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BESCHREIBUNG:
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This watercolor is titled Portrait of a Woman in an inventory list of the Anisfeld estate. In fact, according to the memory of the artist’s daughter, this is a portrait of her mother, Frieda, née Glaeserman, and was painted in 1904/05, around the time of Frieda’s marriage to Boris Anisfeld.
The signature in Latin script was applied at a much later date, most likely sometime in the early fifties, when the artist’s daughter persuaded her aging father to sign many of his unsigned works.
It is an unusual portrait, Fauvist in spirit, unlike other surviving portraits of Anisfeld’s wife and other family members from that time, which were much more conventional, even academic. In the present watercolor, one senses the awe, even the fear, Anisfeld felt for his young wife, a mysterious and unstable young woman, who, as one of Anisfeld’s sisters wrote, was “to lead him quite a life.”
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