Albert Reuss

He was introduced to the world of art by a rich uncle, Baron Andreas Ritter von Reisinger, who was married to his father's sister, and who appears to have instilled in the young boy a lifelong inferiority complex.

Albert's artistic abilities emerged when he was only five years old, and at the age of 14, he applied, unsuccessfully, to the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.

At the beginning of the First World War, he was obliged to undertake military service, but was allowed to do this in Vienna, due to his poor health, avoiding frontline duty.

Once he had recovered, the couple moved to an apartment at Möllwaldplatz 3, Vienna IV, where Albert established his studio, and in October 1922 they converted to Christianity.

In 1930, a newspaper proprietor sponsored him to spend a year in Cannes, where he completed forty portraits and landscapes in oil, following which, he had a second solo exhibition at the Würthle Galerie in 1931.

In 1934, he also started working as a sculptor, creating, among other things, portrait busts of the Viennese councillor Johann Grassinger and of the actress Maria Eis, as well as a study of his wife Rosa, now in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Throughout this period, the couple developed a middle-class lifestyle, and filled their flat in Vienna with numerous books, artefacts and artworks, including two works by Egon Schiele.

However, this period coincided with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party, and by this time, it became clear that Albert and Rosa would have to flee their home country.

With the help of Cornishman and Quaker, John Sturge Stephens (1891–1954),[15] they escaped from Vienna to England, where they arrived in Dover penniless and empty-handed in August 1938.

After a brief stay in London, the Reusses were invited by John Sturge Stephens to his cottage in St Mawes, the springboard of their future life in Cornwall.

However, after England's declaration of war against Germany in September 1939, Reuss was briefly interned as an "enemy alien" in June 1940 at a detention centre in Shropshire, which greatly distressed him.

A fourth solo exhibition took place in 1940 in Cheltenham, followed by a fifth in 1944, Reuss having produced over 200 paintings in the corner of his small living room.

[22] Much to his chagrin, Reuss's attempts to join the Penwith Society of Arts were unsuccessful, as is evident in correspondence with founding member Peter Lanyon.

Whilst Albert painted, Rosa managed the ARRA Gallery together with their friend, Jeanne Day,[23] and in collaboration with the Arts Council of Great Britain, hosting local artists such as Mousehole-born Jack Pender (1918–1998) and Alexander Mackenzie (1923–2002) of the St Ives School.

They received additional financial support from Reuss's younger brother, Max Reiss, with whom Albert had a difficult relationship.

[27] He entered into a lengthy correspondence with the Austrian Press Secretary and later Deputy Ambassador in London, Dr Ingo Mussi (1935–2012), who arranged, with Jacques O'Hana, for some of Reuss's works to be sent to international galleries in Vienna and Israel.

Bawag was a bank which had close ties with the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB).

The bank actively sponsored the promotion of Austrian contemporary art and culture, and Albert Reuss's works were thus amongst the first to be exhibited by the Foundation, in full collaboration with the Socialist government of that time.

[30][31][32][33][34][35] During the early 1950s, when Reuss was exhibiting in galleries in the North of England, he occasionally gave talks in an attempt to explain his work.

An article was published on 11 November 1951 (newspaper unknown) entitled Artist Comes to ‘Explain’ where Reuss is quoted as having described three stages in the development of his art: ″Gateshead's Shipley Art Gallery ... includes pictures representing each of the three important stages through which Reuss's artistic life has passed from early pencil drawings, in which his striving after the essence of his subject was first observable, through the translation of this essence into oils, then to his later more uncompromising works.″ His earlier linear work of the 1920s was characterised by drawings which used a few brief pencil strokes to invoke recognisable images.

Indeed, following his exile, there was an immediate change in Reuss's work into a style which could loosely be called Surrealism; his oil paintings now became simplified and muted with much cooler colours.

Often random objects such as corrugated iron and boulders appeared in the landscape, and sometimes even penetrated into rooms, for example Interior II (1971/72; Newlyn Art Gallery).

[39]There can be no doubt that these works were an expression of Reuss's mental state, of the extreme melancholy and despair that he had suffered throughout his life, but most especially the trauma he had experienced as a consequence of his exile, culminating in the Pictures of Loneliness of his final years.

Consequently, there was no specific clause in his will naming an heir for his artistic works, though he was clear concerning his other assets, having written his will some years earlier with Rosa.

All his artwork therefore went to the named residuary beneficiary, Miss Norette Reed, who had been a friend of Albert and Rosa for many years, and was an ardent admirer of Reuss's work.

[4] In an interview with Susan Soyinka, Reuss's biographer, in October 2016, he said: "I thought the sensible thing to do was to cream off some of the better ones and add them to the Norette Collection ...

[40] John Halkes was keen to honour Norette Reed's expressed wishes to raise Reuss's artistic profile and to ensure that a biography would be written.

In 1984, Halkes gave Reuss's written estate to a young German art student, Lioba Reddeker (1961–2011), who intended to write a biography, but was unable to complete this.

When John Halkes left the gallery in 1990, Reuss's works were put into storage and, apart from a further exhibition in 1992, were rarely seen for almost three decades.

The 2022 Remembering Stone was a joint effort by Susan Soyinka, Reuss's biographer, and St Pol de Léon's Church, Paul, near Penzance, with the financial support of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.