Lot 46 D

The portrait of Schlichter’s wife Speedy is placed in a prominent close-up at the front edge of the picture, with her gaze suggestively directed towards the viewer.
Her hair, jewellery and clothing are depicted in minute detail and convey a kind of surreality. The background is worldscape populated by some kind of surreal dream images in an icy blue – a tone reflected in Speedy’s eyes, as if all this were emerging out of her thoughts.
While this half-length portrait format was already typical in the 1930s – for example, in Schlichter’s self-portrait, his portrait of Ernst Jünger and also of Speedy – the combination of verism and surrealism was a new concept from the post-war period (cf. exh. cat. Tübingen/Wuppertal/München 1997/1998, op. cit., cat. nos. 149, 150, 153).
In our portrait, Speedy holds and caresses her long-haired cat Bouille-Bouille in a protective gesture. Her soft fur stands in contrast to the hard, precise depiction of Speedy’s features. This is the source of the image’s erotically charged tension – here, steely hardness and, there, the charming tactility of the fluffy fur. But the animal’s adorable appearance may be deceptive since cats, in particular, are known for their independent unpredictability and sibylline aura. The portrait thus oscillates between an intimate familiarity and a cool, piercing unapproachability, unsettling viewers in the process. Schlichter seems to have been pleased with the pictorial concept: he repeated it in the form of a work on paper in 1954, although that composition is weaker (cf. exh. cat. Koblenz/Halle 2016, cat. no. 81).
Rudolf Schlichter, whose erotic obsessions are well-known, also shows himself to be a master of the new objectivity with a predilection for the absurd in our portrait “Speedy Schlichter”.