Wally Neuzil, “the End Of A Great Love,” Expressionist Oil On Canvas, Dated 1915 (70 X 100 Cm)

Let us undertake an objective examination of this Expressionist painting: The work was created in the early 1900s, as confirmed by the canvas and the stretcher. What this nude conveys is a sense of pathos, of psychological devastation in a moment of profound tension. We are not looking at a nude that expresses softness in its forms, grace in its pose, or desire for the body. Desire has flown away, swept away by the virulent brushstrokes, leaving behind a hard body that has now become angular, rough, and no longer coveted. She stares into the void and wishes she were a thousand and a thousand kilometers away—and certainly not there, where she has squalidly endured a relationship that was no longer love or passion or tenderness, but a forced reminder of a woman who was once free, loved, and happy, and who now sees her most beautiful memories trampled upon forever, in the emptiness of a room where her man, the love of her life, is stifling the last repressed moans of what was once an immense love. He, the brilliant painter, who did not like to paint bare feet, depicts a special foot in this work, perhaps seeking Picasso’s ideal permission. The variegated ochre wall serves as a backdrop that softens the tension of the scene, and the red sofa on which Wally lies supine, absorbed by a large blue pillow, makes that defenseless body appear as if it were embalmed, crystallized forever. It no longer matters. The painter depicts Wally as if she were there at a crime scene. And he possesses the genius that only a great artist can express, detached from personal involvement. It is The Death of a Great Love, and he is both the murderer and the photographer, the protagonist and the executioner.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Now we must discover who was both the painter and the murderer of that great Love. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes… A painter of immeasurable genius, whose brushstrokes scream and leave an indelible mark on those who, with modesty but with both mind and heart, know how to read them.