Paul Grabwinkler
(Vienna 1880 — 1946)

Holy Marabou
signed and inscribed PAUL · GRABWINKLER WIEN. in the upper right

watercolor with red pencil on beige paper

483 mm×458 mm

PROVENANCE:
Kunsthandler Ludwig Weideneder

Paul Grabwinkler was a watercolorist, draughtsman and painter who studied in Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts as well as the University of Applied Arts. He regularly exhibited at the city’s Künstlerhaus. During his formative period at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth, the Symbolist movement dominated the arts in Europe. There was never a recognized school, but instead a number of Symbolist centers including Vienna. Deriving from a period of uneasiness, in which all traditional values were challenged and the end of the world feared, it was an intellectual movement intended to shock. Suggestiveness and ambiguity lay at the core of their creations that were open invitations to search for deeper meanings beneath the surface.(1)

To many artists including Grabwinkler, the passion and mystery embodied by the Church proved irresistible subject matter and age-old imagery were revived and reinvented. In this watercolor the artist depicts a marabou, a type of stork, gazing at two rhesus monkeys. The stork is a traditional symbol of innocence, purity and the sanctity of marriage. The monkey is associated with vice and used as the personification of lust. The initial reading of the artist’s intention is the victory of good over evil, as the haloed stork stands triumphant over the cowering primates. Yet within the confines of this movement nothing is quite as it seems. Judging from other drawings by Grabwinkler, such as Venus Rising (Private Collection, New York) in which a nude woman stands on the shoulders of a dejected crouching male, and Woman Embraced by a Demon (Private Collection, Paris), the artist adhered to another tenet of the Symbolists — an obsession with the femme fatale. As intended, hints of an alternative meaning thus become more evident.

The pale light and twilight colors add to the stillness and otherworldliness of the composition. As the symbol of purity the stork is usually depicted as all white, but the marabou is covered with black wings that give it a more vulture-like appearance. The halo is a sign of a divine or sanctified person, but hovering above the head of the stork it is incongruous, and the bird’s expression surprisingly malevolent. To the stork’s left lies a skull, the symbol of death, and in the distant left background a demon. While one monkey buries his head the other’s expression is of abject horror, giving credence to the idea that in truth they are the victimized. The concepts of innocence, purity and the sanctity of marriage lay under siege, and one cannot help but wonder if the terrified monkey of the foreground is not a stand-in for the artist

(1) Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1972, pp. 15, 98, 143.

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