Portraits
The finest and most important of the many portraits show
the painter's wife. The wonderful portrait of her as his fiancée begins a series,
and is followed by numerous portraits and self-portraits. Up to 1945, the subject
of the family concerned him more than any other. In his painting he gives an
account of his life and that of his family. Many of his works (oils, drawings,
watercolours) show his family as it grew to include nine children. The children
are often captured in situations where they feel unobserved, with pencil and
charcoal sketches. After 1945, he painted not a single portrait of a member
of his family, and only one self-portrait, in 1948.
"The landscape of the soul is the portrait in which a person
is deciphered, in which his inner being seems to be brought out. Here Boeckl's
world opens its eyes. It becomes personally comprehensible." (
Otto Antonia Graf)
The person portrayed is transformed through strong colours,
bringing out the essential qualities, his inner face. The person portrayed must,
in a sense, die, in order to be immortalised in the portrait. The painter sees
this as a great challenge in portrait-painting: "When I think of the
great number of portraits I have seen during the past few years, I am surprised
that many of them, by various artists, have something rusty and crumbling about
them. These pictures are often only a few years old - and the person can no
longer be seen. It seems as though the person in the picture has died before
the real one. What is the reason for this state of portrait-painting? Probably
that the artist - in this case the false artist - merely copies the person,
without transforming, without managing to separate that which decays from that
which does not decay, the mortal from the immortal, what remains from what is
lost."
