Anatomy
1931, oil on canvas, 133 x 156 cm,
Historisches Museum, Vienna
For Boeckl, anatomy was the "fundamental outcome of the nature paintings I had
done up to that time" and at the same time a "conclusion, perhaps even the conclusion
of my entire work as a young man". Today the picture, owned by the Museum of
History in Vienna, is regarded as one of the principal paintings in Herbert
Boeckl's work of the early 1930s. It shows the corpse of a young man on the
dissecting-table. The thorax swells, intestines and inner organs spill out.
Never before - and seldom later - had Boeckl tackled a motif with such determination.
He approached the subject by a series of drawings made in the dissecting-room
(with two exceptions, these are now owned by the Graphic Arts collection in
the Albertina).
