My Favorite Painting

Eugene Vitalis Biel-Bienne’s

Self Portrait

by John Guider


When I first saw this painting, I was drawn to it immediately. I knew that in most self-portraits, the artist usually tries to make a forceful, singular statement that says, “This is who I am.” Biel’s image is more complicated. The vulpine smile of his jowls masks the dark frown of sadness seen in his tight-lipped mouth. His eyes, set deep in their sockets, reveal the weariness of a hard-lived life. Still, his gaze remains bright and intelligent. This is a man who has literally witnessed the best and the worst of what life has to offer.

Encrypted in the artist’s brushstrokes of this provocative image lies the story of the enigmatic Biel. The son of Austrian aristocracy, Nazi resistance advocate, friend and acknowledged contemporary of Picasso, he came to paint this, his own portrait, while living the last years of his life in a modest two-room apartment in the heart of west Nashville.

Eugene Vitalis Biel-Bienne was born in Vienna in 1902. Biel’s fame as an artist grew quickly, and by the 1930s the New York Times declared him “one of the most significant painters on the continent.” Biel’s form of expressionism was a favorite among the critics, and soon great institutions such as the National Gallery in Berlin, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Nationale D’Art Moderne in Paris were acquiring his work. However, his vehement and vocal outcries against anti-Semitism and the Nazi occupations in the late ’30s cost him the lives of his two children, the health of his wife, and his career.

After near starvation and years of exile, he and his ailing wife were granted asylum in the United States in 1942. With the aid of two Guggenheim grants and a teaching position at Fordham University he was able to restructure his life and continue his work as an artist. Once again his works were shown in major galleries alongside the likes of Modigliani, Seurat, and Kandinsky.

The death of his wife in 1959 left him devastated. He accepted a position at Vanderbilt as a professor of art history until 1965. He continued his life in Nashville and quietly passed away in 1969.