Here we have a large signed oil painting of three human dancers in red unitards, hung by their wrists like marionettes. It’s a scene. Toes pointed and eyes closed. They dangle above a cream floor against a wall of flat black.
The strings run straight up and off the canvas. Whoever holds them never made it into the frame. That missing hand is the whole picture, and it is why the eye keeps climbing back to the top edge.
Each dancer takes it differently. On the left, one bows his head and crosses his ankles like a man waiting out a sermon. The middle one gazes down with the patience of someone who has been here before. Far right, the third tips his face back toward the cords with something close to relief. Up close, the black has crazed into a fine web that catches the light when you walk past. It has hung on walls for decades without anyone cutting them down.
People as puppets is an old idea with good company. Edward Gordon Craig proposed his Über-marionette as the ideal performer, an actor stripped of ego and moved by the director's will. Oskar Schlemmer later dressed Bauhaus dancers as costumed figures that moved more like mechanisms than people. Artists returned to the theme often in latter half of the 20th century. This canvas belongs to that line as surrealist-leaning figurative work.
The tension here sits between control and surrender. What the painter meant by it is unknowable without more information. Some viewers will read it as political. Others will find something devotional in those closed eyes, or something more seductive. All of that is interpretation.
This painting was acquired from a serious art collector in the Milwaukee area. The signature reads SCHRENZEL in brown block capitals at lower right. I have found no record of this artist so we’re dealing with a mystery artist. The surreal marionette painting was likely created in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
The wild framed oil on canvas measures 35” by 31” by 2”. The black field shows fine craquelure across nearly its whole surface, most visible in raking light. It appears stable, with no lifting or flaking that I can find. Scattered pinpoint white flecks sit in the black where tiny bits of paint are missing. Faint pale scuff lines cross the red of the middle figure's left arm. Otherwise the red, flesh and cream areas are clean with strong color. The frame is a slim dark-stained wood strip with edge rubbing and a small light nick on the bottom rail below the signature. On the reverse, the linen is clean and taut. The back of the frame shows a darkened, split patch at the upper left corner and minor gaps at the lower joins. Pencil numbers 30 and 34 are written on the back rails. Please see all pics as they are part of the description.
I ship FedEx to street addresses in the continental USA only (no PO Boxes). Free shipping on the three gentlemen at the end of their rope.
Where the teeth of madness jump…jump, dance, and sing.
