Schoenberg took painting lessons beginning c. 1906 from Richard Gerstl, who long after his death was recognized as one of the leading exponents of Austrian Expressionism. For personal reasons involving Gerstl’s affair with his first wife, Schoenberg later in general denied Gerstl’s influence, which in any case was not lasting; Schoenberg remained an amateur and his painting was secondary to his life’s work as a composer and teacher. He executed approximately 60 paintings and 200 drawings: only twelve of the extant paintings are dated, eleven 1910 and one 1912; most of this output dates from before the end of 1912, during a period of personal and professional difficulty. Schoenberg’s paintings are generally small in size and fall into two groups: a series of technically inept portraits and occasional landscapes on the one hand, and highly expressive visionary works on the other. Schoenberg’s most impressive pictures are the Blicke, ‘gazes’ in the form of faces, which emphasize the act of looking. Although technically weak, some of these pictures, in exorcizing Angst and giving form to extreme states of mind, have an expressive power found elsewhere in contemporary Viennese painting only in the work of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. The painting Red Gaze, along with works such as Tears, belong to early Viennese Expressionism, with its densely claustrophobic atmosphere. Schoenberg also shared with the other representatives of Viennese Expressionism an interest in producing self-portraits, in his case as much for self-assurance as for the constant questioning of his own identity. Schoenberg’s paintings, like his music, were derided by the Viennese critical establishment. In 1910 the bookseller Hugo Heller put on an exhibition showing 40 of Schoenberg’s paintings, which received almost universally sceptical and sarcastic reviews. On the other hand, Vasily Kandinsky praised Schoenberg’s painting, which he showed in a Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich in 1911. In 1912 an exhibition in Budapest, Neukunst Wien, showed his work with that of Schiele and his friends. After 1912 Schoenberg ceased to exhibit as a painter, and his artistic activity decreased sharply; he produced mostly drawings, including a number of portraits of members of his family. Schoenberg’s painting is sometimes seen as a synaesthetic ‘adjunct’ to his music—Grove Art Online