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Even when I know
that this picture is coming, when it is rounding the bend, I still can’t see it
for the portrait it is supposed to be. 
The lithograph is by Berthold Loeffler (1874-1960), a prolific Viennese
designer, artist and professor at Kunstgewerbeschule (1907-1935) whose prodigious
commercial

output covered about every other letter of the artistic alphabet.  This work is a portrait of his mostly-forgotten
fellow-Viennese writer, Peter Altenberg¹ for the Kabaerett Fledermaus of
1909.  The portrait is all squares and
one big button to me, and I have to consciously look for the rest of the
picture in spite of knowing that the stuff is there. 

It is an unusual picture of emergent art—for me not quite
like, for example, the cover of the pamphlet Cinema by J. Epstein, where the letters are a jumble for just a
moment and then snap into view.  The
Loeffler portrait is much more densely hidden in a much more straightforward
manner, and fools my mind every time. 

 Notes

1.Altenberg is probably a product of his time, or a time of
his product.  Described as the bohemian’s
bohemian, he lived an outre lifestyle in little cafes and bars, wearing capes
and broad-brimmed hats, and was evidently something of an effeminate womanizer
with a very deep interest in very young girls. 
There you go.  Altenberg stood
quite high in that world, as Alban Berg put some of his postcard-poetry to
music in his Five songs on picture postcard texts by Peter Altenberg,
which caused a near-riot in its premier, abruptly stopping the performance
which would not see the light of day again for another 40 years.