Richard Gerstl: A Shadowed Genius of the Fin de Siècle Born in Vienna in 1908, Richard Gerstl’s tragically short life – he died by suicide in 1908 at the young age of twenty-five – left behind a remarkably potent and unsettling body of work. Despite producing fewer than one hundred canvases and drawings during his brief career, these pieces are considered profoundly ahead of their time, foreshadowing many of the developments within Ex…