.: news

Tesla Blue Portrait is back!

At NordseeMuseum Husum, a unique oil-painting from New York City, thought to be lost for 85 years, has been rediscovered in our archives. The treasure found might correctly be called a sensation, as the canvas shows the only portrait of the famous inventor of Alternating Current and the radio, Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Tesla has been called a „Master of lightning“, „the genius, who lit the world“; or: „He invented the future.“ No superlative seems too big to characterize this brilliant inventor, whom the world owes not only radio and ‘electricity from the grid, i.e. A.C.-generators, -transformers, and –motors, but remote control and fluorescent lamps as well. The first power station on an industrial scale at Niagara-Falls was equipped with generators based on Tesla’s Polyphase System, the power grid still feeding the world with electrical energy. Maybe the work of Nikola Tesla can be summarized best in the words of physics-Nobel-prizewinner Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962, Nobel prize 1927): „Tesla is entitled to the enduring gratitude of mankind.”

Hard to believe but Nikola Tesla only once in his lifetime sat for a portrait, and he did this only for the painter-princess Vilma Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy. The blue light for illuminating the setting was installed by the inventor himself at her atelier. When on March 1st 1916 the public could examine the portrait for the first time, it made a blue impression, an effect created by blue filters placed in front of specially designed lamps. This is how the oil-painting got its name as the ‚blue portrait‘.

The NordseeMuseum will present this unique treasure on March 2nd 2009, 11 o’clock at a public press presentation - first time ever in EUROPE - first time after 85 years!!! The follow-up exhibition will be „Mythos, Strom und eine Malerfürstin. Das „blue portrait“ von Nikola Tesla, dem Mann, der die Welt erleuchtete“. (Myth, electricity and the painter-princess. The „blue portrait“ of Nikola Tesla, the „man who lit he world“).