Last November I spent 3 weeks in Vienna. I had enough time to visit my favourite museums, galleries, cafés and all the other interesting places. As usual I also went to the Leopold Museum. Jim wanted to see all those famous Schiele paintings and I wanted to see the special exhibition "Between the Wars - Austrian Artist" from 1918 till 1938; ( By the way this exhibition has been extended until March 3, 2008).
At the exhibition "Between the Wars", they were lots of very good, interesting paintings and artists. Some of them I had never heard before. But one painter has totally stolen my heart, his name is Franz Sedlacek. Born in Wroclaw (now Poland) in 1891, he disappeared (missing presumed dead) in Poland in 1945.
His style is cool, in some way very quantum physics-like and magical. With Salvador Dali you can see the perfection, the sophisticated imagination but also a kind of fake. With Franz Sedlacek you see the imperfection, but also the passion for his work. He is honest in his own magical world.
The Kunsthandel Widder gallery in Vienna has lots of his drawings and few of his paintings in its collection. If I had some spare amount of money I would be extremely tempted to buy one of his paintings.
According to the books and the art critics his paintings belong to the style Magic Realism and Neue Sachlichkeit. Often his style was also described as Poetic or Allegoric Realism.
The term Magic Realism (Magischen Realismus) was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to describe the style of the paintings at the exhibition in Mannheim in 1924.
(See an article about magic realism in Wiki – In my view it is not totally correct and in many ways confusing, but I am an alien so who am I to quibble).
3 comments:
I also liked Sedlacek a lot! It seems to me as "Courage the cowardly dog" was inspired on him...
Anyway, I have known of two other guys who alo like it a lot. Maybe we should join efforts to bring his art into internet...
Hi Bernardo,
A great idea. A special tribune page for Sedlacek
I am writing a book about history of fantasy art and I will absolutely mention him.
They are lots more great surrealist/ fantasy artist who are not famous only because they are not English / Italian or French or for what reason at all. I am not familiar with 'courage the cowardly dog'; I have just read about it , was / is it a good serie?
Just saw a show in Lienz/Eastern Tyrol (http://www.museum-schlossbruck.at/sonderausstellungen.html) about paintings between the wars. They are exhibiting three paintings by Sedlacek, one of them, "Landscape with rainbow," is especially stunning.
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