2024-10-30 12:35:00
With a large retrospective, the Leopold Museum illustrates Rudolf Wacker’s (1893-1939) complex oeuvre as one of the most essential Austrian contributions to New Objectivity in Europe. Draws on the basis of around 250 exhibits Rudolf Wacker. Magic and the depths of reality traces the development of the Vorarlberg painter and draftsman, highlights thematic focuses of his work and shows the high artistic quality and perfection of his entire oeuvre. The exhibition traces Wacker’s artistic development in a loose chronology, with the central themes of his work being highlighted in the individual exhibition rooms.
The focus of Wacker’s interest was his immediate surroundings, the “magic of the everyday” condensed in his still lifes, the landscapes of his homeland, the female nude and the self-portrait. His life and work were inextricably intertwined with the socio-political events of the 1910s to 1930s: In 1914, the First World War took the committed art student from Weimar to the Eastern Front, and then to Russian captivity for many years. Back in freedom, Wacker’s expressive style in drawing reached early heights. In the mid-1920s he developed an independent New Objectivity position, which is put into dialogue in the Leopold Museum with selected works of German New Objectivity by, among others, Albert Birkle, Otto Dix, Alexander Kanoldt, Antonräderscheidt, Georg Schrimpf and Gustav Wunderwald. During the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Rudolf Wacker created encrypted still lifes that subtly make the abysses and menace of reality at the time understandable.
“In the past, Rudolf Wacker’s hometown of Vorarlberg in particular has shown great commitment to the processing of his estate. The last monographic exhibitions took place there – in 1993 at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, in 2019 at the vorarlberg museum. In Vienna, however, the first and to date last presentation of his work was in the Belvedere in 1958. As part of a symposium at the Ortner Museum in 2022, his work received widespread academic attention. Due to the focus of the collection on Austrian art of the 19th and 20th centuries and the special appreciation of the collector couple Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold for Wacker, the Leopold Museum is the ideal place for a long overdue, comprehensive retrospective in Vienna.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director Leopold Museum
Artistic beginnings and captivity, brave as a reader and writer
Rudolf Wacker. Magic and the depths of reality is initially devoted to the artist’s artistic beginnings, the years of captivity in Siberia during the First World War and the artist’s subsequent new beginnings. Once free again, he met his future wife in Berlin – the artist Ilse Moebius was to support her husband and his art throughout his life. Selected books from Wacker’s estate and diaries show him as a broadly interested reader and attentive and critical chronicler of his time:
“Rudolf Wacker was not only a draftsman and painter, but also an almost excessive reader and author: he left behind 16 diaries and hundreds of letters that make his personality, his artistic ideas and, of course, current events vividly tangible in a way that is rarely documented. He recorded the books he read in meticulous lists, from specialist art-historical literature to philosophical or scientific works to literary-historical classics. They provide further access to his way of thinking and working and accompany his life as silent commentators. Wacker’s life and art can be viewed from different perspectives, which once again makes dealing with this artist special and fascinating.”
Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, curator of the exhibition
Portraits of women and self-portraits
His own portrait was a central theme for Wacker. In addition, he always dealt intensively with questions of sexuality and physicality:
“Wacker was particularly fascinated by the female nude. Despite his open-minded sexual ethics, he was committed to a conservative understanding of gender roles: artistic creativity was reserved solely for men – he allowed Paula Modersohn-Becker to be the only exception. His image of women was shaped by stereotypical ideas that corresponded to the patriarchal zeitgeist. On the one hand, he declared the ‘mother type’, which he believed had developed in his own mother and his wife, to be the ideal of women. On the other hand, he was fascinated by female ‘sexual wickedness’, which Wacker attributed to his acquaintance Marie Klimesch. His painted, drawn and printed images of women oscillate between these two poles.”
Laura Feurle, curator of the exhibition
Eerie dolls and “idyllic” landscapes
In the early 1920s, dolls first became the main characters in Wacker’s paintings. In the 1930s, it was again dolls with which he expressed ideological criticism of National Socialism: incapacitated puppets, subtle resisters, explicitly female doll bodies with dislocated joints or jagged faces pointed to a world threatened by the fascist zeitgeist.
Despite his ambivalent relationship with his homeland, the artist was unreservedly enthusiastic about his natural surroundings – he repeatedly depicted supposedly idyllic landscapes while, in contrast to fellow artists such as Gustav Wunderwald and Albert Birkle, he ignored the modern world of life in big cities. Wacker subtly incorporated criticism of the increasing brutalization of society using withered branches, crumbling plaster walls and neglected backyards.
New objectivity, “magical reality”, encoded still lifes and acts of resistance
In the 1920s, the Expressionist style in Germany was replaced by a more objective style of representation, which was able to more accurately depict current social, political and social shocks following the war experiences. Wacker’s portraits of women can be seen in the Leopold Museum – although depictions of the modern “New Woman” are missing from his work – as well as self-portraits in which he portrays himself as a fashionable “New Man”.
Another core theme was the world of everyday, mostly unnoticed things. The exhibition is dedicated to Wacker’s encrypted still lifes, with which he subversively allowed the abysses of reality to shine through. Naive children’s drawings and richly shaped cacti, flowers and toys, taxidermied animals and Gothic sculptures are depicted in the enigmatic series of the 1930s, with Wacker’s complex compositions often containing hidden messages.
After his unsuccessful application for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Wacker took a course in life drawing at the Bregenz trade school in 1936. It was officially forbidden to work with nude models, so he hired models privately and drew sensual female nudes, which he contrasted with the strict censorship and martial soldier cult of the National Socialists.
In the last years of his life before his early death, Wacker became increasingly resigned. He was targeted by the Gestapo, suspected of being close to communism and lost his functions in regional artists’ associations as well as his position as a drawing teacher in Bregenz. In addition to haunting doll portraits, Wacker now depicted aquariums and mushrooms, but especially morbid autumn bouquets that hinted at impending disaster.
A comprehensive catalog has been published for the exhibition in German and English, with contributions by Laura Feurle, Herbert Giese, Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, Ute Pfanner, Rudolf Sagmeister and Kathleen Sagmeister-Fox, Jürgen Thaler and a foreword by Hans-Peter Wipplinger.
Curators: Laura Feurle, Marianne Hussl-Hörmann
Link to the exhibition page
Link to detailed press materials and printable images
Link to the photo gallery of the exhibition opening
Opening ceremonies
The invitation to the opening ceremonies by Leopold Museum Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger followed – in the presence of the Leopold Museum board members Josef Ostermayer, Sonja Hammerschmid, Saskia Leopold and Danielle Spera as well as the commercial director Moritz Stipsicz, around 750 guests, including the exhibition curators Laura Feurle and Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, Alexandra Wacker, the artist’s granddaughter, the musicians Rudolf and Nikolaus Leopold, the collector couple Karlheinz and Agnes Essl, collector Werner Trenker (Med Trust) with Sonja Zsolnai-Kasztler, museum founder Josef Schütz, exhibition organizer Arch. Johann Kräftner, Elisabeth Dutz (Albertina), Brigitte Neider-Olufs (OeNB) , the exhibition catalog authors Herbert Giese and Kathleen and Rudolf Sagmeister, the art historians Patrick Werkner and Thomas Zaun Schirm, Jürgen Thaler (Franz Michael Felder Archive), Michael Kovacek (at Kinsky) and Charlotte Kreuzmayr, the gallery owners Marie Valerie Hieke, Philomena and Stefanie Maier, Jürgen Pölzl (Salon Leopold Committee), Nadine Kraus-Drasche (Dorotheum), Thomas Baumgartner (McKinsey) and researcher Sabina Baumgartner-Parzer (MedUni Vienna), Peter Husslein, the former AK Vienna director Werner Muhm, Leopold and Margit Birstinger, Christoph von derschulenburg (Dorotheum), the artists Tone Fink, Joseph Marsteurer and Thomas Palme, Andreas and Edith Fleischmann as well as architect Andrea Frank, Pia Sääf (Heidi Horten Collection), Bernd Ernsting (Letter Foundation) and many more
More pictures in the APA-Fotogalerie
1730292047
#Leopold #Museum #dedicating #comprehensive #retrospective #important #painter #draftsman #Rudolf #Wacker
