Otto Zitko is a contemporary abstract painter. Otto Zitko was born in Linz, Austria in the year 1959. Zitko attended the University of the Applied Arts located in Vienna, Austria.
In this clip we view some works by Otto Zitko. These begin at the 28 second mark of the clip.
The artist is now based out of Vienna, Austria.
Price range information: Sorry none available.
Zitko works in oils, acrylics, charcoal, and mixed media.
The artist reminds of Cy Twombly, another artist famous for his scribbles! James Nares, the British artist renown for his use of line, also comes to mind when viewing the work of Otto Zitko.
Maria Lassnig was an Austrian artist renown for her self portraits. Maria Lassnig was born in Kappel am Krappfeld, Austria in the year 1919. Lassnig worked as a painter and also a filmmaker.
Lassnig attended the Academy of Art located in Vienna, Austria. She also studied later at the School of Visual Arts located in New York City.
She began as an abstract expressionist painter, as that was one of the most popular art movements when her career began.
Below we visit a retrospective that took place for the Lassnig in New York City:
Maria Lassnig passed away earlier this year in May at the age of 94 years old.
Lassnig is part of many prominent collections including the Museum of Modern Art located in New York City.
Price range information: Lassnig worked in watercolor, acrylics, oils, and produced many etchings and screenprints. Prints can be found between $4,000 and 10,000. Originals can bring as much as $300,000.
Lassnig had a very unique idea of painting the figure and especially self portraits. What I enjoy most about Lassnig to explore and conquer different ideas and techniques of painting. I wondered if Georgia O’Keefe ever painted any self portraits in such a unique manner.
Wolfgang Paalen was born in Vienna, Austria in 1905. Paalen was associated with both the abstract expressionist and Surrealist movements.
His father was an inventor and his mother a leading actress. The family always lived in a beautiful living space including a castle whilst the family lived in Germany.
Paalen studied with painter Fernand Leger.
Paalen married an artist and author named Alice Rahon. She will be the next entry! Rahon was a minimalist and modernist painter.
The artist was inspired to move to Mexico by the famous artist Frida Kahlo. At this stage of his life the artist was working in the Surrealist style. The artist also painted in San Francisco, California. He would later lose his friendship with Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera over their political beliefs.
The artist worked with ink and oils as his favorite mediums.
In this clip we view an abstract work by Paalen. The close ups are wonderful to see how much color the artist uses:
Wolfgang Paalen committed suicide in 1959 at the age of 54 years old.
Price range information: Sorry none available.
I enjoy his type of Surrealism. Paalen created very unique shapes and gives the viewer a feeling of being in outer space, or at least a world far different from earth.
Paul T. Frankl was born in Vienna, Austria in the year 1886. Frankl was a furniture designer whose most famous series was his skyscraper series, the first picture in the gallery is a great example of a work in this series. Each desk was made to look like a very large urban building. This design was in the mid 1920s, Paul Frankl was one of the first Modernist Interior Designers.
Frankl arrived in the United States in 1914.
In this clip a discussion on cork as part of shoes and furniture from Daniella on Design. The section featuring Paul Frankl begins at around 1:55 into the clip:
In this clip a brief look at a desk produced by Paul T. Frankl:
His family made their fortune in real estate.
For his collegiate education Frankl studied architecture at the Berlin Polytechnic located in Berlin, Germany.
At his peak the artist ran two very successful home furnishings stores and galleries in New York City and Los Angeles, California.
Frankl was part of the teaching faculty at the Chouinard Institute located in Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California.
Paul Frankl passed away in 1958 at the age of 71 years of age.
Frankl had a daughter that went on to a successful writing career.
Price range information: Most pieces and sets priced between $3,000 to $20,000.
What an innovative artist who helped change the way people think about furniture, Frankl made it a work of art!
Ernst Haas was a world renown photographer born in Vienna, Austria in the year 1921. Haas began his collegiate career with the idea of working in the field of medicine and healthcare. Haas would eventually switch his major to photography. The last image is a photograph of Ernst Haas himself.
Haas worked in a private photography studio from 1943 to 1945.
Haas joined Magnum photography in 1949.
Haas worked as lead photographer for many magazines including Vogue and Life. In addition to his work in commercial photography Ernst Haas also worked in the film industry. Haas has some credits on the IMBD, the international movie data base. Some films he worked on include Heaven’s Gate, the Little Bigman, the Believer’s, and Quest on Fire.
Ernst Haas passed away after having a stroke in 1986, Haas was 65 years old at the time.
In addition to being one of the first artists to use color photography and to experiment with abstracted light patterns such as his skyline shots of New York City. This is my favorite image by Ernst Haas. Its an abstracted image of night lights of New York City. I enjoy the energy of this image!
Haas was also noted for his use of motion and blurred photography. An example of this “blurred lines” style with a bull fighter is shown below.
Price range information: Works range from $3,000 to $20,000.
In this clip the son of the artist named Alex Haas is interviewed about his father’s photography work:
In this clip a brief montage of works by Ernst Haas:
All works except the last one by Schiele. The last is by Gustav Klimt.
The artist was born in Tulln, Austria. His father was the head train station master. As a youngster Egon Schiele was OBSESSED with trains. Drawing and sketching them at all times to the point where his father started destroying some of his sketchbooks.
Growing up Schiele did poorly in school. He was mainly interested in sports and drawing!
When Schiele was fifteen years old, his father died from syphilis. His uncle was left to care for him. His uncle, also a railroad man, thought Schiele would like to follow in the family tradition. His uncle paid for a local tutor to work with his nephew.
When the artist was sixteen years old he applied to an arts and crafts school in Vienna. After seeing his work within the first year of his studies, the faculty convinced him to move to the better school that was better at promoting and teaching classical art, he enrolled at the Akadamie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna. His main professor was Christian Griepenkerl, a famous professor known for his strict working methods and for not admitting Adolf Hitler to the Academy. Hitler applied in 1907 and 1908.
A clip showing twenty various works by the artist.
In this clip see some of Schiele’s landscape and urban paintings. No figures here,only landscapes. Some of which you may have seen already. He enjoyed using gold leaf in his works as well.
Schiele was a protege of another famous Austrian artist, Gustav Klimt.
Like many artists he made many self portraits. Unlike many artists, he sometimes posed naked for his work. The self portrait of the male nude in the gallery is one of these nude self portraits.
PRICE RANGE INFO: Schiele worked in many mediums including charcoal, gouache, watercolor, pencil, chalk, drypoint, and crayon. His record for a gouache work is $2.48 million dollars. His record for an oil painting$40.1 million. Schiele also made a fair amount of bronzes that can be found betwen 3 and ten thousand dollars. Etchings and pencil works can easily reach six figures.
The strict teacher caused the artist to quit school after three years. He had already been taking lessons by Gustav Klimt found a perfect match. Klimt gave much neeeded encouragement, purchased some of the artists works, and on occassion would trade drawings with the artist. Once Schiele was free of the academy approach, he started producing works many considered graphic or explicit.
In 1911 he feel in love with a young girl named Wally. Wally, was a former model for Klimt. The two moved to a small city in Bohemia, but were driven out by town residents who disapproved of their lifestyle and Schiele’s penchant for using teenage girls as models. The couple moved back to Vienna, not quite in the capital. The deliquents of the town came to enjoy his company, and he was arrested for seducing an underage girl.
When the police came to arrest him, the hit art gold! They considered some of his works porn, and confiscated more than 100 works. Schiele was taken to jail. In court one judge even burned a drawing in court. No rape or abduction charges were made, but he was given a short sentence for having erotic drawings in a place accesible to children. He made a few drawings of his life in jail.
In 1914 he fell in love with a different woman, the two were married in 1915. Three days later he was due to report to the army for World War I. He started off watching imprisoned russian officers and eventually came to run the food camp. He was still showing works in Germany.
1918 brought the artist a great show and acclaim. Unfortunately it also brought the Spanish flu. The flu killed around 20 million people that year. It first claimed his sixth month pregnant wife, then three days later claimed Egon Schiele. He was only twenty eight years old.
This artist always impressed me with his line work and plein air looking sketches of people in odd positions. Odd because limbs are foreshortened from difficult angles. He was very prolific. In 1980 a film was made called Egon Schiele Excess & Punishment about the artist’s life.
The artist is quite similar in style the his hand chosen mentor. Gustav Klimt. Klimt loved to experiment with new techniques and poses. A great landscape painter as well, here is my favorite landscape of Gustav Klimt, Forest of Birch Trees made in 1902.
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