Aloys Zötl
Aloys Zötl (born December 4, 1803 in Freistadt , Upper Austria; † October 21, 1887 in Eferding , Upper Austria) was an Austrian master dyer and painter.
Aloys Zötl settled in Eferding as a master dyer and devoted his life to creating an encyclopedic bestiary (fantastic animal watercolors ). His work was rediscovered decades after his death and was described by André Breton (1896–1966) as the most magnificent animal book the world has ever seen. Along with Henri Rousseau von Breton, Zötl was included in the list of “Surrealists avant la lettre”. This makes Zötl the only "officially" recognized surrealist that Austria has produced.
biography
For a long time, not much was known about Zötl's biography beyond the key data.
Vincent Bounore, who searched for details in archives and registers, is quoted in “Das Bestiarium”. The details contradict each other z. T. with those of Reitinger (see below).
Zötl was born in 1803 in Freistadt, a town in the foothills of the Bohemian massif . His parents were Franz Xavier Zötl, master dyer, and Klara, geb. Gruber. The parents' house was at 13 Hafnerzeile, it no longer exists today. Zötl had several brothers, his brother Kajetan settled in Lower Austria, Johann Michael became a bookseller in Freistadt. Aloys became a dyer and also painted as a hobby horse. He then went on a wandering all over Europe, finally living in London for a long time. (Wasn't that rather his brother? - see below)
After his return he married Theresia Edtmeir and moved his work as a master dyer to Eferding, a town about 60 km from Freistadt, upriver from Linz in the Danube Valley. There he spent the rest of his life, about which nothing is known. His wife died on August 18, 1874, and he himself died 13 years later on October 21, 1887 “after a long illness”. His last watercolor, "Exotic Shells", is from October 3, 1887
Reitinger, on the other hand, is reproduced in the FAZ as follows:
As a child, Zötl, like his brothers, enjoyed excellent drawing lessons. The father himself made two albums for his children with images of animals based on ancient woodcuts and copperplate engravings. Zötl never traveled far, in contrast to his brother Joseph, who described the natural objects cabinets in Germany or England to him in letters and who finally brought him one of the first watercolor paint boxes from the company “Ackermann & Co.” from London.
The bestiary
Zötl made his watercolors between 1831 and 1887 and dated them to the exact day. His work subsequently consisted of four bound albums with a total of four hundred sheets.
He only worked for himself, he never looked for an audience for the watercolors and did not part with a single one.
While Breton (and probably others too) saw a certain surrealism in his pictures, Zötl himself pursued more encyclopedic goals. This is supported by the fact that he systematically painted first mammals , then fish , then molluscs , then reptiles , then birds , then insects , then batrachians (an ancient name for amphibians such as frogs and amphibians ), then the coelenterates . Only in the last year of his life, when he painted a lot more than in the time before, did he paint a wide variety of subjects.
The catalog of works also includes nine watercolors created between 1854 and 1864 with the anthropological representation of people. However, these can no longer be found and are only to be assessed as an intermezzo.
The "visionary apparatus"
While Breton suspects that Zötl was a “visionary apparatus” from which he painted the watercolors, Zötl actually painted from templates that, for example, Some of them are even recognizable. He even painted animals that were real in his environment from templates.
One of Zötl's descendants received his library for us, it consists mainly of natural history and ethnographic works and travel books, mostly illustrated.
Zötl himself named Ovid's “Metamorphoses”, Schütz's “Geography” and Buffon's “Natural History” as favorite books . “In fact, this cosmos of images brings him closer to his work than Breton's 'visionary apparatus': It is more like a fantastic collage of Ovid's dreamlike scenes, the flat maps of geography and Buffon's stylized animals. As Reitinger can demonstrate in some cases, Zötl inserted some animals like pieces of a puzzle into found landscapes, not caring about proportions or zoological correctness. In the animals and the landscape you think you can see the wanderlust of the eldest son, who, in order to take over the last successor in a family business that is going down, had to be someone who stayed at home. "
Through this connection between animals and landscape, some of his pictures actually look almost like a Rousseau, but also through a very special “charisma” that goes beyond a purely encyclopedic representation.
The rediscovery of the bestiary
The bestiary only became known to posterity through a chain of coincidences.
Between December 1955 and May 1956, 320 of his watercolors were auctioned at two sensational auctions in Paris. Celebrities from the arts and business acquired works by the unknown shooting star at exorbitant prices, André Breton wrote an enthusiastic catalog foreword and was unable to afford any more works himself in the second auction.
literature
- Franz Reitinger: Aloys Zötl or the animalization of art. How a dyer of the Danube Monarchy became a surrealist . With a text by André Breton. Brandstätter, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85498-358-1
- Harald Szeemann : Austria in the rose network . Exhibition in the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna and in the Kunsthaus Zurich . Springer, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-211-82925-3
- Giovanni Mariotti (author), Michalon / Bazzechi (photographer), Linde Birk (translator): The bestiary of Aloys Zötl (1831 - 1887) , Edition Franco Maria Ricci, Milan, and Weber Verlag, Geneva, 1980, ISBN 3-295- 00213-4 - Illustrated book with 50 large-format color prints
Web links
- Literature by and about Aloys Zötl in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Giovanni Mariotti The bestiary by Aloys Zötl (1831 - 1887)
- ↑ a b c d Buecher.de FAZ review by Reitinger
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Zötl, Aloys |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 4, 1803 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Free City |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 21, 1887 |
| Place of death | Eferding |