Carl Auböck (painter)

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Carl Auböck senior (born August 25, 1900 in Vienna ; † July 17, 1957 there ) was an Austrian painter and designer.

Life 1900–1957

Carl Auböck completed an apprenticeship as a bronze worker and chaser in the workshop of his father Karl Auböck, who was a producer of so-called " Viennese bronzes " (naturalistic animal sculptures in very small formats up to building sculptures). Aubock's father Karl had spent a few years in the United States of America and became a Quaker there at the end of the 19th century .

Karl Auböck recognized the creative talent of his son at an early stage and promoted this according to his possibilities with drawing courses, just like that of his two daughters Elisabeth and Valerie, who later took up both creative professions.

1917–1918 Carl Auböck (also Carl Auböck II) attended the graphic teaching and research institute in Vienna, 1917–1919 he also studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna . Although he was called up for military service in the Austrian army in 1918, as a gifted person he received “military benefits” and was released from military service.

At the same time he was a student of Johannes Itten at his reformist art school in Vienna (1916-1919). At the initiative of Alma Mahler, whom Itten had got to know on the Viennese art scene, her husband Walter Gropius invited Johannes Itten at the end of February 1919 to teach as a master at the new Bauhaus in Weimar . On the occasion of his departure from Vienna, about 16 Viennese students followed him to Weimar and formed their own group of students as “Viennese”.

Carl Auböck was supported with a letter of recommendation from Johannes Itten to Gropius from July 5, 1919 , and from autumn 1919 to 1921 he was a student in the metal workshop and in the preliminary course at the Bauhaus in Weimar . In the 1920s, Auböck was also known for his abstract watercolors .

In Weimar , Auböck was able to use a modest studio with Alfred Lipovec in the Prellhaus and got to know new artistic approaches. After a turbulent time at this new school with great poverty and an escalating dispute with Itten, a group - mainly Viennese students - left the Bauhaus in February 1921 . Carl Auböck traveled to Florence with his colleagues Franz Probst, Hans Breustedt and others .

The creative development process of Carl Auböck can be understood through the drawings and paintings of this time. Written documents are unfortunately lost. A number of landscapes, portraits and abstract compositions ( gouaches and watercolors ) have survived from the 1920s , which show a fine brushwork and particularly balanced composition technique in abstraction.

After his stay in Italy, Carl Auböck worked around 1922 in a metal workshop in the Czechoslovakian town of Müglitz (today Mohelnice ), which was engaged in the manufacture and repair of liturgical equipment. From 1923 Auböck was back in Vienna and worked with his father in his workshop. Aubock's father Karl died in 1925.

The continuation of the workshop in the economically difficult years of the interwar period was now the responsibility of Carl Auböck and his mother Elisabeth. In this situation, Karl Berg, businessman, brother of the composer Alban Berg , is said to have given the decisive impetus for the development of the workshop. Berg had lively economic connections with department stores and department stores (such as Macy’s , Bloomingdales in New York , Neiman-Marcus in Dallas , Texas ) in the USA and promoted trade in Carl Auböck's products there.

On June 5, 1923, Carl Auböck married Mara Utschkunowa (1894–1987) from Plovdiv in Vienna , who was the only Bulgarian Bauhaus student and also assistant to the master Georg Muche . The witnesses were the architect Otto Breuer and the craftsman Alfred Lipovec, former classmates at the Bauhaus. Their only child Carl Auböck III was born on January 6, 1924 .

In the 1920s, Carl Auböck's first “steps” took place as a freelance designer and craftsman. He followed the redesign of existing products in the workshop, mostly in the style of the current “ Art Deco ” - such as decanters and lamps, documented in their early sales catalogs. Lively communication with American buyers, but also with European business partners, resulted in a steadily growing collection of items, oriented towards the wishes of a middle-class, but modern customer base. A time of material experiments and combinations began, the ingenious use of which, brought into series production - over the next few years - became the unique selling point of Carl Auböck's workshop, whereby the influence of the Weimar Bauhaus remained noticeable. The Dessau phase of the Bauhaus, an industrial production refined by craftsmanship, was only to flow into the work of his son Carl Auböck III .

The artistic works of Carl Auböck are located by historians close to the art movements of Surrealism or Kineticism, collectors appreciate the humorous Viennese lightness of the design ideas and the particularly high quality execution, which mostly elude international comparisons. His achievements as a product designer in the field of home decor and as a visual artist have been recognized by numerous exhibitions and awards: in 1933 he received recognition at the world exhibition in Chicago , in 1940 a gold medal at the Triennale in Milan, in 1943 Auböck was present in exhibitions in Zurich, Bern and Barcelona In 1944 he received the Alfred Roller Medal as part of an exhibition at the Kunsthandwerkverein in Vienna (before 1938 " Österreichischer Werkbund ", today " Österreichische Werkstätten "), which he co-founded .

From 1947 Carl Auböck also produced lights and small furniture. Auböck's “tree table” became world-famous. This product idea , which was due to a coincidental find of material and years later, together with the pebble sewn into leather from the Vienna Danube beach and the "Simperlständer" etc. as " Objets trouvés " was sorted into the relevant art section by the currently active historians, arose from the idea " To make something out of nothing ”, this was in turn a basic idea that was committed to the Bauhaus during the Weimar period.

The late 1940s was Carl Auböck's most productive period, during which the majority of his iconic works were created, including a group of sculptures showing Viennese artists and architects. Auböck's circle of friends at this time included Lülja Praun , Fritz Wotruba , Gyula Páp and Sergius Pauser .

The collaboration with his son Carl Auböck III began in the late 1940s.

In 1954, father and son received four gold medals for their joint designs at the Milan Triennale; Among other things, for the cutlery 2060 (anvil), which shows a symbiotic merging of the father's organic, subtle, restrained lines and the son's direct decision to use clear forms. The prototypes were made from brass by Auböck's son in his workshop, then modified together until they were ready for series production and provided with an innovative packaging concept (plywood box with leather straps).

The overall impression of this new use of the material " stainless steel " for cutlery, offered in a wooden box, which in its design was reminiscent of an overseas freight box with an anvil logo burned into the lid, looked like a satirical on the previously known, allegedly precious velvet cutlery boxes at that time still a central part of civil wedding lists. The 2060 cutlery (anvil) was the first design by the Auböck family to be marketed in large numbers and with great success.

After the experiences of the World War, a cultural collapse in Europe and the shortage of the decade after, such products, together with the development of Scandinavian design at the same time, were a kind of program for the future of European design, as it were a symbol of a possible way out of time the "interrupted modernity", as named by the authors Reinhart Moritzen, Albert Vinzens and Stefan Weishaupt.

In the early 1950s, Carl Aubock's son was a Fulbright scholar at MIT in Boston, researching the subject of “Prefabrication as an answer to the housing question”, contacted Walter Gropius and Charles Eames in California and thus influenced his father's late work. The latter consistently pursued his painterly work, with landscapes from the area around Vienna alternating with abstract works, like visionary preliminary drafts of his product ideas.

Carl Auböck died on July 17, 1957 in Vienna after a brief serious illness . To this day, his designs are the focus of the family-run collection.

Honors

time of the nationalsocialism

Carl Auböck had been a candidate for membership of the NSDAP since May 1933 . Auböck himself attributed this after 1945 (testimony in court) to an acquisition trip to the Zeppelin factory in Friedrichshafen , and to a school colleague named Rudolf Simm, from whom the in his own words “inexperienced artist” Auböck was recruited. From the point of view of the time, Auböck's interest in party membership - which was illegal for Austrian citizens between 1933 and 1938 - is understandable in that he tried to secure the export of the products of his workshops and participation in trade fairs in Germany. From 1933 onwards, Auböck was presumably listed as a member of the SA with the rank of SA squad leader .

The files on Aubock's membership in the NSDAP in the various archives in Austria and Germany are unfortunately incomplete. The picture inevitably emerges of the opportunistic attempt of a workshop operator to offer his work to the rulers of the time and thus to secure his own family. In addition, his two sisters (one of whom was already living in the USA at the time) were, as they said at the time, “Jewish misfits” and therefore the NSDAP did not grant him documented full membership due to a lack of reliability. After Austria's " annexation " to the German Reich , Auböck received the " SA Memory Medal" in his own words "at his insistence" and was thus classified as an " old fighter ".

After that, no acquisitions or actual work for the NS system are documented - the workshop was closed after 1938.

Carl Auböck was called up to the auxiliary police in 1942, a job as a traffic policeman is passed down family-run. In the turmoil of the end of the war within the city of Vienna , he succeeded in deserting his service with some colleagues in April 1945. After the end of the war in 1945, Auböck was arrested three times in regional court I in Vienna and probably also in the Oberlanzendorf labor camp because of his work as an auxiliary police officer and his classification as an “ old fighter ”, and charged with the above-mentioned reasons. However, the trial was dropped without conviction. Aubock's applications for compensation were rejected.

literature

  • The catalogs of the Carl Auböck workshop 1925–1975 , Carl Auböck Archive, Vienna 2004, ISBN 978-3-200-00176-3
  • Carl Auböck. 1900-1957. Painter and designer ; Museums of the City of Vienna, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-9500740-0-7
  • Catalog Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919-1923, facsimile , Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-03778-620-8
  • the catalogs of the carl auböck workshop 1925–1975, Carl Auböck archive, Vienna 2004, ISBN 978-3-200-00176-3
  • The work of the carl auböck workshop - photographed from 1948–2005, Carl Auböck Archive, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-200-00522-X
  • Clemens Kois (ed.): CARL AUBÖCK THE WORKSHOP, New York 2012, ISBN 978-1-57687-615-2

swell

  1. ^ Katharina Hövelmann: Bauhaus in Vienna? Furniture design, interior design and architecture of the Viennese studio community of Friedl Dicker and Franz Singer . Ed .: unpublished dissertation. Vienna 2018.
  2. ↑ Reinhart Moritzen, Albert Vinzens, Stefan Weishaupt, et al .: Writings for the defense of art: The creative principle in art, No. I-XX . AQUINarte edition, Kassel 2002, ISBN 978-3-933332-41-7 .
  3. ^ Geschichte / history , on werkstaette-carlauboeck.at
  4. ^ Carl Auböck 1900-1957 painter and designer , on wienmuseum.at
  5. ^ Street names in Vienna since 1860 as "Political Places of Remembrance" (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 129f, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Aubock, Carl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Auböck, Carl senior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian designer
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 17th July 1957
Place of death Vienna