Carl Mayr (restaurateur)

Carl Mayr (born November 5, 1875 in Salzburg , † October 17, 1942 in Henndorf am Wallersee ) was an Austrian artist, fashion designer and restaurateur.

Life

Carl Mayr was the third son among the seven children of the Salzburg innkeeper Franz Mayr and his wife Maria, née. Moser. At times his father owned four inns. With his maternal uncle, Kaspar Moser III., Who ran the “Kaspar-Moser-Bräu” inn in Henndorf, Carl Mayr and his younger brother Richard often spent their holidays as a child.

In 1882 the family moved to Rauchbichlerhof, an estate on Schallmoser Hauptstrasse. In the same year Carl Mayr entered the five-class elementary school St. Andrä in the right-hand district of Salzburg. From 1886 he attended the kk Staatsgymnasium, in 1888 he switched to the Rupertinum , where he stayed until 1890. In 1891 he lost his mother. A year later he entered the Rodr educational institute, which he left in 1895 after taking the high school diploma.

This was followed by military service as a one-year volunteer with the K. uk infantry regiment Archduke Rainer No. 5 in Salzburg. Carl Mayr then began studying law in Vienna , which he broke off after four semesters in order to move to Munich . There he studied - with interruptions - from 1898 to 1901 painting. His training course can no longer be reliably reconstructed; possibly he attended Heinrich Knirr's amateur painting school . During his time in Munich he became acquainted with Alfred Kubin , with whom Carl Mayr remained lifelong friends. In 1901 Carl Mayr became a lieutenant in the reserve .

After Richard Mayr began his career as an opera singer, Carl often lived with him in Vienna. As in his childhood, he spent the summers in Henndorf. It was there that he probably created the first designs for traditional clothing. In 1905 he arranged the artistic part of the Salzburg Anthropologists' Day , at which historical costumes were presented. The event took place in the Museum Carolino Augusteum .

In 1906 the inns of the father, who died six years later, passed to the two eldest sons Franz and Friedrich. Carl and the other younger siblings were paid off. But a few years later, Carl Mayr also began to work in the restaurant business: from 1910 he headed the “Kaspar-Moser-Bräu” in Henndorf after his uncle had died. At the same time, he continued to be artistically active, designing traditional costumes and sometimes producing them himself. As can be seen from his declaration of membership of the Carolino Augusteum Museum Association, he described himself as an “academic painter”.

In 1916 Carl Mayr was called up for military service. He first became an inspector of prisoner-of-war camps.

In 1930 the Mayr brothers sold a large part of their properties in Henndorf, but this did not affect the social life around the Henndorfer Kreis .

In 1934 the architect Otto Prossinger was commissioned to design a summer pavilion in Henndorf for Richard Mayr. He was already too sick to take care of this project himself. Carl Mayr took on the task, but the pavilion was not completed until two years after Richard Mayr's death.

In 1942 Carl Mayr also died in his villa in Henndorf. He was buried in the family crypt of the Gabler-Mayr family in the St. Peter cemetery in Salzburg. His niece Maria Mayr married the brewing and construction industrialist Gustav Kapsreiter and made a name for herself as a patron of the arts, they too are buried in the family crypt in the St. Peter cemetery.

Henndorf as an artist quarter

Since 1915 Carl Mayr owned a villa opposite the inn. Together with his niece Maria and her husband Gustav Kapsreiter, he drew numerous artists to Henndorf. Maria Kapsreiter-Mayr studied at the Vienna School of Applied Arts from 1920. Kapsreiter sponsored Alfred Kubin and Richard Billinger .

Mayr was friends with the writer Burghard Breitner , among others . After the First World War , he joined the newly founded “Wassermann” in Salzburg, an avant-garde artists' association around the painters Felix Albrecht Harta and Anton Faistauer . From 1926 Carl Zuckmayer , who had bought the "Wiesmühl" property from the Mayr family, was also based in Henndorf. The Henndorfer Kreis soon formed around Zuckmayer.

After the Salzburg Festival began in 1920 with the first performance of Jedermann , Henndorf became the preferred summer quarters for numerous stage performers and festival visitors.

Carl Mayr founded an amateur theater for the guests and their children.

In his memoirs, Zuckmayer describes how much life in Henndorf was shaped by Mayr. Mayr was "something of a fairy tale king" was: "His personality had impressed the whole Henndorfer world something of a fairy tale kingdom where in like Midsummer Night's Dream Fairy and Poltergeist next stupid sly and grumpy craftsmen were at home, and of 'outside' coming Visitors first had to pass the fairy tale test to be able to cross his threshold. So it was by no means certain at first whether we could buy the Wiesmühl and become Carl's neighbors: it did not depend so much on whether we liked the house, but whether we liked it. "

Aftermath

Crypt of the Mayr family in the Petersfriedhof Salzburg

Carl Mayr's work as a host and as an artist is described in detail in Carl Zuckmayer's autobiographical work “As if it were a piece of me”. On August 22, 1936, an article by Professor Wimmer-Wisgrill about Carl Mayr as a costume designer appeared in the Neue Freie Presse . In 2003 the exhibition “Carl and Richard Mayr. Costume and Design of the Twenties ”took place in Salzburg. The Carl-Mayr-Weg in Henndorf was named after Carl Mayr. The current shape of Henndorfer costume is attributed to Carl Mayr.

On the occasion of the exhibition about the Mayr brothers in 2003, Ernestine Hutter wrote: “His handicrafts are difficult to classify in common clichés. It is characterized by a complexity that is rooted in the world of a nouveau riche bourgeoisie of the Wilhelminian [...] era, and moves between an interest in down-to-earth and a creative approach to history. ” In contrast to the goals of a regional committee founded in 1910, the tried to preserve the traditional forms of traditional costumes, Carl Mayr preferred a creative approach to the old materials and shapes. “He rediscovered peasant linen for himself and his clothes .” There is evidence that Carl Mayr was the inventor or founder of traditional linen clothing in Salzburg - that “clothing, the copyright of which was always attributed to the Lanz company, for which Carl Mayr as a designer had worked for years without his name officially appearing. ” “ The documents and exhibits collected during the course of the exhibition, ” said Hutter, clearly demonstrated “ that the work of Carl Mayr played a major role in the success that the operators of the traditional costume renewal achieved in Salzburg. " The name of Carl Mayr is inseparably connected with that of the Henndorfer jacket and the Henndorfer dirndl , and thus also with the linen clothing in general, " with which guests at the Salzburg Festival in the 1920s and 1930s [...] were equipped in order to then [...] take on the role of the great fashion role models. "

A special feature of the items of clothing designed by Carl Mayr were the embroidery inserts, which he usually made personally. One of Mayr's larger embroideries that have survived is a tapestry on the theme of Judith and Holofernes . Zuckmayer reports that he was present when this tapestry was made, and spices up the story with the report of a kind of ghostly apparition. It was the anniversary of Mayr's grandmother's death, suddenly there was a loud knocking on the floorboards as if from a cane and Mayr replied quite naturally to this wordless request from the afterlife: “Yes, yes [...] everything is fine and business is good. Now rest. "

Web links

• Biography of Carl Mayr

Individual evidence

1. ^ The artist Richard Mayr: Salzburg Museum. (No longer available online.) In: salzburgmuseum.at. December 1, 1935, archived from the original on January 6, 2015 ; accessed on January 6, 2015 . 
2. ↑ Gottfried Bermann Fischer: Correspondence: Letters 1935-1977. Wallstein Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-892-44627-9 , p. 37. Restricted preview in the Google book search
3. ↑ Prominent writers - On the trail of Carl Zuckmayer in the “Bräu” inn. In: literakur.de. Archived from the original on January 8, 2005 ; accessed on January 6, 2015 . 
4. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer: The taste of transience. Jewish summer retreat in Salzburg , Vienna (Böhlau) 2002, ISBN 978-3205994558 , p. 129
5. ^ Carl Zuckmayer: As if it were a piece by me , S. Fischer Verlag 1986, ISBN 3-10-096534-5 , p. 11
6. ↑ Carl and Richard Mayr - Tracht and Design of the Twenties ( Memento from July 8, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) In: smca.at
7. ↑ Henndorfer Tracht ( Memento from September 6, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) In: museumonline.at
8. ↑ Salzburger Museumsblätter May 2005 No. 5 ( Memento from May 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file)
9. ^ Carl Zuckmayer: As if it were a piece of mine , S. Fischer Verlag 1986, ISBN 3-10-034112-0 , p. 20