Egon von Vietinghoff

Egon von Vietinghoff in 1991, at the age of 88

Egon Arnold Alexis Baron von Vietinghoff (born February 6, 1903 in The Hague , Netherlands ; † October 14, 1994 in Zurich ) was a Swiss painter, textbook author and painting philosopher and founder of the Egon von Vietinghoff Foundation.

Egon von Vietinghoff devoted himself to the traditional European oil-resin painting technique and formulated under the term "visionary painting" a transcendent view and rendering of things that he also theoretically presented in his manuscript The Essence of Fine Art . He created a work of over 2,700 oil paintings and around 200 drawings and etchings.

Life

Egon von Vietinghoff was born as the son of the German-Baltic pianist Conrad Baron von Vietinghoff (from the Salisburg house ) and the Belgian-Dutch writer Jeanne de Vietinghoff , but as a Russian subject in the Netherlands. He grew up in France, Germany and Switzerland. At the age of 16 he left high school and began his career as a painter, which he did not finish until he was 86. He had been a Swiss citizen since 1922, lived first in Munich and on Capri, then in Paris, on Mallorca, in Buenos Aires ( Argentina ), in Las Toscas ( Uruguay ) and in Zollikon near Zurich, and finally from 1940 until his death in Zurich . A defining experience was a foot trip as a teenager through Spain and Morocco, whose impressions he processed in pictures until the last few years.

During his lifetime, his paintings were exhibited mainly in Switzerland and southern Germany. In 1989 he founded the non-profit "Egon von Vietinghoff Foundation" in Zurich with an unsaleable collection of 64 of his paintings. Today the foundation owns 82 works (13 of them graphic) and is present on the internet. The purpose of the foundation is the presentation of this collection and the "documentation of the continuity of European painting".

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Vietinghof's oeuvre includes subjects such as still lifes , flowers, landscapes as well as figurative scenes, nudes and portraits . He left behind a work of over 2,700 oil paintings as well as dozen of portraits and nudes as red chalk drawings, as well as drawings and sketches in pencil , charcoal , ink , in tempera and in oil, as well as some etchings . Vietinghoff oriented itself in terms of content, technology, form and spirit to the old masters . His works are representational, sometimes with impressionistic features in the details of the execution. As an outsider connected to the occidental tradition of oil painting, he remained unaffected by the zeitgeist of the 20th century.

In 35 years he self-taught, experimentally and systematically reconstructed the multi-layer oil- resin painting. He used tempera for the background. The sum of his work experience appeared in the " Handbook for the Technique of Painting ". From the point of view of a painter, he defines the transparency ( translucency ) of colors for the traditional painting technique with glazes : Liquid paint applications, opaque , semi-covering or transparent (translucent), reflect the incident light on several levels, so that depth effects and color differentiations arise cannot be achieved with single-layer alla-prima painting . The plasticity achieved arises from the color itself.

In his contribution to the theory of painting, " The essence of fine art ", Vietinghoff introduced "visionary painting", a conception of the visual arts geared towards transcendence , as well as the method "school of pure seeing", a meditative way of seeing that leads to the artistic vision.

Publications

• Manual for the technique of painting. DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1983 and 1991, ISBN 3-7701-1519-8 . Since it is out of stock, it can be downloaded free of charge from the Foundation's website.
• Egon von Vietinghoff - The Foundation. (Catalog of own works in the collection of the Egon von Vietinghoff Foundation with a foreword by the artist). Self-published, Zurich 1990.

literature

• Alexander von Vietinghoff: The visionary painting of Egon von Vietinghoff. Publication by the Egon von Vietinghoff Foundation, Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-9521269-0-X .
• Bernd Lewandowski, Alexander von Vietinghoff: The visionary painting of Egon von Vietinghoff. Video filming of a slide show , Hamburg 1996.

Web links

• Literature by and about Egon von Vietinghoff in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website of the "Egon von Vietinghoff Foundation"