Gerhart Frankl

Gerhart Gerardus Joseph Richard Frankl (born May 12, 1901 in Vienna ; † June 24, 1965 there ) was an Austrian painter .

Life

Gerhart Frankl came from an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna. His father, the lawyer Emil Frankl, was a lawyer and manager of a bank. As an art collector and generous patron, he particularly promoted the painter Anton Kolig , who later became the head of the Nötsch district . The mother Else (actually Elise) Frankl, nee Kerner was very open-minded culturally. At the age of five, Gerhart Frankl was baptized according to the Roman Catholic rite.

Beginnings in Nötsch

After graduating from high school, Frankl began studying chemistry at the Technical University in 1919 , which he broke off after a year. In the summer of 1920 he went for the first time as a painting student to Anton Kolig in Nötsch in the Carinthian Gail Valley . With Bohdan Heřmanský and Johann Wolfgang Schaukal , Frankl was one of the first members of the workshop community that Kolig gathered around. Frankl stayed in Nötsch several times until 1923, but the relationship with his teacher was gradually clouded by discrepancies, the cause of which was probably that Frankl began to develop as an independent artistic personality.

Travel years

In the years that followed, Frankl undertook numerous study trips to North Africa, France, Italy, Holland and Germany, where he trained his painting skills both in nature and in the museums of old masters. Especially the works of Paul Cézanne had a lasting influence on his own further work. The preoccupation with the Provençal painter brought Frankl into contact with the art historian Fritz Novotny , who had made a name for himself as a Cézanne expert. A close and friendly relationship soon developed from their shared interest in art theory.

emigration

In 1936 Gerhart Frankl married Christine Büringer, a niece of the Nötsch painter Sebastian Isepp , whom he had already met during his early stays in Carinthia. After Austria was "annexed" to National Socialist Germany, Gerhart and Christine Frankl fled to London in the summer of 1938. Frankl's parents stayed behind in Vienna and later died in the concentration camp.

Immediately after arriving in London, Frankl, who had just become an emigrant himself, tried to help Fritz Novotny and his colleague Otto Demus to leave Vienna safely. The art historian Otto Demus, in the thirties the state curator of the monument office in Carinthia, had campaigned for the artists of the Nötscher circle during this time and became acquainted with Frankl. In 1939 he was actually able to move to England, while Novotny decided to stay in Vienna.

The war years in England were full of privation for Frankl. He was forced to give drawing lessons at middle schools and to take on orders for picture restoration, while his own painting work was completely idle and he was only active in graphics.

Hapless return

After the end of the war he resumed correspondence with Fritz Novotny and had the desire to return to Vienna and receive a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts . In 1947 Frankl came to Vienna with his wife, where, with Novotny's support, he stayed for sixteen months and created several paintings from the area around Belvedere Palace, where the Austrian Gallery - Novotny's workplace - was housed. However, he did not find permanent employment in Vienna, so that the Frankls moved to England again in January 1949, this time as ordinary emigrants without the status of political refugees. In 1950 Gerhart Frankl received the English citizenship, but did not give up the Austrian one.

But Frankl found it difficult to gain a foothold again in England and continued to contemplate returning to Vienna for good. In 1961, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, he was given the professional title of "Professor" by the Austrian Federal President. The following year, Novotny organized a large personal exhibition for his friend in the Austrian Gallery. In June 1965, Gerhart Frankl was finally invited to negotiate a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and quartered in a guest room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum , where he died unexpectedly. At the intervention of Fritz Novotny, he was buried in an honorary grave of the City of Vienna at the Vienna Central Cemetery (30E-1-23).

Artistic development

After initially orienting himself towards his teacher Anton Kolig, Gerhart Frankl devoted himself to studying the old masters and paraphrased a. a. Pictures by Peter Paul Rubens , Konrad Witz , Abraham van Beyeren , Pieter Bruegel the Elder Ä. and Jan Fyt . Knowledge of Paul Cézanne's painting, which influenced Frankl's landscapes and still lifes of the 1920s and 1930s, was decisive for his further development. During his exile in London, he concentrated on drawing landscapes. The pictures of the first post-war stay in Vienna symbolically reflect the image of the city in a partly cubist or constructivist style. Around 1960 Frankl found a pastel-like, painterly picture structure that almost completely bursts the boundaries of representationalism. His last group of works in 1964/65 is the picture cycle In Memoriam , in which he uses drastic realism to deal with the atrocities of the National Socialist concentration camps, to which his parents also fell victim.

Estate and posthumous exhibitions

After his death, his wife Christine founded the Gerhart Frankl Memorial Trust to manage his artistic estate. In 2015 this institution was dissolved by will and all of the artist's works were transferred to the Federal Museum Belvedere in Vienna.

Exhibitions:

• 2010: In Memoriam - A cycle on the Holocaust by Gerhart Frankl , Wien Museum
• 2015: Gerhart Frankl - Restless , 21er Haus in the Belvedere

Works (selection)

• Paraphrase after Peter Paul Rubens: Landscape in a thunderstorm , 1923, oil / canvas, London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Princes Gate Collection
• Landscape in Tunis , 1923, oil on canvas, Vienna, Austrian Gallery
• View over the roofs (red chimneys) , 1924, oil / canvas, Vienna, Leopold Museum
• Still life with clay pipe , 1928, oil on canvas, Vienna, Austrian Gallery
• Church in the Green , 1929, oil on canvas, Vienna, Austrian Gallery
• Montmartre, Paris , 1929, oil on canvas, Vienna, Austrian Gallery
• Still life with fish, lemons and glass , 1929, oil on canvas, Vienna, Leopold Museum
• View of Vienna from Belvedere II , 1947/48, tempera, ink / canvas, Vienna, Austrian Gallery
• Portrait of Fritz Novotny , 1952, oil on canvas, Vienna, Austrian Gallery
• London , around 1960, mixed media, Vienna, Albertina graphic collection
• Gastein Valley in Winter , 1961/62, oil on canvas, Vienna, Austrian Gallery

Literature (selection)

Essays

• Gerhart Frankl: How Cézanne Saw and Used Color . In: The Listener of October 25, 1951, ISSN  0024-4392
  • This is how Cézanne saw and used color . In: Hans Bisanz (ed.): The painter Gerhart Frankl. 1901–1965 (special exhibitions of the Historical Museum Vienna; vol. 104). Museums of the City of Vienna, Vienna 1987 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name, March 19 to May 10, 1987).
• Hans Tietze: Alpine etchings by Gerhart Frankl . In: Die graphischen Künste , Vol. 53 (1930), pp. 43-46, ISSN  2195-6170 .

Monographs

• Fritz Novotny: Gerhart Frankl (1901-1965). Oil paintings and works on paper . Verlag Galerie Welz, Salzburg 1973.
• Edwin Lachnit: Wrestling with the angel. Anton Kolig , Franz Wiegele , Sebastian Isepp , Gerhart Frankl . Böhlau, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-205-98837-X .
• Regine Schmidt (Hrag.): Gerhart Frankl. 1901–1965 (temporary exhibition at the Belvedere Gallery ; vol. 226). Edition In Medias, Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-901508-12-0 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name, December 10, 1999 to March 5, 2000).
• Helga Schreyer (ed.): Gerhart Frankl, the painter . Kärntner Landesgalerie , Klagenfurt 1991 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name).
• Hans Tietze: Gerhart Frankl. With an oeuvre catalog of the artist's etchings . New Gallery, Vienna 1930.
• Galerie Welz (ed.): Gerhart Frankl. 1901-1965. Watercolors, drawings, etchings . Verlag Galerie Welz, Salzburg 1990, ISBN 3-85349-148-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ wienmuseum.at: Information on the exhibition ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on January 18, 2016) 
2. ↑ 21erhaus.at: Masterpieces in Focus (accessed on January 18, 2016)
3. ↑ radio lecture on the BBC .

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhart Frankl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Gerhart Frankl  in the German Digital Library