Hans Knesl

Hans Knesl, photo from 1955

Hans Knesl (born November 9, 1905 in Bad Pirawarth , Lower Austria , † July 4, 1971 in Vienna ) was an Austrian sculptor who also used drawing and painting as a form of expression.

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As the third child of his parents, he grew up in simple circumstances in Bad Pirawarth , a small thermal spa about 25 kilometers north of Vienna. He lost his mother at the age of eight and developed into a child who mostly lived in his own world of thought. Since he developed an interest in carving and plastic representation as a teenager , his father looked for a suitable apprenticeship for him and finally found it in the German town of Lage , where Hans Knesl received his training as a stonemason between 1920 and 1924 . After completing his apprenticeship, he began studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna - with Professor Hans Bitterlich - and graduated in 1930 with a diploma. He then worked as a freelance artist in Vienna. But the next few years did not bring the hoped-for orders for larger sculptures and so he made portraits , illustrated magazines (Wiener Magazin 1940 to 1941) and designed models for the porcelain factory Metzler & Ortloff in Ilmenau , Thuringia. It was there that he met Elfriede Dietz, whom he married in 1936 despite major political difficulties ( thousand-mark ban ).

With the annexation of Austria to the German Reich , Hans Knesl's professional situation deteriorated further, as his artistic style of interpretation at the time did not correspond to the ideas of the political leadership and his work was classified as " degenerate art ". In 1941 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht , but shortly before the end of the war he was released early for health reasons. His son Johannes Alexander was born in 1944 and his daughter Elfriede Christiane was born in 1949.

During the first years of the reconstruction, he earned his living, among other things, with restoration work on the Vienna City Hall , the University of Vienna and Laxenburg Castle . At the same time he began to devote himself to his beloved sculpture again. In 1949 he became a member of the Vienna Künstlerhaus . In 1951 he was appointed to the Academy of Applied Arts as head of the master class for sculpture, a task to which he devoted himself with great dedication. Based on imparting technical skills, his objective was to encourage and accompany the students in their independent artistic development.

In addition, he carried out work for public and private clients and took part in exhibitions and competitions. In addition, numerous sculptures were created as free works in search of new forms of expression for his art. Hans Knesl used the summer months that the family often spent in the Waldviertel for stone work with Mühldorfer marble , which required a lot of physical effort due to the hardness of the stone.

Although Hans Knesl received several prizes in competitions for his work, his work was not understood by the public for a long time. For example, his sculpture Große Stehende , exhibited in Vienna's Stadtpark in 1954, unleashed a scandal and had to be removed; his Standing Girl was overturned in 1956 and badly damaged.

In the last years of his life he began to focus more intensely on drawing and painting. Not least because of this, the interest of the art world was aroused and his work was made accessible to a wider public through two large exhibitions in Vienna. For the last one, in 1970, he created nine new sculptures in less than a year. The exhibition was a great success and earned him the long-denied general recognition, but the artist had given too much: after suffering severe suffering, he died on July 4th, 1971 in Vienna. He was buried in the honor grove of the city on the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 40, number 7).

Artistic work

His works, created in the 1940s and 1950s, can already be considered classics of the then modern archaic, de-individualizing tendencies of figurative art. His plastic realism of the 1960s played a major role in the establishment of new, realistic currents, whose best-known Austrian representative, Alfred Hrdlicka , has already achieved world fame.

His artistic problems were primarily based on the human figure, which, however, were simplified and schematized in different ways in the various artistic development phases. He remained attached to the idealizing figure for a long time before he found a more realistic form around 1950. In the 1950s, figures with strong plastic accents were created, which soon gave way to sculptures with a stronger tectonic structure. In the 1960s, both design directions came to a synthesis in his characteristic standing and striding .

He always selected hard stones for his work, with drawings that were as quiet as possible so that the viewer's eye is not distracted from the shape. If Hans Knesl worked as a sculptor (the principle of sculpture consists in adding, that of sculpture in taking away), his figures grew by adding small particles of mass in several layers, like an onion. He left the texture of the applied clay lumps visible. Hans Knesl's sculptures are almost all cast in concrete. He initially used this technique for cost reasons, as a replacement for the expensive bronze casting . However, he soon recognized the specific qualities of this new material, which he then used with great fondness.

Works by Hans Knesl (selection)

Puppa , sculpture from 1967

• Comrades at work , concrete, 1930
• Seated woman , terracotta, 1946
• Lovers , concrete, 1949
• Protective coat Madonna , artificial stone, 1954
• Standing , concrete 1955
• Great striding , concrete, 1959
• Standing girl , concrete, 1965
• Puppa , concrete, 1967
• Striding torso , bronze, 1970
• Gable sign of the Liesing parish church in Vienna , 1955?

honors and awards

• 1951 Awarded the Austrian State Prize for Plastic Promotion
• 1965 Prize of the City of Vienna for fine arts in the sculpture category
• 1967 Gold Medal of Honor from the Vienna Künstlerhaus
• 1970 Culture Prize for Plastic from the State of Lower Austria
• 1975 Establishment of an open-air museum in the former spa gardens of Bad Pirawarth

exhibition

Most of Hans Knesl's works are privately or publicly owned. A permanent, freely accessible exhibition is located in

• Bad Pirawarth (Professor Knesl Open Air Museum)

literature

Catalog of the Lower Austrian Provincial Museum, New Series No. 213, Vienna 1988. Published by the Cultural Department of the Province of Lower Austria, editor: Jürgen Bauer, ISBN 3-900-464-81-9-123

Web links

Commons : Hans Knesl  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Entry on Hans Knesl in the database of the state's memory for the history of the state of Lower Austria ( Museum Niederösterreich )
• Private documentation about Hans Knesl