Hans Lang (painter)

Hans Lang (born May 2, 1898 in Landegg in what is now the Lower Austrian district of Baden , † December 16, 1971 in the Tyrolean capital Innsbruck ) was an Austrian painter , graphic artist , doctor and publicist . Its made of parchment and oil paintings , graphics, etchings , woodcuts , watercolors and drawingsThe artistic work spanning five decades is diverse and extensive. In addition to the fine arts, Hans Lang also studied botany, zoology and medicine. Through his studies, he had a sound basic knowledge of zoology, physiology and anatomy. He implemented this in his realistically detailed paintings and graphics. Art and science as real life interests of Hans Lang run through his extensive work.

Lang's achievements in science communication can also be described as comprehensive in today's categories. He is the inventor of the first comprehensive youth lexicon in the entire German-speaking area. His “knowledge box” is a forerunner of today's reference works that address young people as a target group. Lang also illustrated and wrote articles for a number of academic lexicons and non-fiction books, including Brockhaus . In terms of art, science and contemporary history, his entire oeuvre and his estate are initially being made accessible four decades after his death.

Life

Hans Lang was born in Landegg in what is now the Lower Austrian district of Baden in 1898 as the only child of Marie and Hans Lang. He was baptized in the name of Johann Baptist Josef Lang. He always called himself Hans Lang. His mother Marie (née Hackstock) came from a family of landowners in Kishöflaný, which at that time still belonged to Hungary . This Burgenland municipality is now a district of the state capital Eisenstadt . His father Hans was an innkeeper in Landegg. As the only child of this wealthy family, Hans Lang junior grew up in an environment with an affinity for art and science.

He attended the Wiener Neustadt grammar school . The well-known Austrian classical philologist, who later became a university professor and Liber Latinus author, Mauriz Schuster (1879–1952) was his Latin teacher there. This recognized and promoted the artistic and scientific talents of his student. From this a friendship developed. At the end of 1916, Lang von Landegg moved with his mother to Baden near Vienna. Marie Lang had separated from her husband and bought a house there. Shortly afterwards, Lang volunteered for the First World War as a one-year volunteer , even before he had finished high school in Wiener Neustadt. He graduated from the Theresian Military Academy with a high school diploma . During the First World War he was used in Russia and Italy . He recorded the atrocities of the trench war with pencil and pen drawings as well as watercolors in a "World War II sketchbook". During the war in Italy, like many fellow sufferers, he became infected with malaria . With severe chills and fever attacks, he had to be carried down from a mountain on the Isonzo front and was transported to a hospital in Austria. Meanwhile, his father received news of his death in the distant Landegg. Hans Lang senior shot himself out of desperation, not knowing that his only child was now alive in a hospital in Kitzbühel in Tyrol. After returning from World War I, Lang lived with his mother in Baden again. However, family life continued to be shaped by conflicts between the materially oriented mother and the free-spirited son. He turned to art again more intensely. Long passed the entrance exam at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with distinction. However, he did not start this course. His mother thought life as an artist was too uncertain. Lang first studied biology and philosophy at the University of Vienna . After a few semesters, he switched to studying medicine. He received his doctorate on June 27, 1924. While studying medicine, he also continued his artistic training. He studied technical and art-historical basics intensively. Here his focus was on his great role models: Albrecht Dürer , Leonardo da Vinci and Hans Holbein the Elder. J. Personal records from this period were lost. However, Lang often said that he had taken private lessons from the Austrian-South German painter, graphic artist and book illustrator Maximilian Liebenwein . He also mentioned several times his thorough studies at the Munich Art Academy in the master class of Franz Stuck and also at the Vienna Art Academy in the master class of Rudolf Jettmar and Karl Sterrer .

After his marriage in 1923, he tried harder to earn a living from selling his artistic works. His wealthy mother no longer supported him financially since his marriage to Olga Siegmann (born April 9, 1902 in Vienna; † June 19, 1983 in Innsbruck). The young couple moved into the house of Olga Siegmann's grandmother in Baden, the widowed Martha Fülöp. Olga Siegmann's aunt, the then well-known painter Elisabeth Weber-Fülöp (* 1883 in Budapest ; † 1965 in Duxbury, Massachusetts ) also had her studio there. This new environment gave Hans Lang's artistic development significant impulses. Among other things, both artists shared their critical position on modernism . Just a few years later, in 1927 and 1928, Lang participated in an exhibition by the Baden Art Association. His decades of varied work as an artist and his work for a whole range of specialist and popular scientific publications by the most successful publishers in the German and English-speaking countries at the time began. Lang was responsible for a number of specialist illustrations at the medical specialist publisher Urban & Schwarzenberg , among others .

plant

Today part of Hans Lang's estate is owned by the municipal Rollett Museum in Baden, Lower Austria. Other original works can be found in smaller private collections. The whereabouts of a large number of pictures is unclear. The watercolor "Dead Bird" from 1924 is in the possession of the Vienna Albertina , one of the world's largest and most important graphic collections. According to current research, Lang's earliest dated works date from 1923. Essential characteristics of the early work of the 25th century Year-olds pervaded his work for the next 50 years or so until his death in Innsbruck in 1971. Hans Lang preferred parchment as a painting surface. His graphics, paintings and watercolors are realistically worked with the utmost attention to detail based on their natural models. He had a passion for motifs from flora and fauna as well as fairy tale motifs. This also had to do with the fact that these works sold well. In 1923/1924 Lang published his first beetle and meadow etchings, which were very popular from the start. In his beetle and meadow etchings, the insects sometimes wear clothes from the human realm and therefore have to walk upright, but their physique, their wings and antennae are worked realistically down to the last detail. In his graphic work, Lang oriented himself towards the great artists of the Renaissance . This can be seen, among other things, in the fact that in 1925 he painted a brown hare on parchment, the quality and execution of which appears next to Dürer's famous model around four hundred years later.

Lang also implemented a number of religious and mythological motifs, including an unconventionally designed Pietà in 1926 and the Circe in 1927 . This level of creativity also shows how far the artist positioned himself apart from the then established artistic movements such as futurism and cubism , but at the same time z. B. showed affinities to symbolism with the large-format oil painting of Circe . 1927 was a breakthrough year for Lang. For the first time he presented a cross-section of his work to the public at an exhibition at the Baden Art Association. He also exhibited there the following year. More and more frequently he was commissioned as an author and illustrator for art magazines, worked for a good two dozen well-known, mostly German publishers and marketed himself very skillfully.

In 1928 his daughter Lene was born. Despite Lang's extensive creative workload, the young family repeatedly had to struggle with financial problems. Due to the increasing political tensions, the payment of his work by the German publishers was considerably delayed. Only when Hans Lang's mother Marie died at the end of 1936 and, contrary to her announcements, had not disinherited him, the young family was able to survive without major financial turmoil.

Lang worked for Brockhaus, among others, and was responsible for almost all texts and illustrations in the ten-volume Propylaea Lexicon in the fields of zoology, botany and medicine in the context of plant and animal diseases. He also illustrated numerous children's books, including “Die Schneckenpost” in 1934, which was a top bestseller for the time with several tens of thousands of copies. Two years later went with the “knowledge box. A youth lexicon from A to Z. 4200 key words with 800 illustrations, 68 tables and cards and 10 card covers “an absolute novelty on the book market in print at the time. In this first youth lexicon, which was published by Voigtländer-Verlag, Lang contributed all of the illustrations and text contributions. However, he was only correctly named as the author in the second edition. In the following years, Lang perceived his artistic career as stagnating and felt enormous frustration with the situation of art and society in Austria. Rudolf Maurer writes on this: “We have to be saddened to see how the economic and political climate of the 1st Republic and the corporate state frustrates him more and more and finally leads to expressions in letters that seem more worthy of a 1968er than a middle-class father of the 1930s. As a logical consequence, he throws himself into National Socialism and takes it to the councilor - only to find that he is being misused as a figurehead in politics, while the artistic environment is worse off than before. And then the hated war breaks out! The corresponding statements lead him to a party court. After the dramatic escape of the family and hard months in a French prison camp followed by months of hospitalization, the elderly and sick man created a new existence for himself and his family in Innsbruck. ”During his time in Baden, Lang was only once, 1942, invited to an exhibition. Not a single review of his work was published between 1938 and 1945. His health was already poor during the war, and his condition steadily deteriorated in the years that followed. The family home in Baden fell into the hands of the Soviet occupying forces. Lang lost most of his works, especially the plates of his etchings disappeared without a trace. His wife, his mother-in-law and his little daughter fled to relatives in the Tyrolean Zillertal via Linz . It was not until the beginning of the 1950s that Lang managed to create a new existence for his family in Innsbruck, despite major health problems. In 1955 he founded his own publishing company called "LHL" (Lene and Hans Lang). His 27-year-old daughter Lene, who had meanwhile studied art history at the University of Innsbruck , acted as a publisher. The publishing house mainly produced art cards and art calendars based on the artistic templates of Hans Lang. This yielded just enough that the family had a basic income. In addition, there were always individual orders for advertising graphics and design, as well as illustrations for scientific specialist publications from renowned publishers. Almost until his death, Lang worked tirelessly artistically and scientifically. The last specialist medical work that he illustrated - the atlas "Gynecological-Operative Anatomy" (Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York) - appeared posthumously in 1972. Lang died in 1971 of an infectious pneumonia in Innsbruck. A year earlier he received a special honor. Burgenland, his mother's home country, dedicated a collective exhibition to him in Bad Tatzmannsdorf in 1970 . As part of a few, so far posthumous exhibitions, the “Kleine Galerie” in Innsbruck last showed the exhibition “Hans Lang 1898–1971” on the artist's 90th birthday in 1988 and the Rolletmuseum Baden in 2011 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the artist's death the special exhibition “Beetle "Body, children's books".

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Lang (ed.): The knowledge box. Voigtländer's youth lexicon. Voigtländer´s publishing house, Leipzig 1936.
2. ↑ Several letters in Hans Lang's estate from 1935 show that he was the author and illustrator of Brockhaus from the letter "S" onwards.
3. ↑ 40 years after the death of Hans Lang, the Austrian historian Rudolf Maurer, head of the city archives and the Rollettmuseum Baden, put in 2011 on the basis of extensive source studies in the personal estate of the artist as well as in close collaboration with Lene Lang and thanks to the help of numerous colleagues in various archives a first short scientific biography: Rudolf Maurer: The Baden painter Hans Lang (1898–1971) artist - scientist - contemporary witness. Catalog sheets of the Rollettmuseum Baden, No. 83, Baden 2011. The cited facts are taken from this work and were supplemented using documents from the estate and authorized by the artist's daughter, Lene Lang.
4. ↑ “Sketch Book”, 15 sheets and 4 supplements, pencil, pen, watercolor (mostly with the location Tarnow); 18.1 x 28.5 cm; Ownership note: Hans Lang IR99; Dedication: Dedicated to my mother. This original is in the possession of the Rollett Museum in Baden.
5. ^ Rudolf Maurer: The Baden painter Hans Lang (1898–1971) artist - scientist - contemporary witness. Catalog sheets of the Rollettmuseum Baden, No. 83, Baden 2011, p. 7.
6. ↑ cf. ibid. p. 8.
7. ↑ cf. ibid. p. 8.
8. ↑ Just ten years later, Hans Lang wrote in a letter to his decades-long friend, the Austrian writer Otto Baxta, larmoyantly : “What a shame. Who still wants to believe: “Painting is science”? ”The same letter also shows the artist's extensive workload, and thus his broad sphere of activity for a whole series of book editions. Lang writes, “I squat 14-16 hours a day. Since my return from Berlin, since Pentecost, I have managed: 2 biologies (DG Tuebhner), 4 youth books (Kösel and Pustet), 2 children's books (Braun & Schneider, Jugend und Volk), 1 mushroom book (Ullstein), 1 gem book ( Insel-Verlag). ”(Lang estate, letter to Otto Baxa from August 18, 1937. quoted from Rudolf Maurer: The Baden painter Hans Lang (1898–1971) artist - scientist - contemporary witness. Catalog sheets of the Rollett Museum Baden, no , Baden 2011, p. 32).
9. ↑ “Given the extraordinary creativity of the painter Hans Lang, it is currently impossible to compile an even remotely complete list of works. Apart from the widely scattered specialist literature, the entire, very extensive correspondence from the post-war period would have to be worked through - and only then would research begin to determine the whereabouts of the pictures, ”explains Rudolf Maurer. (Rudolf Maurer: The Baden painter Hans Lang (1898–1971) artist - scientist - contemporary witness. Catalog sheets of the Rollettmuseum Baden, No. 83, Baden 2011, p. 54).
10. ^ Rudolf Maurer: The Baden painter Hans Lang (1898–1971) artist - scientist - contemporary witness. Catalog sheets of the Rollettmuseum Baden, No. 83, Baden 2011, p. 9.
11. ^ "By 1938, Hans Lang had 62 articles on his work in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines," explains Rudolf Maurer. (Rudolf Maurer: The Baden painter Hans Lang (1898–1971) artist - scientist - contemporary witness. Catalog sheets of the Rollettmuseum Baden, No. 83, Baden 2011, p. 16).
12. ↑ cf. ibid. p. 18.
13. ^ "Die Schneckenpost" by Sophie Reinheimer with pictures by Hans Lang was published in 1934 by Franz Schneider Verlag as a bound edition.
14. ↑ cf. ibid. p. 2.
15. ↑ cf. ibid. p. 39.
16. ↑ "Our special thanks go to Dr. Hans Lang, the anatomist and a student of WEIBEL. His excellent visual art of representation, his empathy and his own creative work were prerequisites for the creation of the work ”, write the authors in the foreword of the atlas, Eduard Gitsch, director of the I. University Women's Clinic Vienna and Adolf H. Palmrich, senior physician at the I. University Women's Clinic Vienna. (Eduard Gitsch, Adolf H. Palmrich (eds.): Gynecological-operative anatomy - simple and extended hysterectomy - an atlas. Walter de Gruyter publisher, Berlin / New York 1972, ISBN 3-11-003480-8 , foreword).

literature

• Rudolf Maurer: The Baden painter Hans Lang (1898–1971). Artist - scientist - contemporary witness . Catalog sheets of the Rollettmuseum Baden, No. 83, Baden 2011, p. 6.