Hans Zatzka

Hans Zatzka (originally Johann Franz Čačka , born March 8, 1859 in Breitensee , † December 17, 1945 ibid) was an Austrian painter . He also worked under the pseudonyms Zabateri , P. Ronsard , Bernárd Zatzka and Joseph Bernard (the latter should not be confused with the French sculptor Joseph Bernard ).

life and work

From 1877 to 1882 Hans Zatzka attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and studied with Christian Griepenkerl , Carl Wurzinger and Carl von Blaas . He was awarded the Golden Fieger Medal in 1880. After studying in Italy, he worked as a freelance academic painter in the style of the successor to Hans Makart in Vienna.

Zatzka's pseudonym P. Ronsard is borrowed from the name of the French love poet Pierre de Ronsard , the leader of the “ Pléiade ” poets' circle in the 16th century.

Zatzka always painted freely on canvas without sketches. The model was his first wife, who died of a heart attack in 1912, and his two daughters from this marriage (Martha Dolezel, 1899–1982, and her sister, * 1883). His son Fritz was also a painter and draftsman. Zatzka continued his painting work into old age in his house at Breitenseer Straße 4. In 1945, the year he died, he was awarded the title of professor at the suggestion of Vienna's Vice Mayor Leopold Kunschak .

The spring nymph (1896) as a picture postcard (around 1890) 

family

Hans Zatzka was the brother of the architect Ludwig Zatzka and is the great-great-uncle of the Viennese actress Hilde Sochor .

Works and motifs

Zatzka's first important public commission at the age of 26 was the ceiling painting in the Kurhaus Baden near Vienna (a picture of a spring nymph). He painted ceiling frescoes in the stairwells of the representative residential buildings of his older brother Ludwig Zatzka, B. in the house Hietzing Am Platz 4 and Breitenseer Straße 8, the family seat in Breitensee as well as pictures in his retirement home Villa Zatzka in Spital am Semmering in Styria . Zatzka created numerous altar and wall pictures for churches in Vienna and Innsbruck as well as a votive picture in the Seehospiz San Pellagio and for the church in Olomouc .

Zatzka's main motifs include depictions of the Madonna and Christ, guardian angel images , elves , cupids , sensual female figures, genre scenes , allegories and other popular motifs. Zatzka also turned to mythological subjects and scenes from operas by Richard Wagner . He is considered to be groundbreaking in the mundane bedroom image .

Commissioned works for art institutions and publishers

Signature of Hans Zatzka

At the turn of the century, Zatzka's pictures were sold by the picture postcard distribution in the “Galerie Wiener Künstler” and by other publishers. Around 1906, Adolf May discovered Zatzka for his picture factory, which later became the Kunstanstalten May AG (KAMAG), in Dresden , and gave him precise orders to test its suitability for mass production. From 1914 onwards, Zatzka's pictures were sold by KAMAG in large numbers as oil prints , including the first bedroom pictures . The works can be divided into three groups:

• The round dance pictures have titles such as “flower dance”, “spring magic”, “May time”. On the one hand, they go back to classic models that go back to Peter Paul Rubens , but they also have roots in the allegory of seasons and age, as it was taken up by, among others, Camille Corot , Hans Thoma and Franz von Stuck .
• Dream images such as “Wedding Dream” with its scantily clad ladies and swarms of cupids go back to the often used motif of the sleeping Venus , to which Pierre Paul Prud'hon added numerous putti for the first time .
• The third genre is that of the punt pictures, which were reproduced under titles such as “Nixentraum”, “Elfenspiel” and “Traumverloren”.

From 1924 on, Zatzka painted for the KAMAG competition, especially for Felix Freund in Berlin, where, according to his relatives, he had to deliver two pictures a week. His clients since the mid-1930s can no longer be identified.

Church painting

High altar and glass window (detail) of the Breitensee parish church

Apse of the Baumgartner parish church

From the mid-1920s, Zatzka resumed religious painting for public commissions, often for the church buildings of his brother Ludwig Zatzka .

For the St. Laurentius consecrated parish Breitensee , built in 1896-98 by his brother Ludwig, Zatzka not only painted the altarpiece, depicting Mary with the Child, including the St. Lawrence and St. Francis of Assisi and of angels, but also created the paintings on the side altars, representing the temptation Jesus and the reception of St. Laurentius in heaven, as well as 23 medallions with depictions of saints, which were later painted over. For the parish church in Breitenfeld in Vienna 8th , Zatzka created frescoes and sixteen medallions with portraits of the twelve apostles and the four church fathers, which were repainted after being damaged by bombs in 1945 and only rediscovered in 1998. The fresco “The Last Judgment” in the triumphal arch and the angel medallions between the windows on the left wall of the monastery church “Zur heiligen Familie” in the Marianneum in Hetzendorferstrasse (1887/88), which were also only uncovered in 1988 (the monastery chapel is also a building by Ludwig Zatzka).

The three-part altarpiece of the hospital chapel in the Hietzing Hospital (formerly Kaiser-Jubiläumsspital) shows the Vindobona as the protector of the afflicted as well as Vienna's Mayor Karl Lueger in the central picture, which shows the Savior as the comforter of the sick. The dying man bears the facial features of Lueger, who can also be recognized in other figures of the altarpieces. The left side picture shows the festive occasion of the building of the hospital as a joint work of the city of Vienna and the imperial family, the right side picture shows charity as the victor over all diseases. The Art Nouveau -Altar is from the remains of the famous Otto Wagner - Kirche am Steinhof made.

The three-part altarpiece in the church of St. Karl Borromäus in the geriatric center Am Wienerwald (formerly Lainz nursing home ) comes from Zatzka. Here, too, Lueger von Zatzka was shown kneeling in old German clothing in the right wing of the high altar painting as the donor with the blueprint in his hand, an example of the “bourgeoisification” of sacred painting ( Floridus Röhrig ). The middle shows the church patron Karl Borromeo , on the left an old couple protected by an angel.

Zatzka also created altarpieces for the Baumgartner parish church ( apse painting behind the high altar) and for the Mayerling chapel (1895), also a building by his brother, as well as for the cemetery church of St. Karl Borromeo at Vienna's central cemetery ("The Last Judgment" - with Karl Lueger in a death shirt - and cycle of pictures above the high altar, 1910).

Copyright dispute

After Zatzka had painted the picture Blumenreigen for Felix Freund , Adolf May sued Zatzka in 1924 for injunctive relief and compensation for copyright infringement of the picture Elfenreigen . Zatzka had contractually assigned all rights to this picture to the publisher. As a result, Zatzka had the Dresden Regional Court determined whether May had a copyright share in his work. This was initially answered in the affirmative, but the higher regional court denied it. A decision by the Reichsgericht in 1928 confirmed this decision at the highest level. The reason given was that May was not a “co-creator” of Zatzka's pictures, that the painting of “competing works” was not contractually excluded, that an art genre, in contrast to a single work of art, was not eligible for protection and that the floral arrangement was a different work of art than the elves .

Post fame and market value

After his death in 1945, Zatzka's modest estate went to the relatives of his second wife Marie, born in Brno . Howorka, his former housekeeper.

Around 1975 Zatzka's paintings were sold for about 5,000 marks; prices have risen since then. In 1980 Zatzkas brought in over 10,000 marks. His motifs are particularly popular in the USA. In 2007, works by Zatzka could be seen in international galleries and auction houses for 12,500 pounds, 15,000-20,000 dollars and even for 165,000 dollars.

In 2004, special postage stamps with four motifs from Zatzka pictures were issued in Somalia : harem dancer , nymph , goddess of spring and night sky.

The cover picture of the book edition of Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe in the Stapleton Collection, UK is Zatzka's picture Im Boudoir.

Exhibitions

• 2010: Hans Zatzka, an important painter from Breitensee . District Museum Penzing

literature

• Wolfgang Brückner : Elfenreigen - wedding dream. The oil pressure production 1880–1940 . DuMont-Kunst-Taschenbücher, Volume 22. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1974, ISBN 3-7701-0762-4 .
• Wolfgang Brückner: The Viennese girl painter Hans Zatzka and art for the people . In: Wolfgang Brückner: Art and Consumption - Massenbildforschung (= publications on folklore and cultural history 82), pp. 517-544, ISSN  0721-068X .
  also in: Herbert Nikitsch (Hrsg.): Volkskunst. Lectures at the Austrian Folklore Conference 1995 in Vienna . Book series of the Austrian Journal for Folklore , Volume NS, 14. Self-published by the Verein für Volkskunde, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-900358-11-7 , p. 201–.
• Judith Orschler: The Viennese painter Hans Zatzka and art for everyone in the first half of our century. Dissertation, University of Würzburg 2001. 
• Hilde Sochor : "Children, Kitchen, Stage", Amalthea Verlag, Vienna 2011, ISBN 9783850027687

Web links

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

• Image gallery of the Art Renewal Center
• Postcard prints with pictures of Zatzka from the "Galerie Wiener Künstler"
• Oil paintings by Hans Zatzka

Individual evidence

1. ^ Otto Wolkerstorfer: Waltz bliss and everyday life. Bathing in the 2nd half of the 19th century . Grasl, Baden 1999, ISBN 3-85098-243-2 , p. 176.
2. ^ Stefan Malfèr: Emperor Jubilee and piety on the cross. Habsburg "Pietas Austriaca" in the glass windows of the parish church of St. Laurentius in Vienna-Breitensee. With color plates by Herbert Stöcher, Böhlau Verlag, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar 2011, pp. 30–32.
3. ^ Herbert Richter: Hans Zatzka, a painter from Breitensee . (28 pages, with color photos). In: Penzinger Museum-Blätter . Volume 2010, 68. Museumsverein Penzing (Ed.), Vienna 2010, Permalink Austrian Library Association .
4. ↑ Dissertation not verifiable. - Unsuccessful relevant inquiries on January 12, 2011. (A contribution by the author under the same title can be found in DGV-Informations. Communications of the German Society for Folklore . Volume 1997,106,2. DGV, Tübingen, Permalink Österreichischer Bibliothekenverbund , p. 52.)