Karl Bitter (sculptor)

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Karl Bitter
Carl Schurz statue on 116th Street, New York City

Karl Bitter (born December 6, 1867 in Vienna , † April 9, 1915 in New York ) was an Austrian sculptor .

Origin and education

Karl Bitter was born in Herklotzgasse in the 15th district of Vienna. The Protestant father ran a drug store business, the mother raised the three sons in their Roman Catholic faith. The second-born Karl, who was to embark on a legal career, dropped out of the Henrietten-Gymnasium and entered the sculpture class at the Vienna School of Applied Arts at the age of 14. He later studied with Kühne and Edmund Hellmer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna .

Life

He left the army prematurely by not returning to the troops after a two-month military leave; instead he emigrated to the United States in 1889 . A friend from Vienna provided him with the money for the ship passage to America.

On November 22, 1889, he disembarked in New York. First he worked in a facade decor workshop. The New York star architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895) became aware of him and had him work on the construction of a country house for the major entrepreneur George W. Vanderbilt . He soon won the competition in New York for the artificial design of the bronze doors at Trinity Church , with which he established his reputation in the United States. Richard M. Hunt asked him to decorate the administration building of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago with statues. He worked with the Viennese sculptor Max von Mauch , who had just emigrated to the USA .

At the age of 30 he owned a large studio with skilled workers in Philadelphia and was granted US citizenship. He was married to Marie Schevill, who came from a German-American family in Cincinnati . He already owned his own country estate on the cliffs of the Hudson .

Due to the great success, the artist was appointed head of the entire sculpture decorations of the next two major exhibitions in Buffalo in 1901 and St. Louis in 1904.

He also created the caryatids for the Metropolitan Museum in New York and contributed the sculptures for the Pennsylvania train station in Philadelphia . Decorations for the houses of the Vanderbilts family and the Villard monument. During his lifetime he was the No. 1 American sculptor.

In 1909 a Viennese friend succeeded in obtaining Bitter's amnesty and he was able to return to Austria to visit his parents. On another home visit, he was accompanied by his wife and three children.

Bittner died on April 10, 1915 in a traffic accident in New York. When he wanted to cross Broadway with his wife after visiting the Metropolitan Opera to get to the tram, a car sped up. He was just able to pull his wife back, but got himself under the wheels and died at the scene of the accident.

Karl Bitter received several awards and honors. In 1910 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . He was president of the National Sculpture Society.

Karl Bitter had the figure of the knight of fortune Bonifazius Ritter in Gerhart Hauptmann's Atlantis as a model.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ilse Krumpöck: Die Bildwerke im Heeresgeschichtliches Museum , Vienna 2004, p. 117 f.
  2. ^ Members: Karl Bitter. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 17, 2019 .

Web links

Commons : Karl Bitter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Bitter, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bitter, Karl Theodore Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 1915
Place of death New York City