Neukunstgruppe
The Neukunstgruppe was founded by Egon Schiele and his artistic friends in the summer of 1909. It was made up of young artists who had left the Vienna Academy and were looking for new artistic forms of expression and who ultimately created their own Austrian color expressionism. The immediate cause was a book of complaints written by Schiele calling for more freedom for the academy's students, which is why Schiele was expelled from the institute in April. Among the 15 founding members of the Neukunstgruppe were Schiele's brother-in-law Anton Peschka , Anton Faistauer , Rudolf Kalvach , Hans Böhler , Erwin Osen, Franz Wiegele , Robin Christian Andersen and the composer Arthur Löwenstein. It was founded on June 17, 1909 in the Gustav Pisko Gallery in Vienna at Lothringerstraße 14, near Schwarzenbergplatz. Egon Schiele, who also acted as the group's secretary, was elected President. In 1911 Oskar Kokoschka , Karl Hofer , Sebastian Isepp , Albert Paris Gütersloh and Anton Kolig join them.
“The 'Neukunstgruppe' did not emerge from any consideration of a practical, art-political, or particularly aesthetic nature, it is not a speculative foundation and is not dominated by the desire to go 'school', but rather it came together unintentionally, as it were, through an act of self-defense that the academy imposed on her. "
In December 1909 the first exhibition of this group took place in the Viennese gallery Pisko. Anton Faistauer designed a poster for this, and Schiele wrote a manifesto for it. The catalog of this first show by the “Neukunstgruppe” was considered lost, but was made accessible to the public again in 2006 as part of an exhibition by the Austrian Belvedere Gallery in the Upper Belvedere. The second event of the Neukunstgruppe was the special exhibition Painting and Sculpture , which took place in February 1911. The rooms of the Hagenbund in the Vienna Zedlitzhalle were made available to the artists. Egon Schiele did not exhibit, but Sebastian Isepp and Oskar Kokoschka dominated the exhibition with two separate halls each. For January 1912 Albert Paris Gütersloh organized another exhibition of this association under the title Neukunst Wien in the Budapest Künstlerhaus. Contributors included Faistauer, Gütersloh, Kolig, Schiele, possibly also Kokoschka, who does not appear in the catalog.
After these exhibitions there was only loose contact between the artists and the group broke up. The importance of this group for Schiele is made clear by an oil painting “The Round Table”, which Schiele painted in 1918, which has remained hidden for a long time. Here Schiele portrays himself in white as King Arthur surrounded by a group of fraternal men. Gustav Klimt can also be recognized among them. Obviously, Schiele did not see himself as a lone warrior, but his painting colleagues were very important to him.
Web links
- Sigrid Diewald, Bettina Schweighofer: Reflections on the exhibition situation in Vienna around 1900. To convey avant-garde currents in the visual arts. newsletter MODERNE 5 (2002) issue 1 ( PDF )
- Werner J. Schweiger: Association of Austrian Visual Artists [1]
- The large art lexicon by PW Hartmann [2]
- Neukunstgruppe [3]