Otto Pilny

Slave traders

Otto Pilny: Dancing Harem Lady, oil on canvas, private property

Otto Pilny (born June 28, 1866 in Budweis , † July 22, 1936 in Zurich ) was an orientalist painter .

Born in 1866 in Budweis, South Bohemia, Otto Pilny came to Prague as a child in 1873. Little is known about his artistic training. Otto Pilny began his first trip to the Orient at the age of 19 in 1885 and spent two years with a tent, painting utensils and provisions, accompanied only by his dog, on the caravan route between Cairo and Tripoli. After these adventurous years he returned to his homeland and presumably began studying painting at the Academy in Prague. But it didn't last long, because between 1889 and 1892 Pilny traveled to Egypt again. In 1895 he married Maria Valentin in Zurich and received Swiss citizenship. In 1900 Pilny took part in the annual exhibition of the cooperative of visual artists in Vienna with the picture "Evening prayer in the desert". As court painter to the Vice-King of Egypt , Otto Pilny was awarded the Medschidieh Order of 4th Class by Abbas Hylmi II Pasha (1874 Cairo - 1944 Geneva).

Otto Pilny: Slave Market , 1910.

Otto Pilny is best known for his depictions of praying Muslims. In an atmosphere of religious concentration, men kneel or stand in Pilny's prayer scenes facing Mecca in the seemingly endless expanse of the desert. In addition, Pilny painted a series of erotically charged scenes in which naked or half-naked women are exposed to the greedy gaze of oriental men. Similar to the orientalist painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , Jean-Léon Gérômes and others, these motifs served western male fantasies and did not correspond to reality. The images made it possible for western viewers to look at naked women and at the same time to morally condemn the act depicted - slave trade, voyeurism, violence against women. So they provided a justification for viewing female nudity at the same time. Both his exotic landscapes and his erotic genre scenes served an art market in which images from the Orient were in great demand.

Pilny's son Otto Alexander Pilny (born March 22, 1897 in Zurich ; † March 17, 1958 in Zurich) was also a painter, but limited himself to views of the city of Zurich. His works are often wrongly ascribed to the father.

Web links

Commons : Otto Pilny  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Contribution by Swiss television about Otto Pilny ( Kulturplatz from November 19, 2008)
• Pilny, Otto. In: Sikart
• Pilny, Otto Alexander. In: Sikart

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nicholas Tromans, et al .: The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting . Yale Univ. Press, New Haven 2008, ISBN 978-1-85437-733-3 .
2. ^ Davies, K .: The Orientalists: Western artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia & India . 2005, ISBN 978-0-9759783-0-6 , ISSN  0009-4978 .
3. ↑ Linda Nochlin: The Imaginary Orient . In: The Politics of Vision . Routledge, 2018, ISBN 978-0-429-49596-0 , pp. 33-59 , doi : 10.4324 / 9780429495960-3 .
4. ↑ Köhn, Silke. Otto Pilny, in: Collector's Journal. Art, antiques, auctions , Reichertshausen: GEMI 2009, p. 63ff.
5. ^ Zurich registry office, family register, volume Pilny, No. 1. The same first names of father and son led to confusion in the art trade. To avoid confusion, Otto Pilny and his son Otto Alexander Valentin are sometimes referred to as sen. and jun. or I and II differentiated.
6. ↑ Examples can be found in auction catalogs from Fischer, Lucerne, and Koller, Zurich.

Selected literature

• Davies, K. Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India, New York: Laynfaroh, 2005.
• Köhn, Silke. Otto Pilny, in: Collector's Journal, Art, Antiques, Auctions (Reichertshausen: GEMI Verlags GmbH), November 2009, pp. 62–71.
• Linda Nochlin: The Imaginary Orient. In: The Politics of Vision. Routledge, 2018, ISBN 978-0-429-49596-0 , pp. 33-59.
• Tromans, Nicholas, Weeks, Emily M., et al. 2008. The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 978-1-85437-733-3 .