Paul Flora

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Paul Flora, April 27, 2001
Paul Flora. Handwritten Christmas greeting from 1957

Paul Flora (born June 29, 1922 in Glurns , South Tyrol ; † May 15, 2009 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian draftsman , caricaturist , graphic artist , illustrator and writer .

Life

Paul Flora was born in Glurns im Vinschgau in South Tyrol in 1922 . In 1927 he moved with his family to North Tyrol . His drawing teacher brought him to Max von Esterle , where he tried his hand at painting. He also learned the technique of etching early on. In order to avoid military service, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich , where his future teacher Olaf Gulbransson also stayed, but whom he only met after the war in Innsbruck. In 1944 he was drafted into military service in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia. In 1945 he returned to Tyrol after a short US imprisonment.

Since then he has worked as a freelance artist in Innsbruck. He lived in the Hungerburg , a northern part of the city above Innsbruck. Flora had three children with his wife Gertrude, née Weinzettl, including the sociologist Peter Flora , born in 1944 , who was from Gertrude's first marriage and was adopted by Paul Flora after her marriage, as well as Thomas and Katharina (married Seywald) as biological descendants .

In 1948 he was accepted as a member of the Art Club ( Vienna ). Since 1986 he has been a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts . Since 1999 he has been a member of the Liechtenstein PEN Club . From 2003 to 2006 he was president there and was elected honorary president for his services to the club. In addition, he was co-founder of the municipal gallery in the Taxispalais in Innsbruck in 1964 and the initiator of the “ Austrian graphic competition ”. From 1964 to 1992 he curated exhibitions for the gallery in the Taxispalais in Innsbruck alongside Wilfried Kirschl , Oswald Oberhuber and Peter Weiermair .

Paul Flora died on the night of May 15, 2009 in an Innsbruck hospital. At his own request, he was buried in the cemetery of his native Glurns. On Flora's 89th birthday, on June 29, 2011, the city of Glurns posthumously dedicated the Paul Flora Museum in the Tauferer Turm to him. Since then a permanent exhibition on life and work has been on view there. Works from his hand can be found in many public and private collections.

In September 2018, the Flora cave bath in Innsbruck was demolished. The wave-shaped swimming pool by Paul Flora was planned by the architect Josef Lackner in 1969 and exhibited at the Venice Biennale, among others .

Artistic creation

technology

Before 1950, Flora broke with the dense hatching , turned to the delicate, thin-lined, delicate outline drawing and developed a line technique with pen and ink . From the angular, brittle outlines of his time as a caricaturist, he developed into a greater line density, variable mesh of lines and fine hatching. In the sixties the line became firmer, the outline thicker, the interior drawing increasingly dominant. A wide variety of shades of gray was created through a close, extensive network. With these means he created carefully composed pictures. His "nervous line thunderstorms" and gray value variants resulted mainly in gloomy and melancholy moods. From the 1970s onwards, he increasingly used hatching, creating effects with finely graded contrasts from light to dark. At the same time he began to use more colors ( watercolor , later crayon ). In the eighties he also started drawing with pencils .

Working for newspapers

In 1949 Werner Scholz began working on the American daily for Germany, Die Neue Zeitung . Between 1957 and 1971 he provided weekly drawings to the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit , especially for Rudolf Walter Leonhardt's column Pro & Contra . Around 3,000 political caricatures were created in these years . His drawings have also been published in international magazines: The Times , Literary Supplement , Du , Dagens Nyheter and The Observer .

Book illustrations

At the beginning of his career he created many book illustrations with satirical content. From 1953 an intensive cooperation with the Diogenes Verlag in Zurich began . In addition to portfolios and thematic compilations of his own works, there were books by Peter Hacks , Wolfgang Hildesheimer , Erich Kästner , Josef Müller-Marein and Hans Weigel , which, along with many others, were illustrated and supplemented with drawings by Paul Flora.

In addition, a bibliography has been created with editions mainly from Diogenes-Verlag Zürich (whose founder Daniel Keel he was friends), in the "Edition Thomas Flora" and in the "Galerie Seywald".

Fonts

Paul Flora was also active as a writer. Mostly he wrote short to longer articles about colleagues, but often also comments in catalogs or newspapers. His letters to the editor often contained political issues that challenged him. An exchange of letters with Alfred Kubin , with whom he was friends until his death, is in the archive of the estate agency in Salzburg. In 1997 Diogenes Verlag published the book This and That - News and Stories , a volume with short stories from his own humorous biography to texts about fellow draftsmen and Charlie Chaplin.

Creation and design

In 1963 Flora designed the set for Amphitryon ( Kleist ) in the Akademietheater in Vienna and in 1998 the set for The King dies ( Ionesco ) in the German theater in Hamburg

He also designed wine labels in Italy and Austria, clock faces for a good cause, dishes, postage stamps, paperweights, mute servants , glass figurines from Murano and the like. a. and there are three privately owned tiled stoves .

The Austrian Post has been issuing prepaid telephone cards since 1980 . In 1994 Paul Flora created a series of four telephone prepaid cards with puppets .

He dedicated logos and drawings to various associations , such as the “ Kufstein Narrow Film Tour ”, the “ Aichwald Art Circle ” or the “ Absamer Matschgerern”.

Postage stamps

Between 1985 and 1998 several stamp series with motifs by Paul Flora appeared in Austria (1985 and 1993) and in the Principality of Liechtenstein (1998) as well as a set of seven Olympic stamps (1988). For example, Paul Flora's picture Fliegender Harlequin is on a special postage stamp. The Flying Harlequin is supposed to reflect the hustle and bustle of the Venice Carnival and at the same time the atmosphere of this city. The figures and masks that can still be seen today during the Venice Carnival inspired his imagination .

Principality of Liechtenstein
  • Michel No. 887-889, first day December 9, 1985: Theater
  • Michel No. 934–936, first day December 7, 1987: Calgary Winter Olympics
  • Michel No. 947–950, first day September 5, 1988: Summer Olympic Games in Seoul
  • Michel No. 1004, first day December 3, 1990: 500 years of international postal connections in Europe
  • Michel No. 1173–1176, first day June 2, 1998: Greeting stamps - "Fun with letters"
Austria
  • Michel No. 1829, first day October 25, 1985: Modern Art in Austria
  • Michel No. 2095, first day April 16, 1993: EUROPA - Contemporary Art
United Nations - New York
  • Michel No. 577, first day 23 August 1989: 10 years of the Vienna Office of the United Nations - a value from the edition comprising six values.

Works

Selection of works

The catalog raisonné of illustrated books was published in 1992 on the occasion of Paul Flora's 70th birthday. It comprises 135 book titles and 10 portfolio works from 45 years and provides an overview of the artist's work in 67 illustrations.

  • 1947: Man thinks.
  • 1947: Mr. Huber in the wild west.
  • 1953: Flora's fauna. First book published by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich
  • 1955: The muse horse.
  • 1957: Erich Kästner's warhorse. Humans and other animals
  • 1958: Mourning flora. With a foreword by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
  • 1958: About not reading books. with text by Erich Kästner , 1958
  • 1959: Vivat Vamp. With a foreword by Gregor von Rezzori .
  • 1961: The ravages of time. A lock for an ornamental chicken.
  • 1964: Oh dear time II. Flora's pocket fauna. The males and the females.
  • 1966: royal dramas. Foreword by Ernst Schröder .
  • 1968: vedute and figures. Foreword by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
  • 1969: The educated garden gnome and pastime .
  • 1970: The rooted Tyroleans and their evil enemies. Diogenes portfolio (folder)
  • 1971: premiere , when grandfather shot grandmother.
  • 1972: Off to battle. The bourgeois libertine.
  • 1975: Hungerburger Elegies.
  • 1977: penthouse. From (A) uto to (Z) entauren. Splendor and misery of the railroad (folder).
  • 1978: adventurer. (Folder)
  • 1979: The pale bosom friend. Early drawings. Fauna (folder).
  • 1980: theater. (Folder)
  • 1981: futile words.
  • 1982: Nocturnos. Tiny works. Venezia. (Folder)
  • 1983: Variations on Wagner. Jobless professions . The alpine gymnastics exercises. Panopticon. (Folder)
  • 1989: Ornamental bird with harlequins. (Probably his most famous, most expensive picture)
  • 2002: A Florilegium. With a detailed text from (A) kademie to (Z) eichner by Karl-Markus Gauß.

Publicly owned works (selection)

  • In 1971 and 1972 Flora donated a total of 370 works to the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover .
  • Working in the Glocker Foundation
  • Working in the Ferdinandeum Museum
  • Collection in his place of birth Glurns (South Tyrol) in his own museum

Texts

  • 1987: drawn and written.
  • 1997: this and that.
  • 1969: Article among others in: C. Pack: Moderne. Graphics in Austria.
  • 1985: Wilhelm Busch Museum, Paul Flora, 1984
  • 1997: Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Floras Fauna.
  • 2002: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, drawings 1938–2001. (80th birthday)
  • 2006: Frieder Gadesmann : Paul Flora,… in a nutshell. Aichwald 2006

Exhibitions

Galleries

Since the 1960s, numerous exhibitions have taken place in around a hundred galleries in Europe and the USA. His main galleries are in Innsbruck (Galerie Flora) and Salzburg (Galerie Seywald)

Exhibitions

Honourings and prices
Art historian Magdalena Hörmann with Paul Flora at an exhibition in Kufstein 2001

Movies

From 1989 to 1991 several films about and by Flora were made for ORF :

  • The Ravens of San Marco (via Flora)
  • Flora's Fauna (via Flora)
  • A fisherman over there (via Alfred Kubin )
  • An adventurer in a dressing gown (via Paul von Rittinger )
  • On the Line - Paul Flora in the 2007 film ,
  • Documentary film about the artist Paul Flora by Eva Testor (mobile film)

Others

In a scene in the film Solo Sunny (1980) by Konrad Wolf , the picture Ball, ruining a castle by Paul Flora can be seen.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Draftsman Paul Flora died at the age of 86. ( Memento from August 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: Kleine Zeitung , May 15, 2009.
  2. ↑ Permanent exhibition set up in Glurns. Retrieved September 25, 2011.
  3. ↑ orf.at: Excitement about the demolition of Flora's bathhouse . Article dated September 17, 2018, accessed September 18, 2018.
  4. ↑ Modern art in Austria - 11th value from Paul Flora.
  5. ↑ Extensive review of the Paul Flora exhibition . Caricatures in the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum 2016/17
  6. ↑ Paul Flora: From thick line to thin line. - Stand Montafon. Retrieved July 17, 2020 .
  7. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
  8. ↑ Resale Right (call). Retrieved May 9, 2019 .
  9. ↑ FAZ.NET: Moments of German Films ( Memento from June 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : Paul Flora  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Flora, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian draftsman, caricaturist and book illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Glurns , Vinschgau , South Tyrol
DATE OF DEATH May 15, 2009
Place of death innsbruck