Wolfgang Georg Fischer

Wolfgang Georg Fischer (born October 24, 1933 in Vienna ) is an Austrian writer and art expert specializing in: Viennese Classic Modernism with Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele.

biography

Fischer's parents were the bookseller and publisher Heinrich Robert Fischer (Buchhandlung Frick, Graben 27, 1010 Vienna) and Martha, née Hölzl. She was the daughter of the Social Democratic MP Anton Hölzl, who was represented in the Parliament of the First Republic for the Vienna Southeast electoral district. His paternal grandfather Georg Fischer was a trusted lawyer for the Mosaic merchants.

Fischer grew up in the Ringstrasse house Schottenring 35 (where the law firm Georg Fischer, Robert Fischer and Josef Rochlitzer is located) and in the villa suburb of Pötzleinsdorf . In 1938, after the annexation of Austria , the family emigrated to Yugoslavia due to the father's Jewish origins .

Fischer returned to Vienna with his mother in 1940 . After completing secondary school, he studied art history and archeology at the University of Vienna , the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and in Paris. In 1961 he received his doctorate as Dr. phil. with a dissertation on the 17th century French painter Claude Vignon . From 1961 to 1963, he taught at Harvard University and Smith College in Cambridge (Massachusetts). From 1963 Fischer lived in London, where he worked for the art dealer (Marlborough Fine Art) that his father co-founded in 1948. The father fled to Great Britain in September 1939, where he was interned on the Isle of Man as an "enemy alien" and volunteered for the British Army. After the end of the Second World War, he opened the art trading company Marlborough Fine Art there with another Viennese emigrant Frank Lloyd (formerly Kurt Levai) . The gallery mainly represented the art of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as German expressionism and classical Austrian modernism. Henry Moore, Oskar Kokoschka and other artists were looked after by father and son Fischer.

From 1972 to 1995 he was director of the Fischer Fine Art gallery , 30 King Street, London SW 1. He also published literary texts. In 1982 he took part in the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in Klagenfurt .

Fischer has lived in Vienna again since 1995. He is the author of numerous narrative works and poems , some of which have not yet been published .

Together with his friend, the art historian and architect Hans Buchwald , Fischer founded a committee for the erection of a memorial for the excluded, emigrants and the murdered at the Art History Institute of the University of Vienna. It was unveiled in 2008 in courtyard 8 of the university campus in front of the Art History Institute of the University of Vienna. It commemorates more than 60 art historians of Jewish origin who had to emigrate or were murdered in concentration camps.

Memberships and honors

• Fischer was President of the Austrian PEN Club from 1998 to 2001. He has been its Honorary President ever since
• In 1959 he received a prize from the City of Vienna for literature

and in 1970 he was awarded the Swiss Charles Veillon Prize . (This prize is awarded annually for the best novel in one of the three national languages ​​of Switzerland, German, French, Italian).

• In 1981 he received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art 1st Class and the title of professor hc for his services to Austrian culture and art (for example first Schiele exhibition in 1964 in London and first exhibitions of young Austrian artists such as Hrdlicka, Brauer, Schmalix and others).

Works

Published

• Apartments , Hanser, Munich 1969
• Simplex Simplicius. An almost historical German sheet of pictures , Universal Edition, Vienna 1970 (music by Alexander Goehr ).
• Furnished rooms , Hanser, Munich 1972. They are part of a four-volume cycle with the titles Apartments (1900 to 1938), Furnished Rooms (1938 to 1940), Thousand Year Olds (1940 to 1945) and Room for Room (1945 to 1955).
• The sugar dwarfs from the Zwergenzuckerland , Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1975 (pictures by Monika Beisner).
• Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge , Brandstätter, Vienna 1987.
• Die Mauer , Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1990 (with photos by Fritz von der Schulenburg).
• Egon Schiele , Taschen, Cologne 1994.
• Wolfgang Georg Fischer: Around the World in 80 Years 1933–2013. Vienna 2013.
• From my office in London, Vienna and on Grundlsee 1951 to 2018. Edited by Evelyn Adunka and Helmuth A. Niederle. edition pen (Volume 114) published by Löcker Verlag. Vienna 2018. ISBN 978-3-85409-944-4 .

Unpublished

• Polish swans survive. Polish Diaries I (1978) and II (1989). Description of two reading trips are also available in Polish translation.
• Millennial things (see above).
• Room by room. (see above).

Web links

• Literature by and about Wolfgang Georg Fischer in the catalog of the German National Library