Rudolf Wacker (1893–1939) is one of the most important Austrian representatives of New Objectivity in Europe. The Vorarlberg artist’s life and work were inextricably linked with the socio-political events of the 1910s to the 1930s. After a carefree youth in Bregenz and successful studies in Weimar, the outbreak of World War I marked a caesura in the young art student’s life in 1914. He was sent to the Eastern Front in present-day Ukraine, but was soon captured as a prisoner of war by the Russians. Having only regained his freedom after five years, Wacker’s expressive style reached early climaxes, especially in the medium of drawing.

Throughout his life, Wacker oriented himself on the German art scene. In the mid-1920s, he eventually developed an independent variant of the style of New Objectivity, examples of which enter into a dialogue with select reference works by artists including Otto Dix, Anton Räderscheidt and Alexander Kanoldt in the exhibition. In his art, Wacker was primarily interested in his immediate environment, in simple everyday things, in landscapes and backyards, in the female nude and in his own portrait. He repeated and revisited these motifs in multi-variant compositions, thus encouraging his viewers to explore the magic of the everyday.

Curators: Laura Feurle and Marianne Hussl-Hörmann
Curatorial Assistant: Barbara Halbmayr

Artist – Reader – Author – Networker

Throughout his life, Wacker was not only a draftsman and painter but also a downright excessive reader and writer. During the years of his war captivity alone, he read more than 400 classics of literary history and books covering topics from art history, philosophy and science. As a chronicler of his life, he kept diaries for over three decades, offering not only personal and artistic reflections as well as a list of his exhibitions and sales, but also fascinating accounts of a bygone era. Despite being on the periphery in Vorarlberg, he was highly successful in building a strong network within the German-speaking art scene.

Dolls as Allegories

It was important to Wacker that his renderings could be regarded both as true reflections of nature and as formal constructions. The dissonances and harmonies between the different forms, colors and textures were to intensify the perception of the objects. At the same time, he sought to place them “into a meaningful order”, as Wacker wrote in 1934. Throughout various periods of his oeuvre, dolls played an important role. He staged them in countless variations and combinations alongside everyday things and found objects, such as toys, jugs, pumpkins or shells. With the help of dolls, Wacker sounded out interpersonal relationships, often between man and woman, in a playful manner in the 1920s. Proportionate to the rise of National Socialism in Germany and Austria, Wacker painted dolls in increasingly minimalist compositions, whose naked, twisted bodies, dislocated joints, broken heads and empty gazes appear distressing to the viewer. These unsettling renderings served Wacker as allegories for his criticism of National Socialism’s boundless propensity towards violence.

Images of Women

Despite his liberal and progressive sexual morals, Wacker adhered to a conservative understanding of gender roles: He believed that artistic creativity was reserved exclusively to men. Firmly rooted in the patriarchic zeitgeist of his time, his image of women was determined by two stereotypes. On the one hand, there was the “maternal type”, which he looked upon as the female ideal, and which he believed his mother and his wife Ilse to epitomize. On the other hand, he was fascinated by what he saw as the sexual lasciviousness of women. He thought to have found this quality in the Viennese Marie Klimesch, who was 25 years older than him. Wacker’s female images oscillate between these poles of the woman as a mother and the woman as a whore.

Fragile Idylls

Unlike the German New Objectivity movement, Wacker completely ignored life in the modern metropolis. He deliberately depicted rural counter-worlds, such as the boats in the harbor of Bregenz, the view from his studio window over the city towards the lake, as well as neglected corners of small towns like Bregenz, Lindau, and Goslar. The absence of people, formal exaggerations, or colors heightened to the point of the surreal subtly undermine the initial impression of idyllic landscapes. These pictures allow the abysses of reality and of Wacker’s unsettling socio-political present, to shine through.

With the first monographic exhibition on Rudolf Wacker in Vienna for 66 years and around 200 exhibits and numerous archival documents from institutions and private collections, the exhibition provides a comprehensive panorama, illustrating the artistic versatility and technical mastery of Wacker’s oeuvre in an impressive manner.

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