Anton Romako is among those artists who opened up new painterly possibilities of interpreting the visible world in a visionary and intuitive manner. To this day, his work has lost none of the disconcerting fascination with which he subtly changed conventional manners of depiction from 1875 towards a more meticulous, psychologizing interpretation. The stylistic breaches went hand in hand with his checkered biography. Trained as a history painter in Munich and Vienna, Romako made a name for himself over two decades as a famous portraitist and eminent genre painter in Rome. Following his separation from his wife, the artist returned to Vienna in 1875 and executed works whose idiosyncratic combination of expressive lines and free painterly brushwork overtaxed his generation’s understanding of art. Seeing as Rudolf Leopold recognized Anton Romako’s importance as one of the great pioneers of Modernism very early on, the Leopold Museum as well as the Leopold Private Collection house one of the most comprehensive collections of works by the artist today, including masterpieces such as the two portraits of the Reisser Family, the Countess Kuefstein, Odysseus and Circe as well as Girl, Crossing a Mountain Torrent. The retrospective shown in the spring of 2018 at the Leopold Museum will showcase outstanding works from the oeuvre of this unusual painter.
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