The Leopold Museum Dedicates a Comprehensive Retrospective to the Eminent Painter and Draftsman Rudolf Wacker
31.10.2024
Focus on Wacker’s Multi-Faceted Oeuvre as One of the Most Important Austrian Contributions to New Objectivity in Europe
With a large-scale retrospective exhibition, the Leopold Museum showcases the multi-faceted oeuvre of Rudolf Wacker (1893–1939) as one of the most essential Austrian contributions to New Objectivity in Europe. Featuring some 250 exhibits, Rudolf Wacker. Magic and Abysses of Reality traces the development of the Vorarlberg painter and draftsman, shines the spotlight on thematic emphases of his work, and highlights his oeuvre’s eminent artistic quality and perfection. The exhibition retraces Wacker’s artistic development in a loose chronology, with individual exhibition rooms dedicated to central thematic emphases of his oeuvre.
In his art, Wacker focused on his immediate surroundings, on the “magic of the everyday”, which he condensed in his still lifes, on the landscapes of his hometown, on female nudes and self-portraits. His life and his work were inextricably linked with the socio-political events of the 1910s to the 1930s: In 1914, World War I led the diligent art student from Weimar to the Eastern front, and subsequently for many years into war captivity in Russia. Having regained his freedom, Wacker’s expressive style reached early climaxes in the medium of drawing. In the mid-1920s, he developed an independent variant of the style of New Objectivity, examples of which enter into a dialogue in the exhibition with select works by exponents of German New Objectivity, including Albert Birkle, Otto Dix, Alexander Kanoldt, Anton Räderscheidt, Georg Schrimpf and Gustav Wunderwald. During the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Rudolf Wacker created encrypted still lifes, which, in a subtle manner, allow us to relate to the abysses and threats of the time.
“In the past, it was primarily Rudolf Wacker’s home state of Vorarlberg that reappraised his artistic legacy with great commitment. It was there that the last monographic exhibitions of his oeuvre were held at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 1993, and at the vorarlberg museum in 2019. The first and hitherto last presentation of his work in Vienna was shown in 1958 at the Belvedere. A symposium held at Museum Ortner in 2022 has drawn widespread attention to his oeuvre among researchers. With its collection emphasis on Austrian art of the 19th and 20th centuries, and owing to the great esteem in which the collectors Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold held Wacker’s art, the Leopold Museum is the ideal place for a long overdue, comprehensive retrospective of his work in Vienna.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum
Artistic Beginnings and War Captivity, Wacker as a Reader and Writer
The exhibition Rudolf Wacker. Magic and Abysses of Reality starts by highlighting Wacker’s artistic beginnings, his years spent in war captivity in Siberia during World War I, and the artist’s subsequent fresh start. After he regained his freedom, he met his future wife, the artisan craftswoman Ilse Moebius, in Berlin – she would support her husband and his art all her life. A selection of books and diaries from his estate present Wacker as an avid reader of a wide range of subjects, and as an attentive and critical chronicler of his time:
“Rudolf Wacker was not only a draftsman and painter but also a downright excessive reader and writer: He left behind 16 diaries as well as hundreds of letters, which are rare and vivid testaments to his personality, his artistic ideas and the events of his time. In meticulous lists, he documented the books he read, which ranged from art-historical expert literature via philosophical and scientific works all the way to the classics of literary history. These afford further insights into his way of thinking and working, and provide a silent commentary on his life. Wacker’s life and art can thus be seen from various perspectives, which makes delving into his art all the more fascinating and special.”
Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, curator of the exhibition
Female Likenesses and Self-Portraits
His own portrait was a central theme for Wacker. Additionally, he intently explored questions of sexuality and corporeality all his life:
“Wacker was fascinated especially by the female nude. Despite his open-minded sexual morals, he adhered to a conservative understanding of gender roles, convinced that artistic creativity was reserved exclusively to men and regarding the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker as the sole exception. His image of women was determined by stereotypical ideas rooted in the patriarchic zeitgeist of his time. On the one hand, he declared the ‘maternal type’, which he believed his mother and his wife Ilse to epitomize, to be the female ideal. On the other hand, he was fascinated by women’s ‘sexual lasciviousness’, a quality he ascribed to his acquaintance Marie Klimesch. His painted, drawn and printed female images oscillate between these two poles.”
Laura Feurle, curator of the exhibition
Uncanny Dolls and “Idyllic” Landscapes
In the early 1920s, Wacker first made dolls the protagonists of his paintings. In the 1930s, he once again chose dolls to express his ideological criticism of National Socialism: Rendering them as puppets deprived of their rights or as subtle resistance fighters, his explicitly female bodies of dolls, with dislocated joints and rugged faces, refer to a world under existential threat from the fascist zeitgeist.
Despite his ambivalent relationship with his birthplace, the artist enthusiastically rendered the scenery of Vorarlberg. Time and again, he captured ostensibly idyllic landscapes, while he – as opposed to his fellow artists including Gustav Wunderwald and Albert Birkle – factored out life in modern metropolises. Wacker leveled subtle criticism at the increasing brutalization of society in his landscapes by rendering withered branches, peeling plaster or neglected backyards.
New Objectivity, “Magical Reality”, Encrypted Still Lifes and Nudes of Resistance
In 1920s Germany, the style of Expressionism was superseded by an objective manner of representation, which seemed more apt to describe the social and political upheaval after the experiences of war. The Leopold Museum shows Wacker’s female likenesses – though renderings of the modern “New Woman” are absent from his oeuvre – as well as self-portraits, in which he depicted himself as a fashionable “New Man”.
Another core theme of his art was the world of everyday, often unheeded objects. The exhibition showcases Wacker’s encrypted still lifes, in which he allowed for the abysses of reality to shine through in a subversive and subtle manner. Naive children’s drawings, cacti in a variety of forms, flowers and toys, taxidermied animals and Gothic sculptures feature in his mysterious series of the 1930s, with his complex compositions often conveying hidden messages.
After his unsuccessful application for a professorship at the Vienna Academy, Wacker briefly headed an evening nude drawing class at the Bregenz vocational school from 1936. As he was officially banned from working with life models, he privately hired models and drew sensual female nudes, with which he countered the National Socialists’ strict censorship and martial soldiers’ cult.
Throughout the last years of his life prior to his untimely death, Wacker became increasingly resigned. He was targeted by the Gestapo, was suspected of communist involvement, and subsequently lost the roles he occupied within the regional artists’ associations as well as his position as a drawing teacher in Bregenz. Along with haunting doll portraits, Wacker’s motifs now included aquariums and mushrooms, and, most importantly, morbid autumnal bouquets which referred to the imminent threat.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue in German and English, featuring essays by Laura Feurle, Herbert Giese, Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, Ute Pfanner, Rudolf Sagmeister and Kathleen Sagmeister-Fox, Jürgen Thaler, as well as a prologue by Hans-Peter Wipplinger.
Curators: Laura Feurle, Marianne Hussl-Hörmann
Press material and printable images
Photo gallery of the exhibition opening
Opening Ceremony
The opening ceremony hosted by the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger – in the presence of the Leopold Museum’s board members Josef Ostermayer, Sonja Hammerschmid, Saskia Leopold and Danielle Spera as well as Commercial Director Moritz Stipsicz – was attended by around 750 guests, including the exhibition’s curators Laura Feurle and Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, the artist’s granddaughter Alexandra Wacker, musicians Rudolf and Nikolaus Leopold, the collectors Karlheinz and Agnes Essl, collector Werner Trenker (Med Trust) accompanied by Sonja Zsolnai-Kasztler, museum founder Josef Schütz, exhibition organizer and architect Johann Kräftner, Elisabeth Dutz (Albertina), Brigitte Neider-Olufs (OeNB), the authors of the essays in the exhibition catalogue Herbert Giese as well as Kathleen and Rudolf Sagmeister, art historians Patrick Werkner and Thomas Zaunschirm, Jürgen Thaler (Franz Michael Felder Archive), Michael Kovacek (im Kinsky) and Charlotte Kreuzmayr, gallery owners Marie Valerie Hieke, Philomena and Stefanie Maier, Jürgen Pölzl (Salon Leopold committee), Nadine Kraus-Drasche (Dorotheum), Thomas Baumgartner (McKinsey) and researcher Sabina Baumgartner-Parzer (MedUni Wien), Peter Husslein, the former director of the Vienna Chamber of Labour Werner Muhm, Leopold and Margit Birstinger, Christoph von der Schulenburg (Dorotheum), the artists Tone Fink, Joseph Marsteurer and Thomas Palme, Andreas and Edith Fleischmann, the architect Andrea Frank, Pia Sääf (Heidi Horten Collection), Bernd Ernsting (Letter Foundation), and many others.
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