Floral splendor and search for forms: Leopold Museum presents Olga Wisinger-Florian and Edmund Kalb

28.05.2019

Famous painter on the threshold to Expressionism and pioneer of female artists’ rights as well as excessive draftsman and lateral thinker Edmund Kalb at the Leopold Museum

Two contradictory and long overdue new exhibitions at the Leopold Museum

With the exhibition Olga Wisinger-Florian. Flower Power of Modernism, the Leopold Museum presents the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to this exceptional painter. Olga Wisinger-Florian (1844—1926) was among the first successful women artists who represent the beginning of a consistent female art history from the mid-19th century. Coinciding with the Austrian avant-garde of landscape artists in the 1880s, represented by Emil Jakob Schindler, Robert Russ and Theodor von Hörmann, Wisinger-Florian, along with Tina Blau and Marie Egner, managed to assert herself in the male-dominated art world and to gain recognition and renown as an independent painter. Her paintings regularly featured not only in exhibitions at the Vienna Künstlerhaus but were also shown in Munich, Berlin, Prague and Paris. Wisinger-Florian was committed to championing women’s rights, was among the most highly decorated female artists of her time and counted famous personalities from the bourgeoisie, the high nobility and even the Imperial family among her clients. She earned her independence through enormous diligence, consistency and not least through perfect self-marketing. Based on the motif of flowers, a theme central to her art with typically feminine connotations, she created an oeuvre ranging from a lyrical, nuanced painting all the way to modern painting on the threshold to Expressionism.

“Olga Wisinger-Florian’s impressive career is the result of various interconnected components. She knew how to overcome the obstacles faced by women in the art world with charm and intelligence. While her talent won her recognition and respect, and her diligence made her a reliable partner, it was her intelligent tactics and genius networking that secured her success on the difficult art market. She confidently turned the disadvantage of her gender into her advantage, and thus became a role model to many subsequent generations of female artists.”
Marianne Hussl-Hörmann, curator of the exhibition

“After a last solo exhibition in the 1950s, Olga Wisinger-Florian’s oeuvre was only presented in connection with that of Tina Blau and Marie Egner, and then only as Emil Jakob Schindler’s famous student within the context of the group of Atmospheric Impressionists. Recent research, and not least this monographic exhibition, shows how the artist consistently pursued a revolutionary concept of color, space and mimetic illusion. Her search for new spatial solutions and the luminosity of her markedly bold colors reveal her to be an early exponent of a modern Color Expressionism. We are delighted to be the first public institution to honor this unusual painter with a comprehensive solo exhibition and to single her out from the group of ‘Atmospheric Impressionists’.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

Olga Wisinger-Florian. Flower Power of Modernism features some 120 exhibits, including 70 paintings from eminent institutional and private collections, including the Belvedere, the Wien Museum, the Leopold family’s private collection, the Eisenberger Collection, the art dealership Giese & Schweiger, which is in possession of the artist’s estate, as well as the collection of the Leopold Museum. The Wisinger-Florian expert Alexander Giese acted as scientific advisor to the exhibition.

Exhibition Edmund Kalb

The exhibition Edmund Kalb, which is shown parallel to the presentation of Olga Wisinger-Florian’s oeuvre at the Leopold Museum, is the first presentation in a Vienna museum to afford comprehensive insights into the work of the artist Edmund Kalb, who was born in 1900. Featuring 125 exhibits, the presentation showcases the astonishing oeuvre of this loner and lateral thinker. The exhibition presents a restless artist who, though he consistently advanced his oeuvre and painstakingly documented it in photographs, refused to participate in the art scene and never sold a single work during his lifetime. Motivated by his studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, the Dornbirn-born artist created his main oeuvre between 1926 and 1930. It consists of around 700 self-portraits and some 400 portraits, in which he sounded out the different forms of faces. In the late 1920s he also created remarkable full-figure nudes, and from 1930 self-portraits of the highest quality and intricacy using watercolors, India ink or the technique of drypoint etching. Kalb’s oeuvre petered out after his final return to Dornbirn in April 1930. His intense work in his father’s workshop and on his farm and fields left him hardly any time for pursuing his art. In the late 1930s, the artist explored dynamic abstraction. He showed a keen interest in the scientific achievements of his time, sounded out questions of mathematics, mechanics, nuclear physics, all the way to space technology and perceptual psychology, as well as plant breeding, and communicated with like-minded people all over the world in Esperanto. In 1942 Kalb was drafted into the air force. The uncompromisingly free spirit was sentenced to spells in prison for insubordination, and only narrowly escaped death by firing squad. After the War, Kalb came into conflict with the law once more when he opposed the forced accommodation of tenants in his apartment. Following the deaths of his parents, the artist lived self-sufficiently in precarious circumstances and grew increasingly lonely. On 20th October 1952, after several days of intense suffering, Edmund Kalb died an agonizing death in his apartment. Kalb’s art met with incomprehension and rejection among his family and environment, which resulted in a large part of his oeuvre being destroyed after his death.

“Kalb was not least a versatile researcher and thinker of impressive intellectual autonomy. His forays into philosophy, psychology, mathematics, physics, ecology etc. are not an anecdote of his artistry but a characteristic. He was primarily interested in problems, and whenever he would temporarily run out of problems to solve in drawing, he would address one of mathematics or agriculture.”
Rudolf and Kathleen Sagmeister, the exhibition’s curators

“Edmund Kalb is among the most fascinating artist personalities of the 20th century. His resistance against any kind of repressive authority earned the free spirit and non-conformist a conviction for insubordination during the National Socialist regime and several months’ incarceration in a military prison. In the post-war period Kalb served another months-long prison sentence for resisting state authority and insulting an officer. The consequences of this punishment eventually led to his premature death in 1952. His oeuvre was only discovered and appreciated posthumously, but tellingly by his fellow artists. Despite exhibitions, among others in New York, Rome, Dresden and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which were accompanied by extensive catalogues, the life and oeuvre of Edmund Kalb still remains a discovery for the larger public.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, the Director of the Leopold Museum

Ceremonious opening of the exhibitions

The double opening, hosted by Leopold Museum Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger and the curators Marianne Hussl-Hörmann (Olga Wisinger-Florian), Kathleen and Rudolf Sagmeister (Edmund Kalb) as well as Wisinger-Florian expert Alexander Giese in the presence of the Leopold Museum’s Managing Director Gabriele Langer, was attended by more than 700 visitors, including the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Leopold Museum Josef Ostermayer, the board members Elisabeth Leopold and Agnes Husslein-Arco accompanied by her husband Prof. Peter Husslein, CEO of im Kinsky Christoph la Garde and Ramona la Garde, Michael Kovacek (founder of im Kinsky) and Charlotte Kreuzmayr (founder of Parnass), Erste Bank CEO Andreas Treichl and Desirée Treichl-Stürgkh, Klimt descendent Gustav and Christa Huber, Brigitte Huber-Mader, Leopold Birstinger (Association of Friends of the Leopold Museum), Gerbert and Marianne Frodl, the collectors attorney Bernhard and Elisabeth Hainz, Helmut Klewan and Regina Götz, Diethard and Waltraud Leopold and attorney Ernst Ploil (founder of im Kinsky), the members of the Leopold Museum’s Circle of Patrons Anita Querfeld (CEO of Cafè Landtmann), Jutta Stolitzka, Helene von Damm (former US ambassador), Rudolf Hauptner and publisher Martin Scheriau. Further celebrated opening guests included the president of the Vienna Secession Herwig Kempinger, Edelbert Köb (former Mumok director), Klimt Foundation CEO Peter Weinhäupl, the gallery owners Jane Kallir (Galerie Saint Etienne, New York), Susanne Bauer (Galerie Susanne Bauer), Herbert and Gabriele Giese (Galerie Giese & Schweiger), Florence Giese, Peter and Erika Kovacek, Regine Kovacek and Sylvia Kovacek (Galerie Kovacek), Hansjörg Krug (antiquarian bookshop and art dealership Christian M. Nebehay), Josef Schütz (Schütz Fine Art), Martin and Claudia Suppan (Suppan Fine Arts), the artists Anita Witek, Lorenz Estermann and Michael Horsky, Belvedere curator Franz Smola, curator Andrea Winklbauer (Jewish Museum Vienna), art historian Susanne Längle, Susanna Bichler-Rosenberger (head of Dorotheum Galerie), Angelika Rümmele (Kultur- und Kunstverein Edmund Kalb, Dornbirn), Kunsttrans CEO Birgit Vikas, Josefine Festetics (Christie’s), Dorotheum expert Astrid Fialka-Herics, Susanne Herdey-Herzl and Nina Herdey, Alexandra Kaszay (Hofburg Vienna), the entrepreneurs Antonella and Josef Rupp, Gerhard Ströck, author Max Kübeck, advertiser Christian Satek, and many others.
 

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