VIENNA.- The Leopold Museum is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective exhibition to the multi-faceted oeuvre of Rudolf Wacker (1893–1939) as one of the most eminent Austrian contributions to New Objectivity in Europe. Featuring around 250 exhibits, Rudolf Wacker. Magic and Abysses of Reality retraces the development of the Vorarlberg painter and draftsman, highlights thematic emphases of his oeuvre and illustrates his works’ artistic quality and technical perfection. 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.

The Vorarlberg artist’s 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 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. Following a loose chronology, the presentation retraces Wacker’s artistic development, while individual exhibition rooms are dedicated to central thematic emphases of his oeuvre.

“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 Rudolf 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, WAR CAPTIVITY AND FRESH START

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 his fresh start in Bregenz. Following his rejection by the Vienna Academy, he briefly studied at a private painting school from 1910, before attending the art university in Weimar from 1911, where he was taught by Albin Egger-Lienz. Open minded and unimpressed by the conservative sexual morals of the monarchal society, the enthusiastic art student explored his nude self-portrait in the media of drawing and photography.

These carefree years of study came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I. In 1914, Wacker was drafted into the military, received his basic training, and was sent to the Eastern front, in present-day Ukraine. While he provided unsparing documentations of the war in his diaries and letters, he never explicitly made it the subject of his art, unlike his colleagues, including Otto Dix. After only a few months of serving in the War, Wacker was captured as a Russian prisoner of war, and was transferred to a camp in the Siberian town of Tomsk. During the five years of his captivity, Wacker experimented with drawings and linoleum cuts, whenever possible, maintained contacts with the local art scene, and was even able to sell or exchange some of his works, or to present them in small exhibition projects. Having regained his freedom, he spent the winters and springs in Berlin for several years. There, he met his wife, the artisan craftswoman Ilse Moebius from Goslar in Lower Saxony, who modeled for his nudes. She would support her husband and his art all her life in a selfless manner.

A SPECIAL FACET: WACKER AS A READER AND WRITER

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 artistic ideas and the events of his time. In meticu- lous 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 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 the artist. In his self-portraits, he played through the nuances of his mood, tirelessly varied his artistic means and created increasingly complex compositions, in which he cited his own works and repeated certain groups of mo- tifs. Additionally, he intently explored questions of sexuality and corporeality. Drawing analogies between the creative artistic process and the sexual act of procreation, he described his worldview as “sexualistic”, believing that the “sexual” aspect was central to life, with “everything” geared towards it and “everything” coming from it.

“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

While Wacker started to paint oil paintings from around 1922, he considered his 1924 Self-Portrait with Shaving Foam to be his first fully valid work in oil, which he deemed worthy of being included in his catalogue raisonné. During these initial years, his painting style, which was dominated by powerful colors and dynamic compositions, can still be described as expressive. In the early 1920s, he first made dolls the protagonists of his paintings. Placed into his compositions alongside everyday objects, they appear on first glance to enter into relationships with each other, while, in fact, they remain unrelated and thus provide playful metaphors for interpersonal relationships. In the 1930s, Wacker once again chose dolls to express his ideological criticism of National Socialism, along with his feelings of powerlessness, in his drawings and lithographs: Rendering them as puppets deprived of their rights or as subtle resistance fighters, his naked, sexualized and explicitly female bodies of dolls, with dislocated joints, empty gazes and rugged faces, refer to a world under existential threat from the fascist zeitgeist.

Wacker’s relationship with his hometown of Bregenz, picturesquely situated on Lake Constance, was ambivalent all his life. On the one hand, it was a safe and familiar haven, both economically and in terms of the closeness to his family, on the other, he suffered from the provincial narrowness and hostile local art critics. However, Wacker wholeheartedly embraced the area’s scenic surroundings – time and again, he captured ostensibly idyllic land- scapes. Unlike his colleagues, including Gustav Wunderwald and Albert Birkle, he entirely factored out life in modern metropolises in his work. Wacker leveled subtle criticism at the increasing brutalization of society by incorporating withered branches, peeling plaster or neglected backyards in his landscapes.

NEW OBJECTIVITY AND WACKER’S “MAGICAL REALITY”

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 emancipated, modern “New Woman” are entirely absent from his oeuvre – as well as self-portraits which depict the artist as a fashionable “New Man” and artist. Another core theme of his art was the world of everyday, often unheeded objects. The artist had a particular feel for the nature of things, and knew how to elevate them with symbolic meaning in his deceptively realistic depictions. He used forms, colors and textures to intensify the perception of the objects.

ENCRYPTED “PORTRAITS OF OBJECTS” AND NUDES OF RESISTANCE

Finally, the exhibition shines the spotlight on Wacker’s encrypted still lifes – his “portraits of objects”, as he called them. Through the isolation of things, he allowed for the abysses of reality to shine through in a subversive and subtle manner in these unparalleled renderings. Naive children’s drawings, cacti in a variety of forms, flowers and toys, taxidermied animals and Gothic sculptures feature in Wacker’s mysterious series of the 1930s, with his complex compositions often conveying hidden messages.

After his unsuccessful application for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 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’ ever stricter censorship and martial soldiers’ cult.

Throughout the last years of his life prior to his untimely death, Wacker became increasingly resigned in view of the political situation, and retreated into the private sphere and into nature. 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