VIENNA.- This fall of 2017, the Leopold Museum is hosting an extensive exhibition of works by Austrian artist Anton Kolig (1886–1950). This is the first comprehensive retrospective of Kolig’s work to be held in Vienna in 50 years. The Leopold Museum houses over 20 paintings of this significant artist. The exhibition, featuring all together 60 paintings and 50 works on paper, is curated by Franz Smola, Collections Curator at the Leopold Museum.

Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Artistic Director of the Leopold Museum, in his introduction in the exhibition catalog writes: “In the fall of 1948 the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, organized the first comprehensive exhibition of Anton Kolig.… Nearly seventy years after this memorable exhibition at the Vienna Academy, the Leopold Museum is, once more, organizing a comprehensive retrospective of Anton Kolig’s works. The Leopold Museum is especially well placed to host such an exhibition, as it houses the most comprehensive collection of works by the artist assembled in a single public institution.”

MAIN EXPONENT OF EARLY AVANT-GARDE
Anton Kolig was one of the main exponents of the early avant-garde prior to 1914 in Austria. His painting oeuvre, characterized by an expressive and dynamic style, marks Kolig as one of the most innovative artists of the first half of the 20th century in Austria. Portraits, still lifes, allegories, and nudes of young men are the preferred themes of his complex body of work.

Franz Smola on this topic in the exhibition catalog: “Kolig developed a complex body of work that forged new paths in the areas of oil painting, drawing, and mural painting. Apart from landscape painting, with which he only marginally dealt, his great creative talent was revealed by his many innovative artistic statements in nearly all other motifs.”

NEUTITSCHEIN – VIENNA – NÖTSCH
Hailing from Neutitschein (Nový Jičín) in Moravia, Anton Kolig attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts from 1904 to 1907. There, his contemporary Oskar Kokoschka was a fellow student. From 1907 to 1912 Anton Kolig studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he met the artists Sebastian Isepp and Franz Wiegele who hailed from Nötsch, located in the Gailtal, Carinthia. In 1911 he married Katharina, the sister of fellow student Franz Wiegele, and subsequently moved to his wife’s hometown. Along with painter colleagues Sebastian Isepp and Franz Wiegele, who also lived in Nötsch, and later joined by Kolig‘s pupil Anton Mahringer, Kolig was one of the important artists working in Nötsch – a group which subsequently became known as the Nötscher Kreis, or Nötsch Circle.

NEUKUNSTGRUPPE
In 1910 Anton Kolig became a member of the Neukunstgruppe founded by Egon Schiele, and participated with the group for the first time during their second exhibition at the German Artist Club in Prague. The poster for the exhibition was designed by Kolig. In 1911 he took part in the legendary special exhibition for painting and sculpture (Sonderausstellung Malerei und Plastik) organized by the Neukunstgruppe at the Hagenbund, and once more drafted the exhibition poster. Further participation in the Neukunstgruppe followed, with presentations in 1912 at the Művészház in Budapest, the spring exhibition of the Hagenbund, and the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne.

RESIDENCY IN FRANCE
Between 1912 and 1914, Anton Kolig and Franz Wiegele lived in Paris and western and southern France. The financial support for the residency was made possible by the foundation of the Fröhlich sisters and was facilitated by the co-founder of the Secession, the painter and gallerist Carl Moll. The foundation was established by Franz Grillparzer’s life partner, Katharina Fröhlich, with the goal of supporting the arts and sciences. Due to the outbreak of the First World War, Kolig had to hastily return to Austria in August of 1914. Many of Kolig’s works were left behind and remain missing to this day.

WAR ARTIST AND PORTRAITIST
Starting in 1916 Kolig worked as a war painter, although he was not formally assigned to the Imperial Austrian war press office until August of 1917. As part of his duties he had to document combat situations – a task not particularly suited to Kolig’s artistic aspirations. Instead, he preferred to render portraits of officers and soldiers. During the last year of the war in 1918, Kolig’s relationship with Egon Schiele intensified. Kolig joined Schiele‘s „Sonderbund österreichische Künstler,“ founded in the autumn of 1918, and was a member of it until its dissolution in 1932. In addition to numerous portraits of soldiers, Kolig also created portraits of prominent Viennese society personalities, such as the journalist and writer Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps, who maintained a large salon. Her sister Sophie was married to Paul Clemenceau, president of Paris Dynamit Nobel AG and brother of the later French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau. The portrait of Marie Gutheil- Schoder, a celebrated opera singer, was painted in 1923 and is, undoubtedly, a highlight of Kolig‘s portraiture.

Franz Smola on this topic in the exhibition catalog: “For Anton Kolig, the portrait represented a genre that followed him continuously throughout his career as an artist, and was one he always held in very high esteem. Particularly in the early 1920s, Kolig consistently received orders to portray prominent figures from Viennese society. He was, for instance, unabashedly proud of his works depicting those from the opera scene and aristocracy.”

EXHIBITION PARTICIPATION AND PROFESSORSHIP IN STUTTGART
During the 1920s and 1930s, Kolig developed a strong presence in the Austrian exhibition scene. Kolig also participated in numerous international exhibitions such as in Italy (Venice Biennale 1922, 1932, 1934), the Netherlands (The Hague, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, 1927/28), the USA (Pittsburgh, 1929/30; Baltimore, 1930, 1932; New York, 1933), and Germany (Munich, 1931; Berlin, 1935; Stuttgart, 1936; among others). In 1928, Kolig was appointed to the Württemberg Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, where he worked as professor. He was one of a few Austrian artists of his generation to hold a professorship abroad. The actual opportunities, however, for artistic development and the potential to garner prominent commissions remained far below his expectations. Julia Müller, in her contribution to the exhibition catalog, thoroughly examines Kolig’s Stuttgart period.

Julia Müller, from the exhibition catalog: “Kolig dreamed of the wide world and by no means imagined himself in provincial Stuttgart, which at this time was no longer the home of the artistic avant-garde. He saw the city as a springboard to Munich or Berlin.”

MALE NUDES AND FAMILY PORTRAITS
An important motif in Kolig’s oeuvre is that of the male nude figure. The depictions range from ancient idealizations and heroic poses such as in Large Nude with Mirror (1926), to allegorical allusions such as Youth and Cupid (1911), to the masterful capture of the figure’s three-dimensional appearance as is particularly apparent in his drawings. The nudes seem to be frequently imbued with a melancholic or contemplative mien, such as in Seated Youth (“In the Morning”) from 1919 or Longing from 1921. In a large and unfinished painting, his nude models form a quasi-extended spiritual family of the artist; the piece is entitled The Painter Family (c. 1933).

Otmar Rychlik, from the exhibition catalog: “Kolig lived in Nötsch longing for almost monastic seclusion, while keeping his eyes open at the same time for opportunities to further his reputation in metropolitan contexts and in the world at large; he saw himself as a loner, yet he was also desperately in need of intellectual exchange to thrive; he envisaged for himself an ideal role as teacher that was impossible to realize given the general disillusionment of the post-war era; he clung tenaciously to a more successful past and abhorred the prevalent zeitgeist, at the same time progressive and in hock to tradition, plucky and given to depressive brooding, easy to inflame and quick to take offence; he loved his family and felt attracted to young men, whom he rendered in thousands of nude life drawings.”

Kolig also had a large family of his own. His wife, Katharina, had given him five children: daughters Marie Antoinette, Dulla, Traut, and Sybilla, and a son, Thaddäus. They were often used as models for his paintings, including The Artist’s Family in 1928 and The Artist‘s Daughter Antonia with Fur (unfinished) in 1930.

NATIONAL SOCIALIST SHENANIGANS
In 1929 Anton Kolig was asked to execute a series of frescoes in the grand hall of the Klagenfurt statehouse, which was to be his most important public commission. The paintings, however, were destroyed in 1938/39 by the National Socialists. Kolig’s artistic work did not meet with National Socialist’s art dictation. The now-missing painting Blue Youth (“In the Evening”), 1917, which Alfred Flechtheim sold to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 1932, was confiscated from the Stuttgart Museum in 1937. On the other hand, however, Kolig’s works were included in exhibitions of Austrian art in Paris and Bern during the same year.

STROKE OF FATE
Toward the end of the Second World War, in December 1944, Anton and Katharina Kolig were buried alive during an air raid on Nötsch. They survived with serious injuries, and their house was destroyed during the attack. Kolig’s brother-in-law, friend, and artist colleague Franz Wiegele was killed during the attack, along with many more members of the Wiegele family. The following years for Kolig were marked by serious physical ailments.

LATE WORKS AND EARLY RETROSPECTIVES
During the last years of his life, despite being burdened by serious war injuries, Anton Kolig was able to bring about a new artistic language focusing attention on the power of color. Starting in 1946 he worked on designs for a stained glass window for the western portal of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. As he had not received a commission, the design was never implemented. Encouraged by the gallerist Friedrich Welz, Kolig had worked since 1937 on designs for the Iron Curtain at the Salzburg Festival Hall. By 1948, the work was well underway, but ultimately would not be executed due to the death of the artist. During the same year, Welz organized the first comprehensive exhibition of Kolig’s works and published a first monograph of the artist’s works. The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Künstlerhaus in Klagenfurt also organized significant retrospectives in 1948. Anton Kolig, who suffered considerably during the last years of his life and for whom walking was severely impaired, died in 1950 due to the aftereffects of injuries sustained during the air raid. He was buried in the cemetery of the Church at Saak near Nötsch.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF ANTON KOLIG’S COMPLETE OEUVRE
Kolig developed a complex body of work that forged new paths in the areas of oil painting, drawing, and mural painting. While his work was initially marked by a painterly and dynamic expressionism that took its starting point in the art of Paul Cézanne, his work in the 1920s and 1930s was mainly shaped by an emphasis on graphic and three-dimensional forms. In his later years, Kolig brought the power of color to the center of his work. For the first time in many decades, the exhibition at the Leopold Museum offers the opportunity to get to know Kolig‘s work in all its facets and to engage with it in an in-depth manner.

Hans-Peter Wipplinger, from the exhibition catalog: “The exhibition at the Leopold Museum … lays claim to once again unite all of Anton Kolig’s major works. In particular, the exhibition brings together parallel or similar versions and motifs which have been either rarely or never seen together…. The two large self-portraits from the 1920s, one from the Carinthian Museum of Modern Art and the one from the Leopold Museum (from the years 1923 and 1926, respectively) will also be seen together in an exhibition for the first time in a long while.”

Curator: Franz Smola