Page 16 - Studio International - December 1965

The new Austrian sculpture

An Attempt at a Survey by Otto Breicha

In the years immediately preceding and following 1950. 'master class· of the fine arts at the Vienna Academy. It
which were of decisive importance for the new Austrian has in the meantime become plain: the breakthrough
art. something like a new Vienna school of sculpture around 1950 was something more than a 'throw of
came into being. comparable to the Vienna school in Nature·. One cannot speak of a continuation of existing
twelve-tone music that grew up around Arnold Schon­ traditions. precisely because the great Austrian painting
berg in the first quarter of the century. There are many of the beginning of the century, the pictures of a Klimt.
parallels between what crystallized around the per­ Gerst!, Kokoschka or a Schiele. was paralleled in sculp­
sonality of the sculptor Fritz Wotruba after 1945 and the ture only by the singular manifestation of Anton Hanak.
group phenomenon of the Schonberg school. For in Rather. in the fullest sense of the word. a colonization
both cases the stimulus of an epoch-making search took place. And after 1950 an abundant new crop of
after form releases new and more widely-based talent made its appearance in Austrian plastic art. while
developments. In each case the word ·school' implies the later fifties saw the most remarkable personal
the influence of valid. creative solutions rather than a developments and the realization of their individual
strictly academic technique. In neither case is there possibilities by a young generation of sculptors. Such an
blind compulsion. a preconceived principle of repre­ astonishingly sudden upsurge means more than a going
sentation enjoined and accepted. Just as Schonberg to extremes. more than a chance constellation of
broke through to his pioneering innovations first as achievements. it is the sprouting of a spiritual seed
teacher. as a seeker among seekers, so Wotruba in the which. precisely in Vienna in the last ten years. has
Vienna of the first post-war years came to his present found unusually favourable conditions.
wholly personal style after he had already taken over his This completely specific and peculiar blossoming must

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