Page 17 - Studio International - December 1965

3
be understood in terms of the person of Fritz Wotruba
and of the exemplary force of his work. Almost every
famous sculptor of the young generation has passed
through his school. They remain connected with his
work even in those cases where they have in the mean­
time gone very different ways. Essentially, the Wotruba
students can be divided into two main streams: the
wave that passed through the Wotruba school in the
fifties (Otto Eder, Josef Pillhofer, Oskar Bottoli,
Rudolf Schwaiger, Wander Bertoni, Alois Heidel and
Rudolf Kedl) and those who went on to individual
developments as what one might call second-genera­
tion sculptors (Joannis Avramidis, Andreas Urteil, Alfred
Czerny, Nausica Pastra, Alfred Hrdlicka, Roland Gosch!,
Erwin Reiter, Alfred Matzke and Franz Anton Coufal).
However many diverse initiatives and partial achieve­
ments one may remark in this connection, in the final
analysis the representational art created by Wotruba is
by and large adhered to. It is true that this leaves a very
considerable latitude of choice. The figure work of
Wotruba, derived from classical ideals, the Urteil and
Reiter end up in complicated baroque multiplicity,
and Avramidis congeals in a premeditated austerity (or
tends to the individualized conception which-with
1
Alfred Hrdlicka Karl Prantl, Rudolf Hoflehner and Wander Bertoni­
Portrait of Oskar Kokoschka respects discipline and strict economy of means).
1963 Bronze
The difference of generation mentioned above may
2
Fritz Wotruba also play its part in this connection. Those who wit­
Figure 1965 nessed the transformation of Wotruba's work, from a
Bronze
constrained, almost archaic statuary to a new con­
3 figuration of cubic forms, accepted and shared this
Wander Bertoni
The ear of Dionysus 1959/64 process-certainly a fundamentally important con­
Wood tributory phase in Wotruba's total creation-and
260 cm. high
followed out the individual possibilities in each case,
without subscribing to the progressively developing
evolutions of the figure with Wotruba. In the traditionally
consecrated poses of standing, sitting, crouching and
lying figures, it is those of Bottoli, Schwaiger, Franz
Fischer, Rudolf Kedl and Heinz Leinfellner that persist.
The harmonizing of experienced physical forms and
their relative generalization lead, as the case may be, to a
squat or to a 'blown-up' effect, to elegance or to the
grotesque. The archaic, a formal fact which so
thoroughly defines the pre-cubic work of Wotruba,
finds in each case its individual interpretation, where
again the most various impulses and preferences based
on temperament intersect. Maria Biljan-Bilger makes
her, for preference polychromed, terracotta dolls in the
manner of primitive cultures, Rudolf Kedl's work seeks
out the special possibilities of soft, dark-green jade, or
the fascinating surface effects of worked copper, while
as painter and sculptor Otto Eder has been led to
strange shapes out of oval and cylindrical elements
characterized by a powerfully emotional, somehow
totem-like atmosphere. For a time Heinz Leinfellner
worked as assistant with Wotruba and in his formally
conceived work is to be seen the latter's struggle with
cubism in the field of an applied architectural sculpture.
Meanwhile, however, Wotruba did not remain at the
point of a relative translation of the human figure to the
simple, colossal and statuesque. His further develop­
ment in the years after 1950 led, in the completely
personal coming to grips with the form concepts of
cubism (as is reflected in the comparatively expressive
figure work of the first five years) to a synthesis of
classical ideality and formal absolutism. This develop­
ment took him through the harmonious headstone
figures, subdued to lucid, surveyable proportions, to the
PHOTOS: OTTO BREICHA 221