Page 23 - Studio International - December 1965

Austrian sculpture

Oswald Oberhuber Lohner and Franz Pohacker work less in the limelight. by and large of less importance. The present improved
Phantasmagoric Figure 1949
Plaster for bronze Alfred Czerny is committed to the Jugendsti/ (and there position may be bound up with the development in the
above all to its Viennese variation). His sculptured first post-war years. when in many respects a clean
Fritz Hartlauer
Analythische Gesam1d1sposit1on 7 portraits. slender figurines and horses tearing along break was made with the Austrian art of the thirties.
1956 take on the strange tense proportionalities characteristic This change, however, in particular in the field of the
30 cm. high
of the early Secessionism. Above all. his dramatically plastic arts, is due to Wotruba. who-as already men­
rearing prone figures. the linear surge. the sensitive tioned- by his example of unlimited creative effort has
leaps and curves. smack of an assimilation of the encouraged and enabled the young generation to
Jugendsti/. Like Czerny. Alfred Hrdlicka also passed develop their own individual creative idioms. A similar
through the ·master school' of Wotruba in the later stimulus is perhaps also to be found in the new English
fifties. only presently to be converted to very different plastic art. which analogously is based on the work of
figure ideals. But by taking the style of a Michelangelo. Henry Moore and still. in its most personal formulations.
Puget and Rodin literally, and extending it into the con­ remains orientated on this pioneering style of sculpture.
temporary. Hrdlicka creates out of the special propor­ On the basis of its fundamental artistic aspiration, a
tions and distortions. pathetic and highly effective situa­ pattern is given in the new Austrian plastic arts in respect
tions. A more-th ,in -life-size sculptured portrait of of how continuity is possible. even within the standards
Kokoschka takes its place among the m:)st important of a thoroughly contemporary vocabulary of form. The
likenesses in contemporary sculpture. The etcher reproach sometimes levelled at Austrian creative art.
Hrdlicka is at least the equal of the sculptor. that it remains in aloof self-sufficiency, has precisely to
That talent and personalities are emerging in the field this extent turned out an advantage. The advance-by
of the new Austrian plastic arts. and the scale of this no means reactionary. but deliberately analytic. difficult
emergence. become very clear in a comparison with the to seduce. following an inner compulsion-from one
circumstances before 1938. Even the years so richly thing to the next (preferring to consummate its exciting
endowed with painters. architects. writers and scientists. transitions beneath the surface of appearances) may,
from 1898 to 1918. can only point to a few sculptors. once more. turn out to be the most fruitful way. ■

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