Self-Confrontation in the Early Works of the Vienna School

In 1956 the late Austrian critic Johann Muschik gave seven Viennese painters a collective identity as the Vienna school of Fantastic Realism. They were Arik Brauer (b. 1929), Ernst Fuchs (b. 1930), Rudolf Hausner (b. 1914), Wolfgang Hutter (b. 1928), Fritz Janschka (b. 1919), Anton Lehmden (b. 1929), and Kurt Stein-wendner (b. 1920). ¹ In the history of postwar European art the Vienna school occupies a chronological niche corresponding to that of the New York school in the United States. Beginning in the mid-1940s, the Fantastic Realists experimented with the Surrealist technique of automatism and skimmed from the lexicon of psychoanalysis theories about the role of the unconscious in the creative process. So too did Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Jackson Pollock, the “myth-makers” among the Abstract Expressionists, but with radically different results (Sandler, 1970, pp. 62–71). Since the inception of the Vienna school during the years following World War II, the meticulous illusionism of the Fantastic Realists has remained constant, the ranks of adherents to the school have swelled, and its geographical boundaries have spread beyond the city limits of Vienna. In America there has been a revival of interest in the figurative painting that was produced contemporaneously with the abstract art of the New York school, and a panoply of variations on what has been called the “new Realism” now coexists with the precision of Photo-Realism and the confrontational force of the Neo-Expressionists. Given this resuscitation of the stubbornly persistent Realist tradition, it is curious that the Vienna school of Fantastic Realism has received relatively little notice in English-language publications. ² The following study of seven emblematic self-images will summarize the genesis of the Vienna school and interpret the distinctive imagery of the founding artists.