Wilhelm Thöny Under the Spell of Modernism
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Universalmuseum Joanneum Press office Universalmuseum Joanneum [email protected] Mariahilferstraße 4, 8020 Graz, Austria Telephone +43-316/8017-9211 www.museum-joanneum.at Wilhelm Thöny Under the Spell of Modernism Accompanying booklet Wilhelm Thöny is considered to be a pioneer of modernism in Styria. He returned to his native Graz in 1923 – after his student years in Munich, the time of the First World War and a period spent in Switzerland – and was a co-founder and the first president of the Graz Sezession. The pressures of political turmoil and an ardent wish for an international career lay behind his move to Paris, the Côte d’Azur and subsequently to New York, where he spent most of his life residing in hotels. Graz as the city of his roots was nevertheless to remain the constant focus of his interest, nostalgia and yearning throughout his life. The beginnings Wilhelm Thöny was born in Graz on February 10th 1888. He grew up in a prosperous family with a pronounced interest in the arts and a home at Grieskai 16. He was educated at the k.k. Staatsrealschule, while at home he had free reign for his artistic leanings, he studied playing the piano and singing. Following his somewhat delayed school certificate examinations Wilhelm Thöny left for Munich in 1908, where he studied painting, followed the activities of the Munich Neue Secession with the greatest interest and found a second home among the Schwabing bohemians. He worked with dedication above all on painting portraits and nudes and soon received his first commissions for book illustrations. He met his first wife, the American Hilma White, in Munich and he also met many artist colleagues here including Alfred Weisgerber, with whom he shared an interest in the work of August Macke. The First World War interrupted this carefree student existence. War artist He volunteered to serve with an infantry regiment in Graz on August 14th 1915 and was classed as fit for the front. In 1916 he attended the reserve officer training school in Mürzzuschlag, and was commissioned after one year as a lieutenant. He was employed as a regimental painter and was sent to the Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war camps where he produced portraits of the Italian, Albanian, Romanian, Serbian and Greek POWs. In 1917 he was sent to the Italian front. He painted realistic portraits of officers, presenting them as indestructible war-lords of iron manliness. His battle pictures too, based on small sketches, which he later transferred to large formats in his atelier, were painted in terms of the official regimental history rather than on actual experience of war. These pictures served propaganda purposes and as suitable decoration for the officers’ messes, where heroes were in greater demand than the horrors of war. Thöny also side-stepped the cruel realities of war in the military charity postcards he produced, strategic glorifications of military life, which were sold to raise funds for the widows and orphans of men who had been killed. Thöny applied without success for a position as one of the Page 2 artists in the war press bureau, despite the fact that his work as a war artist was entirely in line with propaganda requirements and he was both popular and successful in the army. His war pictures were exhibited in Graz in 1917. Motivated and committed, he absolutely met the official requirements for his job, and it was only years later that the appalling trauma of the war struck him with full force. Swiss period When the war ended Thöny first returned to Munich, he had married and had a daughter Margit. From 1919 to 1922 Thöny lived in Switzerland, where he moved to escape the political unrest of the Bavarian Soviet republic and personal differences with Neue Secession artist colleagues. It was the country where his American wife and his daughter had spent the last war years. The family lived in hotels in Lucerne and Beatenberg bei Interlaken, and thus adopted a lifestyle typical for the 1920s. Few biographical details have been recorded about this period. In his letters, however, Thöny describes the enormous psychological stress from which he suffered. The realities of the war first became apparent to him in Switzerland. In this phase he turned increasingly to religious subjects, above all Passion scenes. He sees in Christ the symbol of suffering endured. Thöny suffered from appalling memories and terrifying images and decades later he describes the war years as the worst period in his life. Nevertheless, even in later years he had an unbroken interest in military leaders such as Napoleon, or the heroine Jeanne d’Arc. Historical distance allowed him to confront the supposedly glorious violent scenes of European history. His marriage fell apart and his family left for America in 1922. The Book of Dreams During this difficult period for Thöny he produced a collection of some 100 graphic works for his “Book of Dreams” between 1919 and 1920, which in some of his sketches he also titles “Dreams and Grotesques” or as “Cirque”. It is thought that these were a commission of the publisher Georg Müller in Munich and that they were intended as book illustrations for a literary text. This work sheds light once again on his flight from reality, his withdrawal into an inner world, which has been turned to nightmare by the failure of his marriage, the landscape of the Swiss Alps and dark memories of the war years. Wilhelm Thöny had already received commissions as an illustrator during his Munich years, and later he also received commissions from the magazines “Jugend” and “Querschnitt”, as also from Klaus Mann’s exile publication “Decision” and these represent an important part of his graphic output. Graz In 1922 he lived once again briefly in Munich, but his economic situation forced him to return to Graz, the city of origins, in August 1923. Here he established the Graz Sezession taking the Munich Secession as a model together with the artists Axl Leskoschek, Fritz Silberbauer, Hanns Wagula and Alfred Wickenburg among others, and he was elected the first president. Thöny presented Swiss landscapes as expressive drawings and water colours at the first exhibition of this group. Once again he found himself at home in the social round of an artist’s life, while he was also developing his own personal style as a painter. Thea Herrmann-Trautner, the daughter of the wealthy Jewish American painter Frank S. Herrmann, whom he had met in Munich, joined him as his life-long companion in Graz in 1925. He worked in an atelier at Lenaugasse 5 close to the Hilmteich and lived in the Hotel Wiesler, where from 1927 the Graz Sezession met for their legendary five o’clock teas and it was here that their annual artists’ ball was also held. The years Page 3 in Graz were a great success, and looking back from exile in New York he saw this period in a thoroughly nostalgic light and regarded it as a happy period in his life. Nevertheless he began to work increasingly in Munich from 1928, since his applications for a teaching post at the Styrian Academy of Art were all rejected and he began to look for wider career opportunities than were possible in a Graz that was largely hostile to modernism in art. He continued to organize regular exhibitions for the Graz Sezession until 1931, and also promoted lectures, readings and concerts while he also led a very active social life in the city. He received numerous public commissions, such as those for the Chamber of Labour, the Chamber of Commerce, the Thalia and the Operncafé and he was a committed proponent of art in public spaces, for example in the moving of the Marian column, but above all in demanding a centre for the arts, the Künstlerhaus, in the Stadtpark. The landscapes and Graz cityscapes he painted in this period include a number of recognizable motifs, but topographical precision was far less of a priority for him than the capturing of mood. His style of the period was oriented on Edvard Munch. His painting is a reflection of his inner psychic landscape, which in contrast to his brilliantly sparkling social life – appears to have been dark and depressive. He left Graz in September 1931 and moved to Paris, a city he had visited for the first time two years earlier and from where he had returned bubbling over with new impressions and with numerous sketches. He had no notion in 1931 that he would never see Graz again. Beethoven Wilhelm Thöny possessed an extraordinary musical talent; he played the piano and had a trained voice as a singer. Music was of great importance in his life, and in his Munich days he had considered accepting an engagement as an opera singer, like his brother later at the Graz Opera. He was fascinated by Ludwig van Beethoven. In 1924 working in his native city of Graz he produced an extensive cycle of drawings on the composer, which was published. Ludwig van Beethoven is seen playing the piano, conducting and composing. From time to time Thöny’s self- perception appears to merge with the great pianist and composer, a subject on which he reflected himself in his essays. It is said that Thöny could play the entire piano repertoire of the master from memory. Paris Thöny produced a number of Paris cityscapes in Graz, either from recollection, or based on his many sketches after his return from the first Paris trip in 1929. These cityscapes are mostly water colours. The images he presents of the French capital use landmarks and famous buildings and are quite precise.