Universalmuseum Joanneum Press office

Universalmuseum Joanneum [email protected] Mariahilferstraße 4, 8020 , 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 . 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 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. He has left the depressive mood of Graz behind in this series of paintings; Paris is seen in familiar terms through a bright palette of colours. By 1931 the political and also the economic situation in Austria was becoming ever more precarious, this was a reason why Wilhelm Thöny moved to Paris with the aim of promoting his career. He lived in a hotel on the Quai Voltaire with a view of the Notre Dame. In addition to his cityscapes he accepted portrait commissions from elegant Parisian society ladies and gentlemen. He spent the autumn on the Côte d’Azur, where thoroughly impressed by the light and the colours, he changed not only his palette, but his characteristic style too and with this the pictures that he painted. His letters in this period bear witness to a continuing interest in Munch and Kubin, with whom he maintained a long and friendly correspondence, but also of his admiration for Van Gogh and Cézanne, both of whom had also been inspired by the Côte d’Azur at an earlier period.

Page 4

Portraits Wilhelm Thöny painted portraits in every creative period of his life. In Munich the subjects were artists’ models, during the First World War heroic soldiers, and in subsequent years, people of the society in which he moved. In his self-portraits he often appears as an elegant gentleman in a tail coat and top hat, his wife accompanies him in an elegant dress, totally different to the androgynous style favoured as modern in artist circles from the 1920s. Thöny’s double motif of two men in top hats has frequently generated speculation in the literature about an alter ego; he also portrayed people whom he respected or found interesting without having a commission: these included the celebrated conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, whom he saw and heard at the Paris Opera, or writers such as Theodor Däubler or Julius Meier-Graefe and the artists Picasso and Raoul Dufy, society ladies from the milieu in which he moved or historical figures such as Napoleon. The honour he was accorded and at the same time extraordinarily difficult task of painting the French Cardinal Jean Verdier, was a commission he obtained through the Austrian embassy in Paris. It was intended as a gift for the Austrian Cardinal Theodor Innitzer and as a defence of Austrian independence through a clerical axis.

Cyclic works His red chalk drawings cycle on the French Revolution, illustrations to Carlyle’s extensive historical book represent a peak in his drawing work. The nervous lines in this work are a close examination of the people presented showing them in all their drivenness and inner conflicts; it is a cycle of a dimension that rises above a mere historical event. Beyond heroic pathos a great deal is left vague and uncertain here. His sketch-like ink drawings on the subject of Jeanne d’Arc were also produced in Paris; they show her beginnings as a shepherdess, scenes from her life and her fateful end, but there is nothing of her victories. This work is also to be interpreted as universally applicable examination of relationships rather than as a realistic presentation of historical events.

In the south Every year from 1932 to 1937 Thöny spent several weeks on the Côte d’Azur, where he painted Marseille, Toulon, Bandol and many landscapes in numerous canvases, drawings and prima vista water colours. The quality of the light and the glowing colours of the region brought a lighter quality to his palette and work. Sanary-sur-Mer was for Thöny a “paradise of colour”, moreover the town was very popular among British, Austrian and German artists and writers during the 1930s. The caricaturist Eva Herrmann, who was his sister-inlaw, was a familiar figure in the circle of intellectuals who had fled the Nazis as emigrants; these included the family of Thomas Mann, Bert Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger or Franz Werfel.

New York/Paris In summer 1933 Thöny travelled to New York for the first time to visit his daughter, and to meet the family of his companion in life Thea Herrmann-Trautner in Elberon/New Jersey. Deeply impressed by this encounter with the world metropolis, it inspired many oil paintings and water colours painted after his return to Paris. Unique cityscapes of skyscrapers were created, reflecting his overwhelming enthusiasm on first arrival at Ellis Island. His most famous pictures of the city on the opposite side of the Atlantic were painted from memory and from sketches in a painting style reminiscent of Impressionism. His New York works approximate those of Paris in terms of style, with the real background melting into transfigured memory. Page 5

Paris Gambetta The French Minister Léon Gambetta fled from Paris when it was besieged by the Germans in 1870 by balloon, a flight subject that Thöny frequently used in his pictures. In March 1938, as Hitler marched into Austria, Thöny and Thea, to whom he was now married and who was both an American citizen and Jewish, were on board a liner on their way to New York. He never openly attacked National Socialism, but in the illustrations to his letters in the so-called scrap-book for his father-in-law Frank S. Herrmann and in the texts of his letters, especially those to Kubin, he was a decisively critical anti-fascist. He did not take flight, but he avoided the growing political pressures in good time. One year earlier, and despite his awareness of the fate of many colleague artists stigmatised by the Nazis as “degenerated”, Thöny had applied to participate in the large exhibition of German art approved by the National Socialists and had failed only as a result of the bureaucratic effort involved.

New York He rapidly found his way among artists and the dazzlingly modern society of New York thanks to the Herrmann family, but this entry proved to be only a partial compensation for the isolation he felt as a European and his yearning for Graz. He lived in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel on the 16th floor, took part from New York in numerous exhibitions across the USA, but he no longer rented an atelier since he was now frequently weak as a result of illness. He had his work stored in a warehouse, the building burned down on the 4th of March 1948. He spread the report about this disaster that hundreds of his graphic works and paintings had been destroyed in the fire, and that a major part of his life’s work had been lost. It was a severe blow of fate and coupled with his worries about news of losses of his paintings in Europe, it was one from which he was not to recover and he died on May 1st 1949. The few surviving paintings of this period suffer from a loss of atmospheric feel, the light touch of the French coast has vanished and the later New York cityscapes, or portraits of New York society people recall the appeal of naïve painting, or are reminiscent of advertisements in their stiff and strident effect. Historic personalities, who appear to have been role models for him, also appear in his later work. He discovers America as Christopher Columbus meeting the natives who live there and whom he portrays on a basis of equality and without further ado labels them as Indians.

His place in Austrian painting The title of this exhibition “Wilhelm Thöny – Under the Spell of Modernism” is a reference to the visionary strength of an artist who consistently developed an oeuvre as his life’s work through a continuous involvement with the advanced movements in art during the first half of the 20th century, while also maintaining an unbroken dialogue with nature. Thöny’s art is characterized by its modernity in form and the use of colour. He stood aside from the international trend to abstraction, stubbornly persisting with the classic canon of the nude, the still life, portraits, landscapes and society life. Wilhelm Thöny was a moderate among the artists, open to modernism but never a fighter or a member of the avant-garde. He sought out the middle path among all the avant-garde movements, a course he found from the start of his career in the Munich Neue Secession and continued later in Graz. “Within a period of only twelve years I experienced Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Neoexpressionism, , Primitivism and New Objectivity …”, Wilhelm Thöny wrote. He was an artist whose modernism was urbane, but by no means revolutionary, international in character and influence, but nevertheless highly personal. Thöny was a nomadic cosmopolitan, who throughout his life Page 6

lived only in hotels, and was thus in a certain sense homeless. As a result of this polyglot life style he was one of the few Austrian artists who was to some extent familiar with the international network of modernism and to have had direct personal contact with it. An individualist, Wilhelm Thöny remained a lone wolf throughout his life, with a consistent yearning for his hometown Graz.