Collection: Art prints by Anton Faistauer

Anton Faistauer was an Austrian painter and is considered one of the most idiosyncratic and important figures of Austrian modernism in the early 20th century - an artist whose work occupied an independent, unmistakable position between the legacy of the Viennese fin de siècle and the impulses of the European avant-garde and whose significance for Austrian painting of his generation was long underestimated. He was born in 1887 in Sankt Martin near Lofer in Salzburg and received his artistic training at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where, together with Oskar Kokoschka and other young artists, he belonged to that rebellious generation of students who turned against the academic conventions of their training and sought new paths influenced by European modernism. This early connection to Kokoschka and the Viennese avant-garde had a lasting influence on his development, even if he soon embarked on an independent path that set him apart from the expressionist extremes of his companions.

Early on, Faistauer developed a pictorial language that could not be fully assigned to either pure Expressionism or the Decorativism of Art Nouveau, but rather followed a third path: a painterly, sensual, richly colored and structurally well thought-out art that took up the achievements of Cézanne and French Modernism and combined them with an Austrian sensibility. It was not the emotional explosion or spiritual abstraction that interested him, but the painterly substance itself - the quality of the brushstroke, the depth and luminosity of the color, the sculptural persuasiveness of the form. This attitude lent his work a seriousness of craftsmanship and a sensual immediacy that set it apart from many of his contemporaries.

From the 1910s onwards, Faistauer established himself as one of the striking personalities of Austrian artistic life. A central feature of his mature work is the combination of figurative painting and coloristic intensity. His portraits, nudes and figure compositions in particular, as well as his landscapes from the Salzburg region, are among the most impressive achievements of Austrian painting of his generation: they combine a robust, impasto painting style, a warm and differentiated color palette and a keen sense of composition and spatial effect to create pictures of genuine painterly substance and lasting quality. His frescoes for the Salzburg Festival Hall in particular, which he executed in the early 1920s, bear witness to his ambition to bring the painterly tradition of large-scale mural painting into the modern age.

In addition to his work as a painter, Faistauer was a committed author and theorist who articulated his artistic convictions in writings and manifestos and advocated an Austrian modernism that did not merely adopt international avant-garde concepts, but strove for an independent renewal rooted in the Austrian heritage. This cultural-political dimension of his work lends his personality a significance that goes beyond the purely painterly. Anton Faistauer died in Vienna in 1930, aged just forty-two, as a result of a serious illness. Today he is regarded as an important figure of Austrian modernism, whose works are represented in the major Austrian museums and are increasingly gaining the recognition on the art market that corresponds to his painterly quality and his art-historical significance as a mediator between Viennese tradition and European modernism.