Collection: Art prints by Anton Romako

Anton Romako was an Austrian painter and is considered one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures of 19th century Austrian art - an artist whose work was so far removed from the framework of contemporary painting that it was barely understood during his lifetime and could only be recognized generations later for what it actually is: a singular oeuvre that is far ahead of its time in its psychological intensity and painterly boldness and is now considered one of the most exciting and idiosyncratic in Austrian art history.

He was born in Atzgersdorf near Vienna in 1832 and initially received his artistic training at the Vienna Academy, where Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller denied him any artistic talent - a judgment that makes the later development of his work appear as one of the great misjudgements in Austrian art history. Unimpressed by this early rejection, Romako continued on his path, studied in Munich under Wilhelm Kaulbach, spent time in Venice, Rome and London and, after his return to Vienna, was a private pupil of Carl Rahl before finally settling in Rome in 1857, where he acquired both a reputation and a fortune as a much sought-after portraitist and genre painter. These Roman years brought him social success and material prosperity, but beneath the smooth surface of his portrait career was an artistic energy that could not come to terms with the conventions of the genre and sought a pictorial language that was deeper and more disturbing than anything demanded by the sophisticated art world of his time.

After his return to Vienna in 1876, this inner tension became increasingly apparent. At the time, the city was dominated by the overwhelming success of Hans Makart, whose decorative, sensual, magnificent paintings dominated the taste of Ringstrasse society - a climate that was highly unfavorable for Romako's increasingly nervous, psychologically charged pictorial language. His painting style developed in a direction that left his contemporaries alienated and repelled. One contemporary critic accused him of tending towards outlandishness through his search for originality in drawing and color treatment - a formulation that unintentionally describes precisely what distinguished Romako's work from that of his contemporaries and what was to make it so significant for later generations. The result was a gradual turning away of the public and an increasing deterioration in his material circumstances. Further study trips to Hungary, Italy and France, where he came into contact with the Barbizon School, among others, whose influences were reflected in his landscape paintings, did little to change this basic situation.

His portraits of the Viennese years in particular are characterized by a psychological penetration that was unparalleled in Austrian painting of his time. The figures do not seem to be simply painted, but illuminated, as if the painter had pushed aside their outer appearance and looked directly into their inner selves. There is a quality in these works that inevitably brings to mind the later Expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka - not as a mere analogy, but as a genuine anticipation. His monumental painting "Tegetthoff in the Naval Battle of Lissa" is one of the most impressive and unusual history paintings in Austrian painting: instead of the expected heroic calm, it shows a scene of nervous energy and psychological tension, in which the admiral appears not as a marble heroic figure, but as a living human being challenged by the situation. The painting was rejected by the public of its time - today it is considered one of the most important Austrian paintings of the 19th century.

Anton Romako died in Vienna in 1889, poor, lonely and almost completely ignored by the art world of his time. The rediscovery only came in the 20th century, when a new eye finally appreciated Romako's painterly boldness. Today he is regarded as one of the most fascinating and pioneering artists of the Ringstrasse era, whose works are preserved in the major Austrian museums and whose psychological depth and painterly radicalism make him a true forerunner of Viennese Modernism - a painter who was so far ahead of his time that it could not see him.