Collection: Art prints by Marie Egner

Marie Egner is one of the most remarkable and independent personalities in Austrian painting around 1900 - and at the same time one of those women artists whose importance has long been underestimated and marginalized by art history, not least because she worked as a woman in an art industry that systematically disadvantaged women and made it difficult for them to gain access to academic training and institutional recognition.

Born in Bad Radkersburg in Styria in 1850, Egner found her way to painting with remarkable determination despite these obstacles. She received her decisive artistic influence from Emil Jakob Schindler, with whom she studied in the early 1880s and whose atmospheric impressionistic view of landscape she deeply absorbed. However, she did not stop at simply adopting his approach. What she took from Schindler's school she transformed into something decidedly her own: a brighter, more vividly colored and more direct style of painting, closer to French Impressionism than the subdued mood of many of her Austrian contemporaries.

What distinguishes Egner's work above all is the range of her motifs and the freshness with which she approached them. Garden scenes in radiant summer light, park landscapes in spring green, flower still lifes of great coloristic luminosity, quiet river courses and rural views of Styria and the Salzkammergut populate her oeuvre. Her garden paintings in particular are among the most impressive produced by Austrian painting of this period: They combine observation of light, joy of color and an unsentimental directness to create works of lasting quality.

Stylistically, she is certainly somewhere between Mood Impressionism and a brighter colorism influenced by French Modernism. Her brushwork is lively and self-confident, her color palette warmer and more luminous than that of many of her contemporaries, her compositions open and airy. At the same time, she never loses the sense of mood and atmosphere that distinguishes her work from merely decorative Impressionism, despite its brightness.

During her lifetime, Egner was active in the Viennese art scene, exhibited and found recognition among collectors. However, she only received the art-historical recognition her work deserved hesitantly and in fragments. Only in recent decades, in the course of a broader re-evaluation of female modern artists, has Marie Egner received the attention she deserves. Today, she is considered one of the most important painters of Austrian Mood Impressionism, whose work, with its combination of atmospheric sensitivity, coloristic power and painterly freedom, occupies an independent and indispensable place in the art history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.