ANTON FAISTAUER (St. Martin bei Lofer 1887 - 1930 Vienna), Design for a Poster, 1917

ANTON FAISTAUER
(St. Martin bei Lofer 1887 - 1930 Vienna)
Design for a Poster, 1917
pastel/paper, 27,5 x 21 cm
dated Sept 1917
design for a poster for the austrian exhibition in the Liljevachs-Art Gallery, 1917
Provenance: collection Gusel Austria, private property Vienna

ESTIMATE °€ 1.500 - 3.000
START € 1.000

Austrian painter of the 20th century. Considered the most important Salzburg painter of modernism. 1904 to 1906 at the private painting school of R. Scheffers, 1906 to 1909 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Alois Delug and Christian Griepenkerl. 1909 together with Egon Schiele, Anton Kolig, Robin Christian Andersen udn Franz Wiegele founded the Neukunstgruppe. Exhibitions at the Kunstsalon Pisko, in Budapest, Munich and in Vienna at the Hagenbund. 1913 Marries Robin Christian Andersen's sister, in the same year exhibits at the Miehtke Gallery. 1919 in Salzburg with Felix A. Harta founding of the artist group Wassermann. Design of the frescoes for the Salzburg Festspielhaus. Intensive study of the works of Paul Cezanne, development of a moderate Expressionism. Created mainly landscapes, still lifes and portraits. Designed the poster for the 1917 exhibition of Austrian art at Liljevalchs Kunsthalle in Stockholm, Sweden. Exhibited there alongside Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Anton Hanak as the main representatives of the Austrian moeder. The design shows a simplified version of a portrait of his wife Ida.

At the end of August 1917, a train journey lasting several days brought six travelers from Vienna to the capital of neutral Sweden, a playground for agents, reformers and revolutionaries and a few weeks earlier the scene of the Peace Conference of the Second International, which had remained ineffective. The tour group consisted of key protagonists of the Austrian art scene: Albin Egger-Lienz, Anton Faistauer, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Anton Hanak. Under the guidance of the architect Josef Hoffmann, the artists worked from September 3rd to 6th on the construction of the "Österrikisk Konstutställning", consisting of approx. 650 exhibits, which is scheduled to open on September 8th in the new Liljevalchs Konsthall for contemporary art and is part of a "Austrian Week” with readings, concerts and fashion shows. This largely forgotten charm offensive by the young Emperor Karl's government was intended to show that Austria had lost none of its creative power despite the war. The propaganda show was organized by Karl Bittner, commercial attaché of the Austro-Hungarian Embassy, originally not on behalf of the k. u.k. (“imperial and royal”, referring to the Habsburgs dual monarchy Austria-Hungary) Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but of the k. u.k. Ministry of War, or the War Press Quarters. Organization and selection of the works of art were entrusted to Josef Hoffmann. After an initial wrangling over competences between civil and military authorities, the project was finally handed over completely to civilian hands through Bittner's mediation. In order to save face, the War Ministry put forward the much-invoked Austro-Hungarian parity as the alleged reason. Anton Faistauer was entrusted with designing the exhibition poster. The final version, a lithograph, shows a young woman in a high-necked dress, seated, in semi-profile, her hands resting loosely on her thighs. She looks serious but confident. Faistauer's design comes very close to the end result; except that the dress is blue instead of red and the woman bows her head shyly. Faistauer has not yet completely mastered the draft of the Swedish text. It simply doesn't fit all the letters of "ÖSTERRIKISK KONSTUTSTÄLLNING i Liljevachs-Konsthall". He blurred the word "SEPTEMBER" and thus already corrected it to the final "SEPT". The daily opening hours will be shortened to “10 a.m. – 4 a.m.”. The bourgeois simplicity of the seated female figure and the poster design as a whole are an example of the conflict between civil society and the military power that was becoming increasingly apparent in the penultimate year of the war, as well as the longing for peace of the population oppressed by the war. Faistauer's pastel drawing is a fascinating historical document of this little-known major cultural and political offensive of the tottering empire.

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