PAUL MEISSNER (Vienna 1907 - 1983 Vienna), On the Terrace, around 1948

PAUL MEISSNER*
(Vienna 1907 - 1983 Vienna)
On the Terrace, around 1948
oil/canvas, 80,5 x 60,3 cm
monogrammed PM
Provenance: private property Vienna

ESTIMATE °€ 3.000 - 4.000
START € 3.000

Austrian painter of the 20th century. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts with Ferdinand Andri, 1934 and 1935 studied in Italy with Giorgio de Chirico and Upaldo Oppi. Member and long-time president of the Vienna Secession. Member of the Darmstadt Secession and the Graz Secession. In 1948 was commissioned by the city council of culture Viktor Matejka his most famous painting the miracle team, depicting the Austrian national soccer team. Initially neoclassical style, development between cubism, symbolism and realism. Themes such as questions of the meaning of life, Golgotha images and Hiroshima cycle, nudes. From 1960s dissolution of forms and turn to abstract painting.

Paul Meissner's painting "On the Terrace" presents itself as mysterious and fascinating at the same time. Here Meissner not only juggles with various traditional iconographic motifs, but also processes the most diverse stylistic influences. At first glance, this juxtaposition of female nudes and the bourgeois appearance of a pipe-smoking bald man reminds us of painted balcony scenes in the oeuvre of the French impressionist Edouard Manet. This impression is underscored by the faded-in section of the facade with the large balcony windows. The juxtaposition of the model presenting himself naked and the mature man is familiar to us from the classic relationship between painter and model, but here there is no indication of artistic activity on the part of the man. There is only an open book in front of him. Meissner's style of painting reveals a stylistic indecisiveness: while he approaches the new-objective sharpness of observation in the modeling of the slim, naked female figure, the dog painted in as a motif axis between her and the man sitting at the round table, which draws attention to the nude, could also be by Max Beckmann or Lovis Corinth. Meissner also remained true to this stylistic flexibility in his late work, in which he worked on the possibilities of abstraction. In doing so, he remains true to the principle of permanent style change – from Impressionism to Realism, Symbolism, Expressionism and New Objectivity to Abstraction. As former President of the Vienna Secession, which he was for five periods between 1954 and 1975, Meissner undoubtedly got to know the most diverse and respectively leading style fashions and probably also tested their adaptability for his own painting work, which at the beginning of his artistic career was still exclusively in figurative or figurative images is expressed. From 1925, Meissner acquired the painting technique at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he completed the General School and the Master School under Ferdinand Andri. From 1934 he continued his education in Italy with Ubaldo Oppi and Giorgio de Chirico. In 1969 he also had a very personal argument for turning to abstraction: "I belong to the generation that began to paint abstractly because they saw the human grimace unveiled and no longer wanted to depict it."

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