Fantastic (sur)realism by Ernst Fuchs. Fantastic (sur)realism by Ernst Fuchs Ernst fuchs paintings

Ernst Fuchs is one of the most famous representatives of (post)surrealism and fantastic realism, the founder of the so-called Vienna School of fantastic realism. He was friends with Dali, his close friends Hans Rudi Giger (H.R. Giger), Mati Klarwein, Alex Gray (Alex Gray) admired him and considered him their teacher.

He was born in Vienna on February 13, 1930. At the age of 12, I felt that I wanted to be an artist, and at the age of 15 I already entered the art academy, and in my spare time I painted such cute pictures.

Der Puppenschluck

(circa 1945)

Chrucification And Self-Portrait,
With Inge Beside The Cross
(1945)

A Woman's Reflection In A Row
Of Houses
(from the cycle The City)(1946)

(All pictures can be clicked and opened in a large, sometimes very large size)

Of course, Ernst Fuchs was already experiencing the powerful influence of surrealism, which became even stronger later.

Fuchs first saw surrealist paintings “live” at an exhibition in 1947, where he was stunned by the famous “Sad Game” by Salvador Dali. ( “I saw confirmation of what I wanted to achieve.”.)

Die Beweinung des Zwiespaltigen
(1947)

Gutersloh und die Muse
(1947)

The Temptation Of The Victor
(1949)

May Picture
(1949)

Transformations of Flash
(fragment) (1949)

(title unknown)
(circa 1950)

Fuchs later moved to Paris, where he would live for the next 10-plus years, often traveling to Israel and America. There, in 1951, at an exhibition, he first met his idol Salvador Dali. Dali highly appreciated the “terrible”, in his words, works of Fuchs, saying (quite in his own spirit): “You are the German Dali! Well, I am the Spanish Dürer.” Meanwhile, alchemical and religious elements increasingly appear in Fuchs's work, and the images are reminiscent of medieval engravings.

Crucification
(1950)

The Lost Martyrdom
(1950)

Fuchs reads the works of Meister Eckhart, studies alchemical symbolism, and studies “Psychology and Alchemy” by Carl Gustav Jung. This is reflected in his work in the most direct way - as a result, the fusion of crazy surrealism, alchemical symbolism and “medieval” style makes Fuchs’s paintings very similar to the crazy paintings of Bosch. An excellent example is the series of Unicorn drawings, created from 1950 to 1952.

(1950-1952)UNICORN CYCLE

1 - In the Realm of Death

2 - The Artist and the Unicorn

3 - The Procreation (Siring) of the Unicorn

The Spirit of Mercury
(1954)

Satan's Heaven
(1954)

In 1956, Ernst Fuchs converted to the Roman Catholic faith. He studies Catholicism and becomes a church artist, although his works cause violent protests. It is not surprising - in the opinion of the “proletariat”, Fuchs’s paintings are, at best, strange, but rather simply blasphemous. The use of surrealism to illustrate Christian concepts was developed by the same Dali (and if you dig very deep, then by Bosch, although in his time no one had heard of any “surrealism”), but go ahead and explain the symbolism to the “common man” pictures like this...

At this time, a new “visionary” stage begins in the artist’s work, both in the themes of the work and in the technique of execution - but more on that another time.
Oh yes, this is what he looked like at that time:

Ernst Fuchs

Ernst Fuchs is one of the most famous representatives of (post)surrealism and fantastic realism, he was born in Vienna on February 13, 1930.

His father, the Orthodox Jew Maximilian Fuchs, instead of becoming a rabbi, abandoned his studies and married Leopoldina, a Christian from the Austrian province of Styria. In 1938, the Anschluss resulted in the forced unification of Austria with Nazi Germany, and, like many Austrian Jews facing extermination, Maximilian was forced to flee to Shanghai. History is silent about why he did not take his family with him. Eight-year-old Ernst remained in Vienna with his mother, but being half-Jewish, he was sent to a concentration camp for half-breed children. Leopoldina was deprived of parental rights, and in order to save her son, she went for a formal divorce from her husband. In 1942, Ernst Fuchs was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith, and this had a very strong impact on the development of his worldview.

At the age of 12, Fuchs took his first lessons in drawing, painting and sculpture from the artist and restorer Alois Schiemann, and at the age of 15 he entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where he became the youngest student. Already in those years, Ernst Fuchs was strongly influenced by surrealism, which could not but affect his own creative style.

For the first time, Fuchs saw surrealist paintings “live” at an exhibition in 1947, where he was stunned by the famous “Sad Game” by Salvador Dali. “I saw confirmation of what I myself wanted to achieve,” he wrote in his diary.

1948 Moreover, it is a special cultural phenomenon that continues to develop to this day.

Fuchs’s drawings begin to become saturated with many details, somewhat reminiscent of the mysteries of Hieronymus Bosch, the mysterious Dutchman, whose triptych “The Last Judgment” was already in the collection of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Later, Fuchs moved to Paris, where, after a long period of odd jobs, and sometimes real poverty, he gained recognition. Here he met the founder of surrealism Henri Breton, poet, playwright, director and novelist Jean Cocteau, existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, and in 1951 at one of the exhibitions he met his idol Salvador Dali for the first time. Highly appreciating the “terrible”, in the words of Dali, the works of the young Austrian, he, quite in his own spirit, defines his place in modern art: “You, Fuchs, are the German Dali! Well, in this case, I am the Spanish Durer.” However, it was at that time that Fuchs began to slowly free himself from the magic of his idol’s creativity. Alchemical and religious symbols appear in his paintings and graphics, and the characters begin to gravitate towards images from medieval engravings.

Fuchs reads the works of the German theologian and philosopher Meister Eckhart, is interested in alchemical symbolism, and studies “Psychology and Alchemy” by Carl Gustav Jung. Gradually, his work turns into a tight fusion of the most “crazy” surrealism, alchemical symbolism and medieval stylization. The most typical in this sense is the graphic cycle “Unicorn”, on which Fuchs worked in 1950-1952.

In 1957, Fuchs went to Israel, where he lived on Mount Zion in a Benedictine monastery, studying iconography and the language of symbols of different religions. In the work of this period, the artist’s attempts to create a single synthetic language of art, “alchemically” uniting the symbolism of all world religions, are obvious. There, Fuchs received an order to write “The Three Mysteries of St. Rosencrantz” for the new Catholic church in Vienna. However, his works initially provoked violent protests in his homeland. Many believers are demanding that strange – and, in the eyes of some, blasphemous – icons be removed from the temple. But the wave of indignation subsides - and Fuchs’s church works become one of the main attractions of Vienna.

The culmination of the church-religious period can be considered the painting “Psalm No. 69,” where, in Fuchs’s characteristic fantastic-realistic manner, the apocalyptic prophecies of the Bible are combined with images of the artist’s contemporary world.

In 1960, Ernst Fuchs returned in triumph to Vienna, where he already enjoyed universal recognition. Opens a gallery that has become a meeting place for adherents of fantastic realism. He writes the book “Heavenly Architecture”, in which he sets out his views on art, illustrating them with architectural projects and models, as well as examples of monumental sculpture, to which he became addicted in the 1970s.

Since the late 1970s, Fuchs has been rapidly expanding the area of art in which he demonstrates his talents. Designs opera performances - the musical drama "Parsifal" by Wagner and Mozart's "The Magic Flute" at the Hamburg State Opera, Wagner's "Lohengrin" at the Bavarian Opera (Munich), the opera "The Tales of Hoffmann" by Offenbach and the ballet "The Legend of Joseph" by Strauss in Vienna. Creates the watercolor cycle “Lohengrin”. Writes poetry and philosophical essays. He records music discs “Von Jahve” and “Via Dolorosa” of his own composition.

Since 1993, Ernst Fuchs has lived in the south of France, but with the opening of the “Fantastic Museum” he moved to Vienna: on the top floor of the museum there are his personal apartments, and in a cafe next to the museum a table is reserved “forever” for the maestro. And even in a crowded cafe, no one has the right to sit down at it.

In 2011, Ernst Fuchs turned 81 years old. Today he is a cult figure of Austrian art - a man whose talents would be more than enough to fill this art entirely. Fuchs lived a life worthy of a true surrealist - full of eccentric antics, hoaxes, provocations and true artistic discoveries. He has 28 children from countless wives, although he considers his first wife, Eve, to be his only wife, as befits the surreal Adam, who is prone to humor that is not very appropriate in the burgher environment. Or “Fire Fox” (Feuer Fuchs) – this is how the Viennese “prince of painting” signs his works.

Ernst Fuchs: “God has not abandoned Russia”
Ernst Fuchs is a famous Austrian artist, creator of the “Vienna School of Fantastic Realism”, architect and designer, poet and philosopher... At the age of fifteen, Fuchs became the youngest student at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. And at twenty, his name already sounded synonymous with a new direction in Austrian painting, the motto of which was the fight against the mediocrity of avant-gardeism. His paintings seem to come out of dreams. Some admire them, others consider them kitsch...
Between depression and euphoria.
- YOU ONCE called yourself a “vain and proud artist.” Is this really true?
- Absolutely. Of course, in contradiction with others, you imagine yourself as a prophet. The artist’s self-affirmation always sounds like: “Everyone is wrong, only I am right.” It just has nothing to do with success, although many people think that it does.
- What then is the secret of success?
- Hard to explain. I have colleagues about whom I can say that they are talented just like me. But they drink, waste time in endless discussions and fruitless delving into themselves. But one must treat the gift received from the Lord reverently, humbly preserving the gift received from above, so as not to miss it in the weakness of one’s own overestimation.
- In your autobiography, you wrote that your life passes “between euphoria and depression.” Are you still in this state or have you become calmer and more balanced over the years?
- No, on the contrary. The closer you get to the last step into another world - and I can already feel it - the more impatient you become. At least I am. I lose peace when I think about what else I should and want to do. There is less and less willingness to engage in secondary matters, and anger sets in that time is running out.
Consider the invisible
- “ONE of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism” sounds so respectable that you immediately imagine a venerable artist, and yet you were not even eighteen in those years.
"Self-portrait in a hat with feathers", 1983
- I was sixteen years old. I will soon celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of my creative activity. At that time we did not consider this the founding of a new school. I just had a circle of friends that still exists, my colleagues, a brotherhood of like-minded people. A small group of 5-7 people who felt it was important that, along with the idea of reality that each of us has before our eyes, another world could exist.
No one can realistically imagine this invisible world, see the Angel of Death, hell or heaven, unless it is drawn. This is the greatness of the art of icon painting. And Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is a description in words of something that not everyone is able to see. And many other writers have seen this world. Let us remember Bulgakov, for example, his “The Master and Margarita”. In the same sense, we also sought to make reality what could not be seen otherwise.
- Your friend was Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose name is inextricably linked with the cultural history of Austria. What united you and what set you apart?
“We have always been opponents in an argument, rivals, and yet we worked in the same workshop. And I respect Hundertwasser to the highest degree, I consider him a most interesting representative of the so-called abstract art, although I do not consider his art as non-objective. Its color variations seem to me the most beautiful of all that I know. His devotion to his artistic world, to his talent has always been completely uncompromising; he is one of the few artists about whom I can say: he is an honest artist, not a charlatan. And everything he created is not a fake, it is real art.
All revolutions are idiocy
- Your commitment to monarchism is known. Who would you rather be - a court artist or a king?
- What a delicate question! (Smiles slyly.) I think that I am the Kaiser. But, of course, in a spiritual sense. By the way, if we are talking about tsarist power, I was strongly and touchingly impressed by Yeltsin’s admission that the murder of the Romanovs in Yekaterinburg was a terrible crime. I wish I could fall into tartar of this whole October Revolution! It was complete nonsense, all revolutions are nonsense, idiocy, I don’t know a single one that brought anything good. Only new revolutions, new wars, the most difficult wars that we had to endure. The same French Revolution, which proclaimed “Liberty, equality, fraternity!” - the question is, where is all this now? I would like Russia to have both a Tsar and a strong Orthodox Church.
- Do you think that Russia still cannot do without the Tsar?
- This is a matter of tradition. In my eyes, Stalin was such an attempt to become a tsar. But there cannot be a king without a church.
- Today's politicians willingly go to church...
- And they know why. It's hard for me to judge whether this is sincere or just a tactical move. Only God knows this. And yet it is wonderful that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was recreated in Moscow. For me, this is a wonderful sign that Orthodoxy in Rus', despite all the persecution, has not perished, but, on the contrary, is filled with life, perhaps precisely thanks to these persecutions. I, of course, was in Zagorsk, I am a little familiar with the religious life of your country, I saw enough with my own eyes and I want to say that the Lord did not abandon Russia. I read Rasputin's notes to the Tsar, in which he writes that Russia will drown in a sea of tears if Germany becomes its enemy. Unfortunately, Yusupov, who was, in my opinion, a state traitor, incited hostility, and for some time Russia really plunged into a sea of blood and tears. But I hope that this will never happen again in the future.
Ernst Fuchs was born in Vienna in 1930. The son of a Jew and a Catholic mother, at the age of 8 he ended up in a camp for half-breed children and was able to avoid death only thanks to Catholic baptism in 1942 and his mother’s abandonment of her husband, who managed to emigrate to Shanghai to escape the Nazis.

M. Zhuravleva, Vienna, Austria

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Ernst Fuchs

Ernst Fuchs (born February 13, 1930) is an Austrian visionary painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, painter, composer, poet, singer and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.
He studied sculpture with Emmy STEINBOCK (1943), which attended the St. Anna Painting School, where he studied under Professor Fröhlich (1944) and entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1945), where he began his studies with Professor Robin C. Anderson and then move on to the class of Albert von Paris Gütersloh.

At the Academy he met Arik Brouwer, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hütter and Anton Lehmden, with whom he founded what later became known as the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. He was also one of the founders of the Art Club (1946), as well as the Hundsgruppe, created in opposition to him in 1951, together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Arnulf Rainer.

His works from this period influenced the art of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and later Maxim Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonck, Edvard Munch, Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso. During this time, striving to achieve the brilliant light effects achieved by such old masters as Albrecht Altdorfer, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Martin Schongauer, he revived and adopted Mischtechnik (mixed media) painting. At Mischtechnik, egg tempera is used to create volume and then glazed with oil paints mixed with resin, producing a jewel-type effect.

Between 1950 and 1961, Fuchs lived primarily in Paris and made a number of trips to the USA and Israel. His favorite reading material at that time was in the sermon of Meister Eckhart. He also studied symbolism in alchemy and read Jung's Psychology of Alchemy. His favorite examples at the time were the MANNERISTS, especially Jacques Callot, and he was also greatly influenced by Jan van Eyck and Jean Fouquet. In 1958 he founded the Fuchs-Fischoff Gallery in Vienna to promote and support young artists from the Fantastic Realism school. Together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Arnulf Rainer, he founded the Pintorarium.

In 1956 he converted to Catholicism (his mother had him baptized during the war to save him from deportation to a concentration camp). In 1957, he entered the Dormition Monastery on Mount Zion, where he began working on his monumental Last Supper and devoted himself to producing small paintings on religious themes, such as Moses and the Burning Bush, culminating in a commission to paint three altar paintings on parchment, the Mystery Cycle St. Mary's (1958-61), at the Rosenkranzkirche in Hetzendorf, Vienna. He also deals with contemporary issues in his masterpiece of this period, Psalm 69 (1949-60). (Fuchs, 1978, p. 53).

He returned to Vienna in 1961 and had a vision that he called verschollener Stil (The Hidden Prime Styles), theories which he expounded in his inspired and grandiose book Architectura Caelestis: Die Bilder DES verschollenen Stils (Salzburg, 1966). He also produced several important series of prints, such as The Unicorn (1950-52), Samson (1960-64), Esther (1964-7) and Sphinx (1966-7; all shown in Weis). In 1972 he purchased Otto Wagner's abandoned Hutteldorf Villa, which he restored and transformed. The villa was opened as the Ernst Fuchs Museum in 1988. Since 1970, he began on numerous sculptural projects, such as Queen Esther (Part 2.63 m, 1972), located at the entrance to the museum, and also installed on the radiator cap from Cadillac at the entrance to the Dalí Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.

From 1974 he became involved in the development of stage sets and costumes for operas by Mozart and Richard Wagner including The Magic Flute, Parsifal, and Lohengrin.

In 1993, Fuchs was given a retrospective exhibition at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, one of the first Western artists to receive such an honor.

Ernst Fuchs continues to inspire, with many exhibitors and students including HR Giger, Mark Ryden, Robert Venos, Michael Hussar, Mati Klarwein, DE ES Schwertberger, and his son Michael Fuchs. And the new generation of students includes Andrew Gonzalez, Amanda Sage, Antonio Roybal, Victor Safonkin, O. A. Korolev and Lawrence Caruana.

In the preface to the edition of "Metamorphoses":

".... Even when Fantastic Art was strictly prohibited, such as during the period when Russia was ruled by Brezhnev, knowledge of this style of art continues to spread. One of my first students in 1952 in Paris was a very remarkable, talented person, dancer, artist and tattoo fetishist, Vali Myers from Melbourne. We were in contact until her death in 2005. She and Mati Klarwein were my first followers in Paris, so it gives me great pleasure that another Australian fan of my work is publishing this book. Some of these names included here are very good to me, or studied under my guidance, and became fine teachers themselves - artists such as Brigid Marlin and Philip Rubinov Jacobson. This book will have a fundamental message for art lovers: Fantastic art has survived despite all official attempts to quench its spirit." Ernst Fuchs 2006

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