Czech painter

Erwin Stolz (1896 Giesshuebel/Sauerbrunn - 1987 Vienna) was a Czech painter and draughtsman.

Biography

After an experience as agricultural engineer and captivity in Italy during the World War I, he devoted himself to painting, working as a sign painter, industrial graphic artist and attending numerous art courses in Vienna. He had contacts to Gustav Kurt Beck [fr; de](1902–1983) who had an influence in the Viennese world in the spread of the avant-gardes, Erich Mallina (1873–1954) who introduced him in his mystical-religious worldview and in the theosophical society, George Kenner (1888–1971) who shared his experience in prison camps during the First World War, Alexander Rothaug [de](1870–1946) who was a great illustrator and symbolist painter as Stolz himself and the artists of union Hagenbund. He was also a friend of Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959) a composer and music theorist near to Arnold Schoenberg whose art was considered degenerate art by nazism. In his career Stolz followed various artistic currents. He had a classical training which was admirably expressed in portraits, in liberty paintings (nouveau and deco in particular) and in symbolism that distinguishes many of his drawings and temperas in which he expressed an art of great graphic quality highly influenced by Max Klinger (1857 - 1920) and Gust Klimt (1862 - 1918). In the 20s, however, alongside these trends he also became interested in expressionist painting and in the New Objectivity as can be appreciated in some portraits and in the numerous nudes made from 1925 to the end of the 30s which was his most fruitful period. After the World War II his painting was oriented above all in a surrealist key.

Artworks

Erwin Stolz excelled above all in ink drawing where in the 30s and 40s he touched absolute peaks not only of great formal and technical refinement but also of great creativity, succeeding in the not easy intent of rendering through the lines depth, atmospheric sense, tonalism in the absence of color or better with a single color, black, with which he was able to create not only the entire chromatic range but also to render the objective reality of what he represented.

Works