AXL LESKOSCHEK (Graz 1889 - 1976 Vienna), Still Life with Flowers, 1951

AXL LESKOSCHEK*
(Graz 1889 - 1976 Vienna)
Still Life with Flowers, 1951
oil/canvas, 100,5 x 70 cm
signed A Les, monogrammed AL and dated 51
Provenance: Gallery Ciwna, Fine Arts Widder Vienna

ESTIMATE °€ 2.000 - 3.000
START € 2.000

Austrian painter of the 20th century, especially of the interwar period. Main representative of the modern and avant-garde in Styria. Studied at the Landeskunstschule in Graz under Alfred Schrötter and from 1921 to 1923 at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna under Alfred Cossmann. Cultural editor at the Social Democratic newspaper Arbeiterwille, from 1920 also book illustrator. 1919 co-founder of the Werkbund Freiland, 1923 Grazer Secession. Fled to Switzerland via Italy in 1938 with the architect and resistance fighter Herbert Eichholzer. 1941 to 1948 exile in Brazil, professor at the Academy in Rio de Janeiro. 1948 return to Austria. active in Vienna as a painter, graphic artist and theater critic. Early influences from Art Nouveau and Expressionism, later interest in medieval woodcuts. Created colorful oil paintings and watercolors, southern landscapes and nudes, also exotic floral still lifes with calla and parrot flower reminiscent of his time in South America.

The painter, graphic artist and illustrator Axl Leskoschek was born in Graz as the son of a field marshal lieutenant and completed his legal training with a doctorate in 1917 - in the middle of the First World War. Immediately afterwards he was ordered to the front as a lieutenant pilot, from which he returned severely wounded. Under the impression of this drastic war experience, he renounced a career in law and began to study at the Landeskunstschule Graz with Alfred Schrötter and at the Grafische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. With his woodcuts to the "Legends of St. Francis" he founded a series of illustrations to world literature in 1920, became a co-founder of the Werkbund "Freiland" (1919) and the Graz Secession (1923). At the same time, he developed his keen awareness of the political upheavals of this time of change, during which he also worked for the social democratic daily newspaper "Arbeiterwille" as cultural editor until 1934. As early as 1920, he produced his first book illustrated with woodcuts, which was to be followed by more than 50 other books until his death. It was mainly expressionist pictures with which Leskoschek appeared in public at the beginning of his career. However, he was not only active as a painter, wood engraver and carver, but also - between 1928 and 1931 - as a stage designer at the municipal theatre in Augsburg and as a political activist. As a member of the Schutzbund he took part in the bloody workers' uprising in February 1934, for which reason he joined the illegal KPÖ after a short imprisonment and was again imprisoned in the detention camp Wöllersdorf in 1936/37. During his imprisonment he created an extensive series of allegorical sheets in an expressive-surreal style. In 1938 he managed to escape from the Nazi regime just in time. Together with the architect Herbert Eichholzer, he fled via Trieste to Switzerland, from where he escaped into exile in Brazil in 1940 together with his wife, whom he had met there. There he produced a series of oil paintings, watercolours, linocuts and woodcuts, pochoirs, lithographs and etchings. He also taught woodcut and composition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro and thus became the teacher of a whole generation of Brazilian artists. It was not until 1948 that he returned to Austria, where he became a communist activist for realism in art during the Cold War and his work was officially hardly noticed. It was only through international exhibitions in the 1960s that he was able to gain some notoriety, while in Austria exhibitions such as the one in 1954 on the theme of "Art and Resistance" were boycotted. Shortly before - in 1952 - he also created this innocuous floral still life with the exotic red flamingo flowers, which at the same time reminded Leskoschek of his beloved adopted country Brazil: the anthurium comes from the tropical rainforests of Colombia, Guatemala and the Amazon region in Brazil. Leskoschek also adds a flower of the bird of paradise, which is native to South Africa. Leskoschek excellently accentuates this exotic floral splendour against the silky, shimmering, silvery white background in a late expressionist manner. The brilliant effect is further enhanced by the large form. Leskoschek himself only became the focus of initial honours and exhibitions in Graz and Vienna in 1971 and 1974 respectively after he left the Communist Party in reaction to the bloody suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968, only to fall into oblivion again soon afterwards. Shortly before his death in 1976, he confessed that it had been the biggest mistake of his life to leave Brazil in 1948, when he already had so many friends and students there. He returned, he bitterly summed up, to his homeland as a country where he remained unknown, almost anonymous.

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