Art collectors in Vienna

A series of interviews, recorded by Rudolf Schramm

Episode 1: Hungarian connections

Dr. P.:

The impetus to engage with art came from my drawing teacher in Budapest. When I was eleven, our drawing teacher took us to play football once a week on the Margaretenwiese at the foot of the castle. This was always followed by a visit of about 20 minutes to the art history museum, where each time he presented and explained a single painting to us – and familiarised us with the life of the painter. It was something of a deal: first we were allowed to play football, then we had to listen. I don’t know how the other pupils felt about it, but in me the teacher had lit a spark that over time became a great flame of enthusiasm for art.

I then didn’t see him for many years, but met him again a few months ago – and bought a painting from him. He told me how hard it had been for him to work as an artist in communist Hungary. Back then, everyone who had anything to do with art or culture in the broadest sense was eyed with suspicion or even outright persecuted, unless they worked in line with the Party.

In 1965, at the age of 13, we came to Vienna, where I attended the grammar school in Fichtnergasse. Of course, at first I spoke very little German. A Hungarian-speaking religious education teacher took me under his wing, and little by little my German improved noticeably. As far as art was concerned, Vienna already offered a great wealth of opportunities to inform oneself back then. Without any system, I went around a lot to studios and galleries, saw lots of contemporary work and got to know numerous Austrian artists personally. Before that I had come into contact almost exclusively with classical modernism – namely through my uncle in Hungary, who was also a collector. Even as a child I witnessed him once selling one of his paintings and using the proceeds to buy a flat for his son. If you bear in mind how rare and precious flats in Budapest were at the time, you can imagine how much this one painting had earned my uncle. I was very impressed.

Later, when we lived in Speising, my brother, who is seven years older than me, and I often went into town and looked at shop windows. In the Dorotheum I discovered a painting by an unknown painter that I liked very much and that was available for a very low price. That became my very first art purchase.

One of the artists who impressed me greatly with his work, but also as a personality, was Josef Mikl. He originally came to me as a patient. He suffered from lower back pain, probably a consequence of the fact that he had painted in a stooped posture for years. He had been advised to have an operation and came to me to make sure that it was really necessary. Already at the first examination I found that an operation was not required. Subsequently we became friends. He was, one can certainly say, a somewhat eccentric personality; perhaps that is also why he was close friends with Qualtinger (laughs). One of his quirks was always to carry a small coffee mug with him, from which he would then drink the wine he had ordered from the waiter in the café or the inn.

My mental reconciliation with my home country Hungary took place in the 1990s. At that time I visited an exhibition of Hungarian avant-garde from 1920 to 1980 in Linz, curated by Peter Baum. There I got to know some Hungarian artists better, with whom I also stayed in contact, and I also acquired one of the paintings on display. Subsequently I travelled to Hungary again once or twice. The painting I had bought was a “Kopf” by Akos Birkas, which I had always seen as an egg. Over the years he had painted dozens of these in very different ways. At the time I got to know him, he had just switched to a more figurative style of painting.

A truly impressive artist whom I had the pleasure of getting to know was Hildegard Joos. For a long time she worked as a secretary for the father of one of my friends, who had supported her artistic endeavours for many years, without, however, achieving any public impact with it. When I first met her, she was already over 80 years old. What particularly impressed me was that even at this advanced age she was still curious and creative and turned to techniques she had not yet tried. In the first years of her career she had mainly painted landscapes. After that her main field of activity lay in narrative geometry. Quite suddenly she began to paint monochrome. A completely unusual experiment, which she likewise only undertook in this late phase of her life, was applying the paint to the canvas with her knuckles instead of a brush. I am very happy to have an example of this idiosyncratic technique in my collection.

I got to know and appreciate Herbert Brandl when he was still a very young painter. At that time I did not yet have the financial means to acquire a painting by him, but today I enjoy several of them on my walls.

I have also acquired numerous works on my forays through flea markets and sometimes only got to know the artists who made them later, for example Peter Dotrel, who died 5 years ago. It was also at a flea market that I found my first painting by Thomas Ritter. Later I bought more of his works from his German gallery Depelmann. One day – it was already getting dark – a lorry loaded with paintings drove up in front of my house and Mr Depelmann got out. He unpacked a number of Ritter’s works and placed them against the avenue trees directly in front of my window, so that I could look at them all while it was still daylight. That was a very moving scene.

During a holiday in Madrid I was once recommended to visit an “artists’ quarter”, which, however, turned out to be more of a junk dealers’ quarter. In one of the shop windows, though, I discovered a medium-sized painting that spoke to me spontaneously. I went into the shop and made it clear to the owner that I found this and only this work absolutely fantastic. A happy smile appeared on his face and his chest seemed to swell – because it turned out that he was the painter of this work. After trying for many years to earn his living from art, he had given up and opened this second-hand shop. You can imagine his pride when he was “discovered” by me.

I owe a great deal of inspiration and knowledge to the gallerist Hans Knoll, who for years has been organising and leading art trips to Eastern European countries. Each time, 8 to 12 people are guided through galleries, studios and artists’ meeting places in a city such as St. Petersburg or Budapest, and there is usually a lively exchange of information and ideas with local artists, curators and gallerists. Knoll originally came from the countryside and in the 1980s had set his mind on founding a gallery. And not just anywhere, but of all places in what was then communist Budapest. What a bizarre idea! Which he nevertheless managed to realise – despite seemingly overwhelming bureaucracy and against all obstacles, including financial ones. Of course, as one can well imagine, the beginnings were anything but easy. But when the Soviet Union vanished into thin air, his gallery in the Hungarian capital suddenly became a heavily frequented place: Western art lovers and art dealers used Knoll’s knowledge and contacts to gain a foothold in the countries of the East – and artists from Hungary, Russia, Slovakia and other states of the region pushed through him into the West. He had done everything right.

Next episode: An artist with a childhood trauma