Josef Stoitzner

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Biography

Josef Stoitzner

The son of the painter Konstantin Stoitzner, he received his initial training at the Vienna School of Applied Arts and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Franz Rumpler from 1906 to 1908. In 1905 he began teaching drawing, including the years from 1916 to 1919 as Tina Blau's successor at the Vienna Women's Academy. His many years of teaching would eventually lead him back to his former educational institution, the Vienna Academy, where he was a lecturer on the methodology of drawing instruction from 1932 to 1944. In 1944, his Vienna apartment, his studio and the printing blocks and works stored in it were destroyed by a bomb hit. Josef Stoitzner was a member of the artist group "Der Kreis", the Vienna Secession and the Vienna Künstlerhaus. His works - mostly landscapes, still lifes and interiors - are committed to an unmistakable, idealizing realism and are characterized by impasto paint application, powerful contours and contrasting play of light and shadow. Josef Stoitzner died in 1951 at the age of 67 in Bramberg, where he was also buried. His artistic beginnings at the beginning of the 20th century were marked by the Art Nouveau style, which was widespread throughout Europe. Like many contemporary painters - such as Carl Moll, Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel, Broncia Koller or Rudolf Kalvach - he was also intensively occupied for years with the techniques and forms of expression of printmaking.¹ With his formally and motivically distinctive color woodcuts, Josef Stoitzner - at the latest after being awarded the gold medal of the BUGRA in 1914² - also became known to the wider public. This decidedly graphic component, however, was also to flow into his painterly work and play a determining role. He brought pastose mosaic-like forms and the hardness of drawing into an exciting relationship and combined these principles of two-dimensional and linear stylization with a strong spatial plastic effect. The conciseness with which Josef Stoitzner prepares each form and his sense of order, which permeates even the smallest detail of the pictorial composition, heighten the vividness of his painterly cosmos to an unusual clarity and sharpness. The fascination that emanates from these paintings has reached a new peak, at the latest since the major museum survey of his work at the Salzburg Museum in 2010 and the publication of a comprehensive catalog raisonné in 2019, also for a broad art-interested public.³

¹Vgl.: Tobias G. Natter, Max Hollein, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (Hg.), Kunst für alle. Der Farbholzschnitt in Wien um 1900, Ausstellungskatalog, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Albertina, Wien 2016/2017
²BUGRA, Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik, veranstaltet von der damaligen „Buchstadt“ Leipzig
³Ausstellung: Josef Stoitzner (1884-1951). Landschaften-Stillleben-Interieurs, Salzburg Museum, Neue Residenz Salzburg, 30. Jänner bis 30. Mai 2010; Kolhammer & Maringer Fine Arts (Hg.), Josef Stoitzner. Das Gesamtwerk, Wien 2019

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