Anton Ažbe
Encyclopedia
Anton Ažbe was a Slovene realist
painter and teacher of painting.
Ažbe, crippled since birth and orphaned at the age of 8, learned painting as an apprentice to Janez Wolf and at the Academies in Vienna
and Munich
. At the age of 30 Ažbe founded his own school of painting in Munich
that became a popular attraction for Eastern European students. Ažbe trained the "big four" Slovenian impressionists
(Rihard Jakopič
, Ivan Grohar
, Matej Sternen
, Matija Jama
) and a whole generation of Russian painters (Ivan Bilibin
, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky
, Igor Grabar
, Vasily Kandinsky
, Dmitry Kardovsky
and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
, to name a few). Ažbe's training methods were adopted and reused by Russian artists both at home (Grabar, Kardovsky) and in emigration (Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky).
Ažbe's own undisputed artistic legacy is limited to twenty-six graphic works, including classroom studies, most of them at the National Gallery of Slovenia
.
His long-planned masterpiece
s never materialized and, according to Peter Selz, he "never came into his own as an artist". His enigmatic personality blended together alcoholism
, chain smoking
, bitter loneliness, minimalistic simple living
in private, and eccentric behaviour in public. A public scarecrow and a bohemian
socialite
, Ažbe protected his personal secrets till the end, a mystery even to his students and fellow teachers. The public transformed the circumstances of his untimely death from cancer
into an urban legend
.
s Alois and Anton Ažbe were born in a peasant family in the Carniolan
village of Dolenčice
near Škofja Loka
in the Austrian Empire
(today, in Slovenia
). Their father died of familial tuberculosis
at the age of 40, when the boys were seven years old. Mother lapsed into a severe mental distress (there is unreliable evidence that she later committed suicide) and the boys were placed into foster care
. By this time it was evident that while Alois developed normally, Anton suffered serious congenital health problems: he lagged in physical growth, his legs were weak and his spine
deformed. His legal guardian
reasoned that Anton was not fit for farm work; after completing an elementary school he sent Anton to "study commerce" in Klagenfurt
.
After five years of living and working at a grocery store Ažbe ran away from Klagenfurt to Ljubljana
.
At some point in the late 1870s he met Janez Wolf, a Slovenian painter associated with the Nazarene movement
who handled numerous church mural commissions. Little is known about Ažbe's experience with Wolf, apart from the facts that in 1880 Ažbe assisted Wolf with the fresco
es of the Zagorje ob Savi
church and, in 1882, with the facade of the Franciscan Church of the Annunciation
in Ljubljana.
In the same year Wolf helped Ažbe with admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
, where Anton studied for two years. He was dissatisfied with outdated, uninspiring Viennese training and barely made passing grades. In 1884 he relocated to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, then a "liberal" and "modern" school as opposed to the conservative Viennese Academy. There he made a superb impression on his teachers Gabriel Hackl and Ludwig von Löfftz and earned a free scholarship. To make a living, Ažbe teamed up with Ferdo Vesel, selling classroom works and run-of-the-mill kitsch
scenes to wholesale dealers. Half of Ažbe's surviving legacy dates back to the Munich Academy years; by the end of this period he was recognized as a professional portrait painter and was regularly exhibited in the Glaspalast
.
Wolf died in bitter poverty in 1884; later, Ažbe frequently spoke that shortly before death (rendered by Ažbe in chilling detail) Wolf dictated to him his last will – that he, Ažbe, must train a successor of Wolf's art, an ethnic Slovene who would surpass his seniors and strike the world with his genius. The free-of-charge training should last no less than eight years. For this purpose, said Ažbe, Wolf entrusted Ažbe with the "secret" of his art.
It is not clear how much of the "Wolf's myth" is real; the "great Slovene painter" did not emerge and Ažbe complained that all Slovene students, apart from faithful Matej Sternen
, were leaving the school too early, preferring absolute freedom to the benefits of professional training.
In 1892 Vesel and Rihard Jakopič
offered Ažbe the informal job of examining and correcting the students' paintings. The seven clients rented a study room and paid Ažbe for fixing their homework. Two months later, an inflow of new clients allowed Ažbe to rent his own premises, starting the Ažbe School.
After a brief stay on Türkenstrasse the school relocated to its permanent base at 16, Georgenstrasse in Schwabing
(the building was destroyed by an allied air raid
in July 1944). Later Ažbe rented another building for the school classes and moved into his private workshop (also in Georgenstrasse).
The school was never short of students, with a normal complement reaching 80. The total number of Ažbe alumni stands at around 150. Some, notably Alexej von Jawlensky
, Matej Sternen and Marianne von Werefkin
attended the school for nearly a decade. Ažbe remained the sole instructor, except for a brief period in 1899–1900 when he hired Igor Grabar
as an assistant. Long-established competitors, the Munich Academy and the Imperial Academy of Arts
in Saint Petersburg
, recognized Ažbe school and recommended it as a preparatory or "refreshment" course.
In 1904 Ažbe, a lifelong smoker, developed throat cancer and by the spring of 1905 he could hardly swallow food. Matej Sternen noted that the feeling of near death was obvious to all witnesses. Ažbe agreed to a surgery that passed without immediate complications, but on August 5 or 6, 1905 Ažbe died.
The public transformed a sad but ordinary and expected event into a melodramatic
urban legend
. Leonhard Frank
, who studied with Ažbe in 1904, reproduced the legend in Links, wo das Herz ist (1952): "Nobody ever saw his paintings. Nobody knew if he ever painted at all. Nobody knew his past. One chilly December night, intoxicated with cognac, he fell asleep in the snow. He was found dead in the morning. Nobody knew where he had come from." A similar story was retold by Mikhail Shemyakin.
The school of Anton Ažbe survived its founder and existed until the onset of World War I
.
It is not known if Ažbe ever had a personal life; he himself mentioned that he was engaged twice, and both marriage attempts failed. There was some bond between him and Kathi Kobus, owner of the Simpli pub, but they both took the secret of this relationship to their graves. According to Sternen, he was consumed by a mysterious personality split that drove him into binge drinking
and slovenly appearance. Likewise, Kandinsky wrote that Ažbe's apparently unremarkable life was itself a mystery.
Physically, Ažbe was not a dwarf
but still a man of a very short and irregular stature. Niko Zupanič described him as having unusually short and weak legs, with a twisted upper spine. His head combined a large cranium with a disproportionately narrow face. Igor Grabar
noted that his wide forehead was covered with a web of red pulsing veins; the rest of the face was uniformly red, as if in a fever; at the age of 33 Ažbe seemed to be at least forty years old. He groomed his long chestnut moustache to the style of Wilhelm II. He always wore black, and of the best make; in winter his attire was complete with a tall oriental karakul hat.
The oddly shaped and expensively (if not tastelessly) dressed schoolmaster, slowly walking with a cane and always smoking, became a target of tabloids and cartoonists. Boys taunted him on the streets, shouting "Atzpe! Atzpe!" (incorrectly pronouncing Slovenian Ažbe in German
). Ažbe's own German was not perfect either; he, particularly, abused the word nähmlich ("namely", "that is...") and was called "Professor Nähmlich". He normally spoke German in Munich but used Slovenian language
in a Slavic company.
Ažbe never had a proper home, sleeping on an untidy sofa in a workshop filled with his students' paintings.
He always painted in his studio and never ventured into open air painting. Ažbe frequently spoke of his planned future masterpieces, none of which moved past the sketch stage. He left Munich only once, visiting Venice
in 1897; otherwise, his life revolved between the school and local pubs. Their owners regularly allowed a drunken Ažbe to sleep on their premises. With age he became more and more sedentary and replaced his daily walkouts with a circle ride on a tram
.
Ažbe maintained ties with brother Alois but eventually severed all contacts after Alois' savvy wife reprimanded Anton for wasting too many matches lighting his cigars. The housewife's frugality
was completely alien to Ažbe, who never hesitated offering free tuition to students in need and lending them cash. An obituary noted that "he was a man of almost proverbial modesty... one of the most original and best-known personalities of Munich."
Lack of hard evidence prompted conflicts among historians and critics, further aggravated by the politics of the former Yugoslavia
and its successor states. Baranovsky and Khlebnikova noted that by the end of the twentieth century, Ažbe the creator has become a myth, just like Ažbe the person became a legend after his death.
Frantz Stele (1962) and Peg Weiss (1979) have extensively studied Ažbe's relationships with the emerging avantgarde art and mature impressionism
, and considered Ažbe to be a forerunner of modernist art, a link between Cézanne
and Kandinsky. Both studies, in partucular Weiss', were rejected by Tomaž Brejc who reasoned that any parallels between Ažbe and Cézanne are moot because Ažbe never mastered Cézanne's technique and there is no evidence that he ever attempted it.
) of Ažbe training system agree that it relied, at least in the beginners' classes, on two paramount ideas: the Main Line and the Ball Principle (German: Kugelprinzip). Ažbe discouraged beginners from focusing on minor details, instead forcing them to build the image around one bold "Main Line". He enforced drawing in black charcoal that enabled quick and radical corrections of the students' work. Dobuzhinsky admitted that these intrusions into his early work were an eye-opener, "an excellent tool against dilletante, myopic copying of reality..." although for many students it spelled their end as painters: overwhelmed by the "Main Line", they did not dare to step over it and "beef it up" with relevant details.
The Ball Principle, in its most practical application, portrait, stipulated that a human head is simply a sphere; reproducing lighting of a human head follows the same rules as reproducing a plaster ball. Facial features in this systems are merely protrusions and cavities of the ball's surface. Once the student mastered these basics, Ažbe carefully led him to a different interpretation, that of a head as a polyhedron
composed of flat surfaces and sharp ridges – in Dobuzhinsky's opinion, a precursor to cubism
.
Ažbe, himself a master of human anatomy, enforced rigorous training in this subject, from nude figure drawing
to attending autopsies
. Igor Grabar, who approved this approach, recalled that in the process he memorized all human muscles and bones by heart to the point where he easily reproduced them in plaster with closed eyes. Vasily Kandinsky
, on the contrary, dreaded figure drawing
sessions: "I quickly encountered a constraint upon my freedom that turned me into a slave, even only temporarily in a new guise – studying from a model.
Two or three models 'sat for heads' or 'posed nude'. Students of both sexes and from various countries thronged around these smelly, apathetic, expressionless, characterless natural phenomena who were paid fifty to seventy pfennig
an hour...
the people who were of no concern to them... they spent not one second thinking about art."
Kandinsky, in his mature years, stayed aside from portraiture or nude figures, and his few rare examples were "featureless, weightless and transparent, a mere cipher without substance" – an opposite of Ažbe's own intentions. Yet, Kandinsky also appreciated Ažbe's view that no theory and no set of rules should subdue the artist's will, and quoted Ažbe: "You must know your own anatomy but in front of an easel
you must forget it".
Painting in colour was a distant target that required prerequisite mastery of line, shape and anatomy. All memoirists noted Ažbe's aversion to mixing paints on a palette; instead, he recommended painting with raw paints and wide brushes. A wide brush covered with layers of different paints could, according to Ažbe, paint a human forehead in a single powerful stroke, a skill that required years of rigorous, sometimes exhausting, training. Ažbe frequently compared a proper oil painting to a diamond
: raw paints must retain their independence, like the facets of a gem. Ažbe himself adopted this style, later called "crystallization
of colour", only in the middle of 1890s. While Igor Grabar praised this style and elevated it to a level of a whole system developing in parallel to impressionism
, Dobuzhinsky (who never mastered the power stroke) called it "an artful magicians' trick... colourful but greasy painting devoid of its essence, the 'tone'."
After the death of Anton Ažbe the school trained a group of Estonian
painters: Johannes Greenberg, Anton Starkopf, and Ado Vabbe.
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
painter and teacher of painting.
Ažbe, crippled since birth and orphaned at the age of 8, learned painting as an apprentice to Janez Wolf and at the Academies in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
and Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
. At the age of 30 Ažbe founded his own school of painting in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
that became a popular attraction for Eastern European students. Ažbe trained the "big four" Slovenian impressionists
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
(Rihard Jakopič
Rihard Jakopic
Rihard Jakopič was a Slovenian painter. He was the leading Slovenian Impressionist painter and theoretician. Together with Matej Sternen, Matija Jama and Ivan Grohar, he is considered the pioneer of Slovenian impressionist painting.- Life :Jakopič was born in Ljubljana, then part of the...
, Ivan Grohar
Ivan Grohar
Ivan Grohar was a Slovene Impressionist painter. Together with Rihard Jakopič, Matej Sternen and Matija Jama, he is considered one of the leading figures of Slovene impressionism in the fin de siecle period.- Life :...
, Matej Sternen
Matej Sternen
Matej Sternen was a leading Slovene Impressionist painter.Sternen was born in Verd, now part of the Carniolan municipality of Vrhnika, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He attended the secondary school in Krško and attended technical school in Graz between 1888 and 1891...
, Matija Jama
Matija Jama
Matija Jama was a Slovene painter. Together with Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar and Matej Sternen, he is considered among the best representatives of Impressionism in the Slovene Lands.- Life :...
) and a whole generation of Russian painters (Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin was a 20th-century illustrator and stage designer who took part in the Mir iskusstva and contributed to the Ballets Russes. Throughout his career, he was inspired by Slavic folklore....
, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky
Mstislav Dobuzhinsky
Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky or Dobujinsky was a Russian-Lithuanian artist noted for his cityscapes conveying the explosive growth and decay of the early twentieth-century city....
, Igor Grabar
Igor Grabar
Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar was a Russian post-impressionist painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art. Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich...
, Vasily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
, Dmitry Kardovsky
Dmitry Kardovsky
Dmitry Kardovsky was a Russian artist, illustrator and stage designer.-Biography:He was born near Pereslavl-Zalessky in the Yaroslavl province. After studying law at Moscow University, he then studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg from 1892, under Pavel Chistyakov and Ilya Repin...
and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin, was an important Russian and Soviet painter and writer.-Early years:...
, to name a few). Ažbe's training methods were adopted and reused by Russian artists both at home (Grabar, Kardovsky) and in emigration (Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky).
Ažbe's own undisputed artistic legacy is limited to twenty-six graphic works, including classroom studies, most of them at the National Gallery of Slovenia
National Gallery of Slovenia
The National Gallery of Slovenia is the national art gallery of Slovenia. It is located in the capital Ljubljana.The Slovenian National Gallery was founded in 1918, after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the establishment of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs...
.
His long-planned masterpiece
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
s never materialized and, according to Peter Selz, he "never came into his own as an artist". His enigmatic personality blended together alcoholism
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...
, chain smoking
Chain smoking
Chain smoking is the practice of lighting a new cigarette for personal consumption immediately after one that is finished, sometimes using the finished cigarette to light the next one. It is a common form of addiction.-Causes:...
, bitter loneliness, minimalistic simple living
Simple living
Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include reducing one's possessions or increasing self-sufficiency, for example. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they need rather than want...
in private, and eccentric behaviour in public. A public scarecrow and a bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
socialite
Socialite
A socialite is a person who participates in social activities and spends a significant amount of time entertaining and being entertained at fashionable upper-class events....
, Ažbe protected his personal secrets till the end, a mystery even to his students and fellow teachers. The public transformed the circumstances of his untimely death from cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
into an urban legend
Urban legend
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...
.
Biography
TwinTwin
A twin is one of two offspring produced in the same pregnancy. Twins can either be monozygotic , meaning that they develop from one zygote that splits and forms two embryos, or dizygotic because they develop from two separate eggs that are fertilized by two separate sperm.In contrast, a fetus...
s Alois and Anton Ažbe were born in a peasant family in the Carniolan
Carniola
Carniola was a historical region that comprised parts of what is now Slovenia. As part of Austria-Hungary, the region was a crown land officially known as the Duchy of Carniola until 1918. In 1849, the region was subdivided into Upper Carniola, Lower Carniola, and Inner Carniola...
village of Dolenčice
Dolencice
Dolenčice is a small dispersed settlement to the north of Poljane in the Gorenja vas - Poljane Municipality in the Upper Carniola region of Slovenia.- External links :*...
near Škofja Loka
Škofja Loka
-Art colony:Before the civil war in the former Yugoslavia the Serbian town of Smederevska Palanka and the town of Škofja Loka held art colonies Groharijeva kolonija run by an art teacher from elementary school Olga Milošević in Smederevska Palanka. Now, after the split of SFR Yugoslavia, the two...
in the Austrian Empire
Austrian Empire
The Austrian Empire was a modern era successor empire, which was centered on what is today's Austria and which officially lasted from 1804 to 1867. It was followed by the Empire of Austria-Hungary, whose proclamation was a diplomatic move that elevated Hungary's status within the Austrian Empire...
(today, in Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
). Their father died of familial tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
at the age of 40, when the boys were seven years old. Mother lapsed into a severe mental distress (there is unreliable evidence that she later committed suicide) and the boys were placed into foster care
Foster care
Foster care is the term used for a system in which a minor who has been made a ward is placed in the private home of a state certified caregiver referred to as a "foster parent"....
. By this time it was evident that while Alois developed normally, Anton suffered serious congenital health problems: he lagged in physical growth, his legs were weak and his spine
Vertebral column
In human anatomy, the vertebral column is a column usually consisting of 24 articulating vertebrae, and 9 fused vertebrae in the sacrum and the coccyx. It is situated in the dorsal aspect of the torso, separated by intervertebral discs...
deformed. His legal guardian
Legal guardian
A legal guardian is a person who has the legal authority to care for the personal and property interests of another person, called a ward. Usually, a person has the status of guardian because the ward is incapable of caring for his or her own interests due to infancy, incapacity, or disability...
reasoned that Anton was not fit for farm work; after completing an elementary school he sent Anton to "study commerce" in Klagenfurt
Klagenfurt
-Name:Carinthia's eminent linguists Primus Lessiak and Eberhard Kranzmayer assumed that the city's name, which literally translates as "ford of lament" or "ford of complaints", had something to do with the superstitious thought that fateful fairies or demons tend to live around treacherous waters...
.
After five years of living and working at a grocery store Ažbe ran away from Klagenfurt to Ljubljana
Ljubljana
Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia and its largest city. It is the centre of the City Municipality of Ljubljana. It is located in the centre of the country in the Ljubljana Basin, and is a mid-sized city of some 270,000 inhabitants...
.
At some point in the late 1870s he met Janez Wolf, a Slovenian painter associated with the Nazarene movement
Nazarene movement
The name Nazarene was adopted by a group of early 19th century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty and spirituality in Christian art...
who handled numerous church mural commissions. Little is known about Ažbe's experience with Wolf, apart from the facts that in 1880 Ažbe assisted Wolf with the fresco
Fresco
Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...
es of the Zagorje ob Savi
Zagorje ob Savi
Zagorje ob Savi is a town and a municipality in central Slovenia. It is located in the valley of Medija Creek, a minor left-bank tributary of the Sava River, east of Ljubljana southwest of Celje, and west of Trbovlje. Traditionally the area was part of the Upper Carniola region. The entire...
church and, in 1882, with the facade of the Franciscan Church of the Annunciation
Franciscan Church of the Annunciation
The Franciscan Church of the Annunciation is a Franciscan church located on Prešeren Square in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. It is the parish church of Ljubljana - Annunciation Parish....
in Ljubljana.
In the same year Wolf helped Ažbe with admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is an institution of higher education in Vienna, Austria.- History :The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was founded in 1692 as a private academy by the court-painter Peter Strudl, who became the Praefectus Academiae Nostrae. In 1701 he was ennobled as Baron of the Empire...
, where Anton studied for two years. He was dissatisfied with outdated, uninspiring Viennese training and barely made passing grades. In 1884 he relocated to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, then a "liberal" and "modern" school as opposed to the conservative Viennese Academy. There he made a superb impression on his teachers Gabriel Hackl and Ludwig von Löfftz and earned a free scholarship. To make a living, Ažbe teamed up with Ferdo Vesel, selling classroom works and run-of-the-mill kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
scenes to wholesale dealers. Half of Ažbe's surviving legacy dates back to the Munich Academy years; by the end of this period he was recognized as a professional portrait painter and was regularly exhibited in the Glaspalast
Glaspalast (Munich)
The Glaspalast was a glass and iron exhibition building in Munich modeled after The Crystal Palace in London. The Glaspalast opened for the Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Industrieausstellung on July 15, 1854.-Construction:The Glaspalast was ordered by Maximilian II, King of Bavaria, built by MAN AG...
.
Wolf died in bitter poverty in 1884; later, Ažbe frequently spoke that shortly before death (rendered by Ažbe in chilling detail) Wolf dictated to him his last will – that he, Ažbe, must train a successor of Wolf's art, an ethnic Slovene who would surpass his seniors and strike the world with his genius. The free-of-charge training should last no less than eight years. For this purpose, said Ažbe, Wolf entrusted Ažbe with the "secret" of his art.
It is not clear how much of the "Wolf's myth" is real; the "great Slovene painter" did not emerge and Ažbe complained that all Slovene students, apart from faithful Matej Sternen
Matej Sternen
Matej Sternen was a leading Slovene Impressionist painter.Sternen was born in Verd, now part of the Carniolan municipality of Vrhnika, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He attended the secondary school in Krško and attended technical school in Graz between 1888 and 1891...
, were leaving the school too early, preferring absolute freedom to the benefits of professional training.
In 1892 Vesel and Rihard Jakopič
Rihard Jakopic
Rihard Jakopič was a Slovenian painter. He was the leading Slovenian Impressionist painter and theoretician. Together with Matej Sternen, Matija Jama and Ivan Grohar, he is considered the pioneer of Slovenian impressionist painting.- Life :Jakopič was born in Ljubljana, then part of the...
offered Ažbe the informal job of examining and correcting the students' paintings. The seven clients rented a study room and paid Ažbe for fixing their homework. Two months later, an inflow of new clients allowed Ažbe to rent his own premises, starting the Ažbe School.
After a brief stay on Türkenstrasse the school relocated to its permanent base at 16, Georgenstrasse in Schwabing
Schwabing
Schwabing is a borough in the northern part of Munich, the capital of the German state of Bavaria. It is divided into the city borough 4 and the city borough 12...
(the building was destroyed by an allied air raid
Strategic bombing
Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in a total war with the goal of defeating an enemy nation-state by destroying its economic ability and public will to wage war rather than destroying its land or naval forces...
in July 1944). Later Ažbe rented another building for the school classes and moved into his private workshop (also in Georgenstrasse).
The school was never short of students, with a normal complement reaching 80. The total number of Ažbe alumni stands at around 150. Some, notably Alexej von Jawlensky
Alexej von Jawlensky
Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association , Der Blaue Reiter group and later the Die Blaue Vier .-Life and work:Alexej von Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, a town in Tver...
, Matej Sternen and Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne von Werefkin , born Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina , was a Russian-Swiss Expressionist painter.-Life and career:...
attended the school for nearly a decade. Ažbe remained the sole instructor, except for a brief period in 1899–1900 when he hired Igor Grabar
Igor Grabar
Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar was a Russian post-impressionist painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art. Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich...
as an assistant. Long-established competitors, the Munich Academy and the Imperial Academy of Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
in Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, recognized Ažbe school and recommended it as a preparatory or "refreshment" course.
In 1904 Ažbe, a lifelong smoker, developed throat cancer and by the spring of 1905 he could hardly swallow food. Matej Sternen noted that the feeling of near death was obvious to all witnesses. Ažbe agreed to a surgery that passed without immediate complications, but on August 5 or 6, 1905 Ažbe died.
The public transformed a sad but ordinary and expected event into a melodramatic
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
urban legend
Urban legend
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...
. Leonhard Frank
Leonhard Frank
Leonhard Frank was a German expressionist writer. He studied painting and graphic art in Munich, and gained acclaim with his first novel, The Robber Band...
, who studied with Ažbe in 1904, reproduced the legend in Links, wo das Herz ist (1952): "Nobody ever saw his paintings. Nobody knew if he ever painted at all. Nobody knew his past. One chilly December night, intoxicated with cognac, he fell asleep in the snow. He was found dead in the morning. Nobody knew where he had come from." A similar story was retold by Mikhail Shemyakin.
The school of Anton Ažbe survived its founder and existed until the onset of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
.
Personality
Modern understanding of Ažbe's personality is based on the interpretation of biased and conflicting statements made by his alumni. Ažbe never wrote for the public and never attempted to formulate his own teaching methods on paper. His letters to Alois were destroyed according to the family's will; the rest of his archive contained only business papers. The only evidence of Ažbe's own handwriting is limited to three postcards and a letter to Sternen.It is not known if Ažbe ever had a personal life; he himself mentioned that he was engaged twice, and both marriage attempts failed. There was some bond between him and Kathi Kobus, owner of the Simpli pub, but they both took the secret of this relationship to their graves. According to Sternen, he was consumed by a mysterious personality split that drove him into binge drinking
Binge drinking
Binge drinking or heavy episodic drinking is the modern epithet for drinking alcoholic beverages with the primary intention of becoming intoxicated by heavy consumption of alcohol over a short period of time. It is a kind of purposeful drinking style that is popular in several countries worldwide,...
and slovenly appearance. Likewise, Kandinsky wrote that Ažbe's apparently unremarkable life was itself a mystery.
Physically, Ažbe was not a dwarf
Dwarfism
Dwarfism is short stature resulting from a medical condition. It is sometimes defined as an adult height of less than 4 feet 10 inches , although this definition is problematic because short stature in itself is not a disorder....
but still a man of a very short and irregular stature. Niko Zupanič described him as having unusually short and weak legs, with a twisted upper spine. His head combined a large cranium with a disproportionately narrow face. Igor Grabar
Igor Grabar
Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar was a Russian post-impressionist painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art. Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich...
noted that his wide forehead was covered with a web of red pulsing veins; the rest of the face was uniformly red, as if in a fever; at the age of 33 Ažbe seemed to be at least forty years old. He groomed his long chestnut moustache to the style of Wilhelm II. He always wore black, and of the best make; in winter his attire was complete with a tall oriental karakul hat.
The oddly shaped and expensively (if not tastelessly) dressed schoolmaster, slowly walking with a cane and always smoking, became a target of tabloids and cartoonists. Boys taunted him on the streets, shouting "Atzpe! Atzpe!" (incorrectly pronouncing Slovenian Ažbe in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
). Ažbe's own German was not perfect either; he, particularly, abused the word nähmlich ("namely", "that is...") and was called "Professor Nähmlich". He normally spoke German in Munich but used Slovenian language
Slovenian language
Slovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. It is the first language of about 1.85 million people and is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union...
in a Slavic company.
Ažbe never had a proper home, sleeping on an untidy sofa in a workshop filled with his students' paintings.
He always painted in his studio and never ventured into open air painting. Ažbe frequently spoke of his planned future masterpieces, none of which moved past the sketch stage. He left Munich only once, visiting Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
in 1897; otherwise, his life revolved between the school and local pubs. Their owners regularly allowed a drunken Ažbe to sleep on their premises. With age he became more and more sedentary and replaced his daily walkouts with a circle ride on a tram
Tram
A tram is a passenger rail vehicle which runs on tracks along public urban streets and also sometimes on separate rights of way. It may also run between cities and/or towns , and/or partially grade separated even in the cities...
.
Ažbe maintained ties with brother Alois but eventually severed all contacts after Alois' savvy wife reprimanded Anton for wasting too many matches lighting his cigars. The housewife's frugality
Frugality
Frugality is the quality of being frugal, sparing, thrifty, prudent or economical in the use of consumable resources such as food, time or money, and avoiding waste, lavishness or extravagance....
was completely alien to Ažbe, who never hesitated offering free tuition to students in need and lending them cash. An obituary noted that "he was a man of almost proverbial modesty... one of the most original and best-known personalities of Munich."
Ažbe as a creator
Loyal students Igor Grabar and Dmitry Kardovsky noted portraits by Ažbe for his "superb drawing" marred by dry, if not dull, paint technique. Modern critics divide over Ažbe's significance as a painter, not in the least because his surviving undisputed legacy is limited to twenty-six works. Eleven of these are early paintings and classroom studies from his college years. Only four paintings, dated from 1890 to 1903, can be considered mature art influenced by the Munich Sezession. The largest and most complex of these, The Village Choir, has been irreversibly damaged by a botched restoration. Photographs and memoirs testify to the existence of his other works, now lost or hidden in private collections.Lack of hard evidence prompted conflicts among historians and critics, further aggravated by the politics of the former Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
and its successor states. Baranovsky and Khlebnikova noted that by the end of the twentieth century, Ažbe the creator has become a myth, just like Ažbe the person became a legend after his death.
Frantz Stele (1962) and Peg Weiss (1979) have extensively studied Ažbe's relationships with the emerging avantgarde art and mature impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
, and considered Ažbe to be a forerunner of modernist art, a link between Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
and Kandinsky. Both studies, in partucular Weiss', were rejected by Tomaž Brejc who reasoned that any parallels between Ažbe and Cézanne are moot because Ažbe never mastered Cézanne's technique and there is no evidence that he ever attempted it.
Ažbe as a teacher
Supporters (Igor Grabar) and opponents (Mstislav DobuzhinskyMstislav Dobuzhinsky
Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky or Dobujinsky was a Russian-Lithuanian artist noted for his cityscapes conveying the explosive growth and decay of the early twentieth-century city....
) of Ažbe training system agree that it relied, at least in the beginners' classes, on two paramount ideas: the Main Line and the Ball Principle (German: Kugelprinzip). Ažbe discouraged beginners from focusing on minor details, instead forcing them to build the image around one bold "Main Line". He enforced drawing in black charcoal that enabled quick and radical corrections of the students' work. Dobuzhinsky admitted that these intrusions into his early work were an eye-opener, "an excellent tool against dilletante, myopic copying of reality..." although for many students it spelled their end as painters: overwhelmed by the "Main Line", they did not dare to step over it and "beef it up" with relevant details.
The Ball Principle, in its most practical application, portrait, stipulated that a human head is simply a sphere; reproducing lighting of a human head follows the same rules as reproducing a plaster ball. Facial features in this systems are merely protrusions and cavities of the ball's surface. Once the student mastered these basics, Ažbe carefully led him to a different interpretation, that of a head as a polyhedron
Polyhedron
In elementary geometry a polyhedron is a geometric solid in three dimensions with flat faces and straight edges...
composed of flat surfaces and sharp ridges – in Dobuzhinsky's opinion, a precursor to cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
.
Ažbe, himself a master of human anatomy, enforced rigorous training in this subject, from nude figure drawing
Figure drawing
In art, a figure drawing is a study of the human form in its various shapes and body postures - sitting, standing or even sleeping. It is a study or stylized depiction of the human form, with the line and form of the human figure as the primary objective, rather than the subject person. It is a...
to attending autopsies
Autopsy
An autopsy—also known as a post-mortem examination, necropsy , autopsia cadaverum, or obduction—is a highly specialized surgical procedure that consists of a thorough examination of a corpse to determine the cause and manner of death and to evaluate any disease or injury that may be present...
. Igor Grabar, who approved this approach, recalled that in the process he memorized all human muscles and bones by heart to the point where he easily reproduced them in plaster with closed eyes. Vasily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
, on the contrary, dreaded figure drawing
Figure drawing
In art, a figure drawing is a study of the human form in its various shapes and body postures - sitting, standing or even sleeping. It is a study or stylized depiction of the human form, with the line and form of the human figure as the primary objective, rather than the subject person. It is a...
sessions: "I quickly encountered a constraint upon my freedom that turned me into a slave, even only temporarily in a new guise – studying from a model.
Two or three models 'sat for heads' or 'posed nude'. Students of both sexes and from various countries thronged around these smelly, apathetic, expressionless, characterless natural phenomena who were paid fifty to seventy pfennig
Pfennig
The Pfennig , plural Pfennige, is an old German coin or note, which existed from the 9th century until the introduction of the euro in 2002....
an hour...
the people who were of no concern to them... they spent not one second thinking about art."
Kandinsky, in his mature years, stayed aside from portraiture or nude figures, and his few rare examples were "featureless, weightless and transparent, a mere cipher without substance" – an opposite of Ažbe's own intentions. Yet, Kandinsky also appreciated Ažbe's view that no theory and no set of rules should subdue the artist's will, and quoted Ažbe: "You must know your own anatomy but in front of an easel
Easel
An easel is an upright support used for displaying and/or fixing something resting upon it.-Etymology:The word is an old Germanic synonym for donkey...
you must forget it".
Painting in colour was a distant target that required prerequisite mastery of line, shape and anatomy. All memoirists noted Ažbe's aversion to mixing paints on a palette; instead, he recommended painting with raw paints and wide brushes. A wide brush covered with layers of different paints could, according to Ažbe, paint a human forehead in a single powerful stroke, a skill that required years of rigorous, sometimes exhausting, training. Ažbe frequently compared a proper oil painting to a diamond
Diamond
In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...
: raw paints must retain their independence, like the facets of a gem. Ažbe himself adopted this style, later called "crystallization
Crystallization
Crystallization is the process of formation of solid crystals precipitating from a solution, melt or more rarely deposited directly from a gas. Crystallization is also a chemical solid–liquid separation technique, in which mass transfer of a solute from the liquid solution to a pure solid...
of colour", only in the middle of 1890s. While Igor Grabar praised this style and elevated it to a level of a whole system developing in parallel to impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
, Dobuzhinsky (who never mastered the power stroke) called it "an artful magicians' trick... colourful but greasy painting devoid of its essence, the 'tone'."
Notable alumni
In chronological order, by year of admission:- Rihard JakopičRihard JakopicRihard Jakopič was a Slovenian painter. He was the leading Slovenian Impressionist painter and theoretician. Together with Matej Sternen, Matija Jama and Ivan Grohar, he is considered the pioneer of Slovenian impressionist painting.- Life :Jakopič was born in Ljubljana, then part of the...
(1892–) - Ludvík KubaLudvík KubaLudvík Kuba was a Czech landscape painter, musician, writer, professor in the Academy of Fine Arts. He was a representative of the Late-Impressionism and he collected folk traditions.-Life:...
(1895–1904) - Ivan GroharIvan GroharIvan Grohar was a Slovene Impressionist painter. Together with Rihard Jakopič, Matej Sternen and Matija Jama, he is considered one of the leading figures of Slovene impressionism in the fin de siecle period.- Life :...
(1896–) - Igor GrabarIgor GrabarIgor Emmanuilovich Grabar was a Russian post-impressionist painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art. Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich...
(1896–1901) - Alexej von JawlenskyAlexej von JawlenskyAlexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association , Der Blaue Reiter group and later the Die Blaue Vier .-Life and work:Alexej von Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, a town in Tver...
(1896–1905) - Dmitry KardovskyDmitry KardovskyDmitry Kardovsky was a Russian artist, illustrator and stage designer.-Biography:He was born near Pereslavl-Zalessky in the Yaroslavl province. After studying law at Moscow University, he then studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg from 1892, under Pavel Chistyakov and Ilya Repin...
(1896–1900) - Marianne von WerefkinMarianne von WerefkinMarianne von Werefkin , born Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina , was a Russian-Swiss Expressionist painter.-Life and career:...
(1896–1905) - Matija JamaMatija JamaMatija Jama was a Slovene painter. Together with Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar and Matej Sternen, he is considered among the best representatives of Impressionism in the Slovene Lands.- Life :...
(1897–) - Vasily Kandinsky (1897–1899)
- Yelena Makovskaya (1897–1899)
- Pavel Shmarov (1897–1898)
- Matej SternenMatej SternenMatej Sternen was a leading Slovene Impressionist painter.Sternen was born in Verd, now part of the Carniolan municipality of Vrhnika, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He attended the secondary school in Krško and attended technical school in Graz between 1888 and 1891...
(1897–1905) - Ivan BilibinIvan BilibinIvan Yakovlevich Bilibin was a 20th-century illustrator and stage designer who took part in the Mir iskusstva and contributed to the Ballets Russes. Throughout his career, he was inspired by Slavic folklore....
(1899) - Olga Della-Vos-KardovskayaOlga Della-Vos-KardovskayaOlga Lyudvigovna Della-Vos-Kardovskaya was a Russian painter and graphic artist. From 1891 until 1894 she studied at the Schneider School in Kharkov; from 1894 to 1899 she was a student at the Academy in Saint Petersburg. She went to Munich to study at Anton Ažbe's school, staying there from...
(1899–1900) - Mikhail Shemyakin (1900–1902)
- Mstislav DobuzhinskyMstislav DobuzhinskyMstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky or Dobujinsky was a Russian-Lithuanian artist noted for his cityscapes conveying the explosive growth and decay of the early twentieth-century city....
(1899–1901) - Oleksandr MurashkoOleksandr MurashkoOleksandr Murashko was a Ukrainian painter.-External links:*...
(1901) - Kuzma Petrov-VodkinKuzma Petrov-VodkinKuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin, was an important Russian and Soviet painter and writer.-Early years:...
(1901) - David BurliukDavid BurliukDavid Davidovich Burliuk was a Russian avant-garde artist of Ukrainian origin , book illustrator, publicist, and author associated with Russian Futurism...
and Vladimir Burliuk (1903) - Leonhard FrankLeonhard FrankLeonhard Frank was a German expressionist writer. He studied painting and graphic art in Munich, and gained acclaim with his first novel, The Robber Band...
(1904) - Eugeniusz ŻakEugeniusz ZakEugeniusz Zak was a Polish artist.-Life:Eugeniusz Zak was born to a family of assimilated Polish Jews in Mogilno, Minsk Governorate . As a boy he moved to Warsaw, where he graduated from a non-classical secondary school...
(1903–1904) - Oskar HermanOskar HermanOskar Herman was a Croatian Jewish painter. He was one of the group of Croatian artists known as the Munich Circle, who had a strong influence on modern art in Croatia.-Biography:...
(1904) - Josip RačićJosip RačićJosip Račić was a Croatian painter in the early 20th century. Although he died very young , and his work was mostly created when a student, he is one of the best known of the modern Croatian painters...
(1904) - Konstantin Dydyshko (1905)
- Abraham Manevich (1905)
After the death of Anton Ažbe the school trained a group of Estonian
Estonians
Estonians are a Finnic people closely related to the Finns and inhabiting, primarily, the country of Estonia. They speak a Finnic language known as Estonian...
painters: Johannes Greenberg, Anton Starkopf, and Ado Vabbe.
Sources
- Victor Baranovsky, Irina Khlebnikova (2001) (in Russian). Anton Ažbe i hudozhniki Rossii (Антон Ажбе и художники России). Moscow State UniversityMoscow State UniversityLomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...
. ISBN 9619093607. - Shulamith Behr (2000). Veiling Venus: gender and painterly abstractions in early German modernism, in: Katie Scott, Caroline Arscott (editors) (2000). Manifestations of Venus: art and sexuality. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719055229, ISBN 9780719055225.
- Konrad Boehmer (1997). Schönberg and Kandinsky: an historic encounter. Taylor & Francos. ISBN 9057020467, ISBN 9789057020469.
- Igor GrabarIgor GrabarIgor Emmanuilovich Grabar was a Russian post-impressionist painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art. Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich...
. Avtomonografia (Автомонография) (in Russian). 2001 edition: Respublika, Moscow. ISBN 5250017894. - Dirk Heisserer (2008) (in German). Wo die Geister wandern: Literarische Spaziergänge durch Schwabing. C.H.Beck. ISBN 3406568351, ISBN 9783406568350.
- Peter Howard Selz (1974). German expressionist painting. University of California Press. ISBN 0520025156, ISBN 9780520025158.
Further reading
- Katarina Ambrožič (1988) (in German). Wege zur Moderne und die Ažbe-Schule in München. Recklinghausen: Bongers. ISBN 3764703881.
- Bernd Fäthke (1988) (in Germam). Im Vorfeld des Expressionismus. Anton Azbe und die Malerei in München und Paris. Wiesbaden: Verlag des Institutes für Bildende Kunst. ISBN 3926899018.
- Marijan Tršar (1991) (in Slovene). Anton Ažbe. Ljubljana: Založba Park.
- Peg Weiss (1979). Kandinsky in Munich: the formative Jugendstil years. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691039348, ISBN 9780691039343 (1985 edition: ISBN 0691003742, 9780691003740).