Anton Faistauer - Buy or sell works
14 February 1887, St. Martin bei Lofer (Salzburg, Austria) - 13 February 1930, Vienna (Austria)
Faistauer is one of the most important exponents of Austrian Expressionism.
The son of a farming family from Salzburg, Faistauer was inspired to take up painting during his student years through a meeting with Albert Paris Gütersloh. He first studied privately before attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He left the Academy in 1909 to found the Neukunstgruppe together with Egon Schiele, Anton Kolig and Franz Wiegele, to protest the Academy’s conservative attitudes. He entered military service during WWI, organising war art exhibitions at Vienna’s Museum of Military History, together with Egon Schiele.
In 1918, Faistauer moved to Salzburg, where he founded the radical art group Der Wassermann with Felix Harta and other artists.
A major commission to decorate the newly built Kleine Festspielhaus in Salzburg with frescos was followed by further prestigious fresco commissions, and subsequently by international recognition.
The motifs for his painting were predominantly landscapes, still lifes and portraits, as well as religious themes.
He refused the offer of a professorship at the Vienna Academy in 1926. Even so, he returned to Vienna in 1927, although spending longer periods of time travelling, especially in Italy.
Faistauer also undertook a theoretical analysis of contemporary painting, publishing his treatise Neue Malerei in Österreich in 1923.
In contrast to many other artists of his time, Faistauer was concerned with further developing traditional Western painting. He felt an affinity with the work of Cezanne and was more similar in style to the artists of the Nötscher Kreis than to Klimt and Schiele, of whose work he was highly critical.
He became internationally famous during his lifetime, as evidenced by exhibitions in Hungary, Germany, the Czech Republic, England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.S.A.