Naturstudie XLV 1924

Karl Wiener made this ‘Nature Study’ using coloured pencils, likely sometime in the interwar years in Austria. It depicts a characteristically Romantic scene of forest meeting mountains under an expressive sky. Wiener’s naturalism takes on a new dimension when we consider his biography. As a Jew in Austria, his life was disrupted by the rise of National Socialism. While the urban avant-garde of Vienna was suppressed by the pro-fascist government from 1934 onward, landscape painting, and especially the kind that evoked a sense of homeland, was permitted and even encouraged by cultural institutions. One wonders whether a picture like this was purely an aesthetic exercise or if it was also a coded expression of belonging at a time when the artist’s place in the nation was increasingly precarious. We must use a range of historical resources to reconstruct the original context of this image, bearing in mind how cultural and political forces shape artistic production.