So why would I write about an artist whose work I don’t particularly like and whose politics I found a mixed bag at best, and pretty upsetting in some aspects? An artist who died about 2 week ago, forcing me to keep my snark at a minimum?

I tell you why. Arik Brauer (1929-2021) had a trait that I singularly admire: he did what he wanted in his pursuit of art as well as in life, in full defiance of the demands, criticisms or attacks by his contemporaries.

An Austrian Jew, he survived the Holocaust, in contrast to many of his family. He eventually settled in Vienna again after detours of living in Paris and Israel, where he met his wife. He was a singer, an architect, a painter, who engaged in the good fight for environmental protection and the odious fight against muslim immigration into Austria. His views of Islam as an evil force, however shaped by his experience as a Jew, even let him devote paintings late in life depicting what he understood to be the oppression of Muslim women.

During a time where abstractionism was believed to be the future of painting, he engaged in Fantastic Realism, drawing from myth and fairy tales, religious themes and the healing power of nature. As I said, not my cup of tea, but an unperturbed pursuit of what he saw as his best tool for expression. A mix of realism, surrealism and art nouveau, saturated colors and not a scintilla of fear to cross over the border of kitsch, it seems. Below is a short clip that shows a retrospective, no need to understand the German.

I think it is hard to begin with to know what we want to express and how we want to express it. It is harder in societies like ours that proscribe such structured trajectories from childhood, leaving little room to explore who you are in the constant competition for achievement. It is even harder when you are surrounded by people and movements who label you old fashioned or any number of derogatory terms. To pursue your own path without hesitation is something I envy.

Not that he didn’t have his fans, though. Among them was a couple, the Leopolds, who deserve their own little report one of these days, two ophthalmologists who collected work by Klimt, Schiele and any number of emerging artists in the 1920s, including Brauer.

Eventually their treasure found its home in the Leopold Museum – here, too, a light and a dark side closely connected. On the one hand they understood the artistic power of many of the Austrian painters they collected; on the other hand they used any means to get their hands on looted Nazi art, at least according to some pending law suits (and one that settled for $19 million, keeping a stolen painting in the museum.)

The Leopold Museum is part of Vienna’s Museum Quarter, depicted in todays photographs. It is an important museum, testament to collectors who also knew what they wanted – Zeitgeist be damned.

Music is by Brauer himself and one of his daughters, Timna Brauer, who is a renowned singer in her own right.