To mark the 100th anniversary of his death, a major retrospective at the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck is currently reassessing Franz von Defregger’s work Even as a child, Franz von Defregger (1835-1921) drew banknotes so deceptively real that an innkeeper fell for them. The artistic talent of the Tyrolean farm boy from the remote Ederhof was enormous. Defregger made it far in Munich. Ludwig […]
To mark the 100th anniversary of his death, a major retrospective at the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck is currently reassessing Franz von Defregger’s work
Even as a child, Franz von Defregger (1835-1921) drew banknotes so deceptively real that an innkeeper fell for them. The artistic talent of the Tyrolean farm boy from the remote Ederhof was enormous. Defregger went far in Munich. Ludwig II appointed him professor and ennobled him. In 1882, the painter and his family moved into a villa in Königinstrasse, built in the old German Renaissance style – as befitted a prince of painters. His order books were well filled. His clientele even included the Berlin National Gallery.
Defregger constantly reassembled the simple life, rustic and unadulterated, in his paintings: majestic mountains, lonely farms, fearless poachers and smart dairymaids, lads playing cards and taking their brides out to dance. Defregger delivered what the zeitgeist demanded. Karl von Piloty was his teacher at the academy. The history painter taught Defregger how to create a dense pictorial narrative. But there is a completely different, previously unknown side to the painter: the modern Defregger.
For the painter did not – as is generally assumed – remain isolated from modernism in France. Private, largely unknown works show a more unconventional, impulsive style of painting, with clear influences from the Barbizon School and a proximity to Impressionism. The Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck is now showing this on the 100th anniversary of the painter’s death (until May 16, 2021), thereby reassessing his oeuvre: between modernity and tradition, identity and image, myth and abuse.
The exhibition was conceived by Dr. Peter Scholz, curator at the Tyrolean Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, art historian and journalist Angelika Irgens-Defregger, wife of Franz von Defregger’s great-grandson, and Dr. Helmut Hess, Managing Director of the Richard Stury Foundation in Munich. For the first time in decades, the show brings together many of the well-known major works from Europe and the USA, places them in relation to modernism and illustrates how innovative many of Defregger’s works are.
For the first time, they are confronted with questions of identity and gender roles, for example, but Defregger the entrepreneur is also presented. The artist had discovered the then new market of art reproductions for himself. He earned more from reproduction rights than other artists from originals, as Helmut Hess researched. For example, Gustav Klimt sold a painting for 1,000 marks at the Glaspalast exhibition in 1901. Defregger received five times that amount for the reproduction rights to his religious subject “The Madonna with the Christ Child” from the Munich art publisher Franz Hanfstaengl.
The exhibition also focuses on the political charge of his history paintings and their posthumous abusive reception under National Socialism as well as the perspective on the rural way of life, traditional costumes and architecture. In this context, the article by PD Dr. Christoph Hölz, lecturer and deputy director of the Innsbruck Archives of Architecture, is highly interesting. Based on the painter’s birthplace, which burnt down in 1934 and was rebuilt in the same year and not reconstructed, he examines the motifs of East Tyrolean building culture in Franz von Defregger’s paintings.
Read more in RESTAURO 3/2021.
