I’ve written before about Peter Chrastek, one of the main collectors and promoters of twentieth-century Austrian painting, and particularly of work by members of the Hagenbund, an association of artists who exhibited in Vienna in the early decades of the century. Theodor Kern was a member of the group from 1927 until the time it was dissolved following the Nazi annexation of the country. Professor Chrastek is a leading figure in the Friends of the Hagenbund, through which I made contact with him and his colleague Dr Manfred Götz.
In a previous post I mentioned Peter Chrastek’s book, Expressionism, New Objectivity and Prohibition: Hagenbund and its Artists, Vienna 1900-1938, which is an excellent introduction to the work of this important and often-overlooked group of artists, and which includes a page on the work of Theodor Kern. Recently I took delivery of another attractive volume, published in 2019 by Kunsthandel Widder of Vienna, entitled Sammlung Chrastek – Hagenbund, which is a comprehensive and beautifully-illustrated guide to Professor Chrastek’s extensive collection of paintings, consisting of over 700 works by more than 150 artists.
The page devoted to Theodor Kern includes reproductions of four works – three paintings and a lithograph – which I assume represent the extent of Peter Chrastek’s Kern collection. The three paintings, ‘Landschaft bei Paris’, ‘Vogelmotiv’ and ‘Aus der Toskana’ were featured in the earlier Hagenbund book, the last-named being the only one that I was previously aware of as belonging to Chrastek. They certainly reflect the dramatic changes in Kern’s style across the years, with the Paris and Tuscany pictures dating from 1934 and 1936 respectively, and the 1952 ‘bird motif’ representing the artist’s late, abstract style of the 1950s and 1960s.
The monochrome lithograph, ‘Familie mit Kind’, is dated 1930 and looks to me as though it belongs to Theodor Kern’s Sicilian period. It has much in common with the paintings and drawings of Sicily that I wrote about in this post, including those that I’ve come across in the private Smith collection.
Art lovers should be grateful to collectors like Peter Chrastek for preserving the memory of a generation of artists whose work was ‘cancelled’ by the Nazis and largely forgotten in the post-war period. He is performing the same kind of public service as the Salzburg collector Dr Heinz Böhme, whose Museum Kunst der Verlorenen Generation I had the pleasure of visiting two years ago, and who recently added a painting by Theodor Kern to his collection after seeing this blog and making contact with me.
Theodor Kern 