I subscribe to the Mutual Art website, where you can follow individual artists and be notified when their work is coming up for auction. This week, I learnt that a portrait by Franz Lerch will be sold by auction at the Dorotheum in Vienna on 23rd March. The picture, entitled simply ‘Bildnis eines Mädchens‘ , signed and dated 1930, is described as follows: ‘Black chalk, watercolour on paper, on Japanese paper on the box, leaf size 41.5 x 34 cm, somewhat browned, an old damage is visible on the right edge, framed’.
The picture is rather beautiful and, like most of Franz Lerch’s portraits from this period, I’m fairly sure that it’s another loving representation of Steffi, whom he would marry three years later.
Apparently the starting-bid for the auction is 700 euros (£692 or $740). If I had that kind of money to spare, I’d be sorely tempted to enter a bid, as this would be a lovely example of Franz’s work to hang on one’s wall. As it is, I hope that a gallery or museum makes a successful offer, as it would be good to know that the portrait will be on public display, rather than hidden away in a private collection.
Firstly: about the name. The ‘official’ first name of Franz Lerch’s wife was Stefanie: this is the way it was written on the record of their church-sanctioned marriage ceremony in 1937 (see this post). I’ve seen her name written as ‘Stephanie’ on an Italian website, but I don’t think that was a spelling she ever used. As far as we can gather, Stefanie shortened her name to ‘Steffi’ as soon as she was able: it’s how she signed herself on the pictures she created for Franz Cisek’s art classes in Vienna, when she was about 14 years of age (see this post). ‘Steffi Lerch’ is also how most publications and websites refer to her, whether they are discussing her own work or her relationship with Franz. However, much of the work she published after the Lerchs’ emigration to the United States bears the name ‘Steffie Lerch’ – with an additional ‘e’ at the end of ‘Steffi’. I assume this was a concession to American sensibilities, and possibly a conscious distancing from the more usual – and German – spelling.
Those post-emigration publications, as far as I can gather, were all children’s books. The Italian website that I referred to above – a blog about illustrated children’s books – usefully provides a comprehensive list of them, explaining that Steffi began illustrating children’s books in the mid 1940s and continued doing so until the early 1950s. The books that Steffi illustrated during these years were enormously varied. Perhaps the most famous was what I believe to have been her final commission: an edition of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, Child of the Mountains, which was published in 1954.
Another enduringly popular story which Steffi Lerch illustrated was Morrell Gipson’s The Surprise Doll, published in 1949, which many women readers recall as being a favourite book of their childhood:
Then there were Steffi’s illustrations for a book of poetry for children, and a book of party games:
However, perhaps the most intriguing of Steffi’s post-emigration publications, at least to my mind, were her two books for the Neumann Press described as being ‘for little Catholics’. One was entitled Hail Mary (1957) and the other Jesus and Mary (1951?) which apparently included three previously published stories: the lives of Jesus and Mary and the story of Fatima:
I’m not sure whether the life of Jesus in that volume is identical to that published separately as The Story of Jesus (1951), which was published by Little Golden Books and translated into French and possibly other languages as well.
There was also another book from the same publisher with a religious or semi-religious theme, which included a cut-out Christmas manger:
I’m curious about Steffi’s work on these religious – indeed, explicitly Catholic – books for children, in part because of what we know about her Jewish origins, and her father Samuel Krauss’ reputation as a prominent Talmudic scholar. Were Steffi’s motives in accepting these commissions purely economic, or were they a reflection of a dramatic change in her religious affiliation? I’m intrigued by this question because of the motive for my original interest in Franz and Steffi Lerch: and that is Franz’s lifelong friendship with his fellow artist, fellow refugee from Nazi Austria, and fellow former student at the Vienna Academy, Theodor Kern, whose life and work I’ve been researching for a number of years.
Kern was Catholic by birth, but underwent a conversion to a more active religious faith in his thirties, shortly before he left Austria, and much of his later work was inspired by that faith. Like his friend Franz Lerch, Theodor Kern was married to a Jewish woman – Frieda Frankl – who had been forced to flee from her native Germany when the Nazis came to power. Friedl was a convert to Catholicism, I believe under the influence of the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, who was also a friend and mentor to Theodor. Despite the fact that the Kerns and the Lerchs emigrated to different countries – England and America – we know that Theodor and Franz remained in contact throughout their lives in exile. Is Steffi Lerch’s work on a variety of Catholic books for children an indication that Franz and Steffi followed a similar spiritual path to Theodor and Friedl, or even that the latter exerted an influence on the religious views of the former? I would love to know the answer to these questions.
In purely artistic terms, I have to say that, despite the obvious charm of Steffi’s illustrations for these children’s books, whether religious or secular, and their success in appealing to children in America and elsewhere, I find them much less interesting than the pictures she produced as a teenager in Franz Cisek’s class in Vienna, which are of much greater aesthetic interest. I believe that, in addition to the children’s books described in this post, Steffi also produced other commercial work after arriving in America: I wonder if those commissions gave her the opportunity to spread her artistic wings rather more freely?
There seem to have been only two publications devoted exclusively to the work of Franz Lerch. One is a 1985 dissertation with the title Franz Lerch (1895-1977). Ein Beitrag zur österreichischen Malerei der Zwischenkriegszeit und deren Fortwirken nach 1939 (‘A contribution to Austrian painting of the interwar period and its continued influence after 1939’), by Matthias Boeckl, who is now a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. I’ve written to Professor Boeckl to enquire whether it’s possible to access a copy of his thesis, but he is currently indisposed.
Cover of ‘Der Maler Franz Lerch’ (1975), featuring Lerch’s 1929 painting ‘Mädchen mit Hut’ (Belvedere Museum)
The other publication, Der Maler Franz Lerch (‘The Painter Franz Lerch’) is the catalogue for a 1975 exhibition marking the artist’s 80th birthday. The exhibition was held at the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien in Karlsplatz (now part of the Wien Museum), in collaboration with the Österreichische Galerie (now housed at the Belvedere Museum). I’ve obtained a copy of the book and was disappointed to find that the information on Lerch included is quite minimal, consisting of a brief foreword by the directors of the two galleries and a three-page introduction by art historian Hans Bisanz, with the remainder of the space being taken up with a list of the 79 paintings in the exhibition, accompanied by monochrome reproductions of a small selection of them. This contrasts with the similarly titled volume devoted to Lerch’s friend and fellow artist Theodor Kern (1900 – 1969), also produced for a retrospective exhibition in 1975 (in his home town of Salzburg), which includes an extensive biography of the artist, by his nephew, the journalist and publisher Ernst Ziegeleder (see this post on my Kern website).
Nevertheless, given the paucity of available information about Franz Lerch, it’s useful to have even these brief texts. I’ve now translated both of them, and my English versions follow below. Firstly, the foreword by gallery directors Hans Aurenhammer and Robert Waissenberger:
The Austrian Gallery and the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna are jointly devoting an exhibition to the Viennese painter Franz Lerch on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Lerch, who left in 1938, worked in this city for a relatively short time, but his pictures were always on display, especially in the exhibitions of the ‘Hagenbund’ artists’ association. The fact that appalling external reasons forced the artist to leave his home country should not be taken to mean that the country forgot him. For years, the Austrian Gallery has endeavoured to keep alive the memory of important artists who emigrated from Austria in connection with the political events of 1938. In connection with this, reference is made to the exhibitions with works by Gerhart Frankl, Joseph Floch and Georg Merkel. Technical reasons prevent this exhibition from taking place in the rooms of the Austrian Gallery. The cooperation with the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna is also intended to indicate that in Franz Lerch one should see an Austrian who was primarily rooted in Vienna and was formed here as a painter. Exhibitions of this kind are intended to familiarise the public with artistic personalities whose work is of such great importance in the development of Austrian art of the 20th century that it should be remembered.
Photograph of Franz Lerch (1973) from ‘Der Maler Franz Lerch’
And here is the essay by Hans Bisanz:
‘…I hope my pictures prove
that I love what I paint.’
Franz Lerch
What Franz Lerch sees, he treats with love, but also with thoughtfulness and severity. With him, the joy of the motif is subjected to formal discipline, the variety of impressions must first be clarified to monumental simplicity, contrasting elements must be harmoniously integrated into the overriding composition. According to his own statement, he paints his pictures ‘slowly and by heart’. In front of the motif, only sketches are created as parts of a whole, which is then built up in the studio.
These basic features have retained their validity for Franz Lerch to this day. Precisely because they were never rigid dogmas for him and therefore could not restrict his development. Thus, despite the new impressions that were made following emigration and the Second World War, an anchoring in the Viennese period of the late 1920s and 1930s remains visible. The pre-war period also later resonates as a basic chord, this time that is conjured up in fashion and on the cinema screen today.
That time, with its cool elegance, which is admired once again today, was an epoch of great artistic fertility for Vienna, which stood in tense contrast to the economic and political disasters. The fire in the palace of justice and the world economic crisis were opposed by an optimistic belief in the construction of a new social order. Chaos was to be combated by an ideal harmony that ranged from balancing out social differences to the clarity and beauty of artistic forms.
Everyone should live, in a villa, in a high-rise that has just been built on Herrengasse, or in a community building. Rudolf Perco, one of the most famous community building architects, wrote an essay in 1932, ‘Towards the Coming Fifth Rebirth of Antiquity’. ‘The Greeks knew’, he wrote, ‘only two foundations: the natural man and number… The invasion of irrational orientalism brought them their downfall… Seen from afar, our world view and the Greek one are more correct than ever in perfect harmony…We, too, long for a happy synthesis between individualism and collectivism. After all artificial systems, modern man also wants to return to nature and to simplicity, to fit into the cosmos…’ In 1929 the neo-positivist ‘Vienna Circle of Philosophy’ published its programmatic ‘Scientific World View’. The philosophers, citing Mach and Wittgenstein, also strove for comprehensive clarity and demanded a unified science to the exclusion of metaphysics.
Perco made reference to Otto Wagner and significantly to Palladio and Schinkel, the painters of the ‘New Objectivity’ movement, which was particularly prevalent in Germany in the interwar period, referring also to antiquity and the Renaissance as well as to the clear forms of Cézanne.
Franz Lerch also studied Cézanne on a visit to Paris in 1927 and recently mentioned in a letter his long-standing admiration for Titian and Piero della Francesca. At the same time, he affectionately apologised for this purely personal choice: ‘…you other great masters, forgive me if I just forgot you…’ Already in contemporary reviews and essays of the 1930s, Lerch was associated with the ‘New Objectivity’ and above all with the German painter Karl Hofer, albeit, quite rightly, with immediate reservations. In 1931 Fritz Grossmann underscored the cautious acceptance of the ‘extremely one-sided tendencies’ of German ‘New Objectivity’ and French Surrealism in Austria and described both tendencies as ‘exaggerations of the basic principle of the new painting: the demand for large classical form and an emphasis on the psychic values of the work of art’. As early as 1930, Wolfgang Born pointed out that Franz Lerch differed from Karl Hofer in spite of all the similarities in the severity of the composition and in terms of a richer palette and greater spatial depth and plasticity. In connection with this modelling of corporeality in Franz Lerch, Benno Richard Fleischmann spoke of a ‘Holbein style transposed into the present day’.
Fleischmann was also aware that the ‘New Objectivity’ in its striving for a ‘rational, purely optical form’, which was obviously directed against Expressionism, harboured the danger of ‘dryness’. This danger, he wrote, was met in Austria by the development of a new, ‘purified objectivity’ that preserved organic vitality within formal rigour.
Franz Lerch is a particularly striking example of this filling of the formal structure with human and natural life. Here it becomes clear that in Austria so much of the dynamic of Expressionism continued to have an effect, especially in the case of Kokoschka, Boeckl and the Carinthian painters of the Nötsch School. In addition, interrelationships and efforts to achieve balance existed between the expressive exaggeration of form and the constructive affirmation of form even earlier, in the case of Schiele as early as 1913, probably under the impression of a Cubist exhibition seen in Munich. In the case of Kokoschka, after years of extreme artistic dissolution, a conciliatory striving for a harmonious calming of the lively form began to emerge in the Dresden pictures from about 1923, which extended to the Trudl portraits of 1931. In these portraits, with their classic balance and plasticity, a close proximity can be observed to contemporary portrait drawings by Franz Lerch, who, as Gerhard Schmidt wrote, ‘held the middle ground between Expressionism and New Objectivity’.
Franz Lerch, ‘Sitzendes Mädchen’, 1928 (Leopold Museum, Vienna)
There is another reason why Franz Lerch’s pre-war paintings should be assigned to the ‘New Objectivity’ with caution. In his pictures, the severity of the construction is softened not only by organic warmth, but also by a special personal grace, in which the hand of a music-loving person becomes recognizable. This grace characterizes not only his human figures, but also their architectural or landscape environment. Through the peculiarity of colours and the gracefulness of lines, the scene can acquire an exceptional or unusual beauty. Here Lerch’s art transcends constructive formalism towards the dreamlike, surrealistic side, which was represented in Austria in a moderate form by Gütersloh, Jene, Pajer-Gartegen or Gorgon. The writer Wolfgang Born pointed this out as early as 1930: ‘The gestures of his models are very characteristic. The way in which a girl, seen from the back, arranges her hair in a picture by Franz Lerch seems all the more lonely and shy as the figure finds herself surrounded by a mysteriously veiled architecture. This mood runs through all his pictures, even where the human figure as the carrier of expression is absent. Franz Lerch once painted a nocturnal street that leads backwards between silent house walls. The round disk of the moon pours pale light over the scene. Bare trees push one behind the other in the foreshortening. One feels that all life is lost in the eternal strangeness of the seemingly everyday.’
Franz Lerch, ‘Italienische Landschaft’, c.1930 (Wienneroither & Kohlbacher, Vienna). This and the previous image via Peter Chrastek, ‘Expressionism, New Objectivity and Prohibition: Hagenbund and its Artists, Vienna 1900 – 1938)’, Wien Museum, 2016
The art of Franz Lerch remained anchored in these basic features, which at the same time clarifies his central position in Austrian painting of the interwar period, even though it experienced an enrichment of the expressive possibilities through the addition of new impressions. ‘He was less influenced by the fundamental change of location than might have been feared’, wrote Gerhard Schmidt and at the same time cited the preoccupation with post-cubist painting by John Marin as an example of the absorption of new impressions in the USA. In general, the move to New York, forced by external circumstances, was an opportunity for Franz Lerch to subject his art to a cosmopolitan revision. His further development shows a decline in the figurative and an increase in landscape, which grew into monumental coastal formations through his occupation with Edvard Munch. Reconciliation with Picasso, who used to ‘give nothing’ to Lerch, also followed. The openness to non-representational painting can now also be seen in an increased turn to sketches and large-scale abstraction. ‘Today the young are closer to me than the old.’
This further development must not be understood as a turning away from Austria, where after the Second World War and the previous enforced isolation a very similar general receptivity to new things developed. Moreover, Franz Lerch did not lose himself in the new, but only measured his own firmly established position against it, the importance of which must be recognised in Austria.
Franz Lerch and Steffi Krauss were married in Vienna in 1933 and, shortly afterwards, Franz took Steffi on what one source describes as a ‘wedding and study trip’ to Sicily. Franz is known to have destroyed his unsold paintings before he and Steffi fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, and one can only conclude that many of the works created as a result of that Sicilian sojourn were among them, since I’ve only been able to identify two so far.
Franz Lerch, ‘Sizilianisches Fischerdorf’ (owner unknown)
The two paintings are of the same Sicilian fishing village, seen from different angles. The first, which bears the title ‘Sizilianisches Fischerdorf’(Sicilian fishing village) was painted from a point low on the foreshore, among a group of rocks, looking back at a number of fishing boats beached on the sloping shore, with a view of the buildings of the village behind. There is a striking contrast between the deep blue of the boats in the foreground and the yellow, white and red colouring of the buildings, set against a pale blue sky.
Franz Lerch, ‘Blaue Boote vor rotem Haus’ (owner unknown)
The second painting, ‘Blaue Boote vor rotem Haus’ (Blue boats in front of a red house) depicts a view somewhat further up the same beach and this time looking across the sloping sand and past the blue boats to the large red building which can be seen in the upper right section of the first painting. Interestingly, whereas in the first painting this building has a rectangular doorway, in the second picture the artist has given it a curved head.
Theodor Kern, ‘Fischerhafen in Sizilien’ (Salzburg Museum)
Obviously, these paintings constitute different aspects of the same scene, perhaps even painted on the same day. Interestingly, as I’ve already pointed out on my blog about Franz Lerch’s friend and fellow painter Theodor Kern, the two paintings are almost identical to Kern’s ‘Fischerhafen in Sizilien’, in subject-matter, if not in style. If done from life, the pictures must have been painted from very similar vantage points. As I wrote on my Kern blog:
How can we account for this similarity? Could one of the paintings be a copy of the other, rather than being from life? Alternatively, was either Theodor Kern or Franz Lerch inspired by his friend’s work to visit the same Sicilian fishing village and reproduce the same scene on canvas? However, a third possibility suggests itself: that the two friends visited Sicily together and that both created impressions of this view on the same day: in which case, we can perhaps imagine Kern and Lerch sitting side by side at their easels on the beach, or perhaps on a jetty, exchanging ideas and comparingnotes.
However, undermining the latter theory is the fact that Theodor Kern and his first wife Christl Engelhart were in Sicily in 1930 – three years before Franz and Steffi Lerch visited – and that all of Kern’s Sicilian paintings date from this period. So perhaps we need another theory to explain the similarity between the two men’s paintings. Perhaps Kern had spoken to Lerch about his Sicilian trip, mentioning in particular the picturesque fishing village, and encouraging his friend to visit it. Theodor may even have shown Franz his own painting, which may have prompted the latter – maybe as a dare, or a challenge – to attempt to reproduce it. Or even to improve on it…?
Franz Lerch married Steffi Krauss at a civil ceremony in Vienna in April 1933, when he was 37 years old and she was 28. However, via the Vienna Catholic Church registers now accessible at ancestry.co.uk, I’ve found a record of what appears to be the ecclesiastical validation of their marriage four years later, in April 1937.
Extract from Vienna Catholic Church registers for 1937 (via ancestry.co.uk)
The German script of the ‘Trauungsbuch’ (wedding book) is difficult to read, and its use of obscure abbreviations doesn’t make things any easier. However, the validation seems to have been performed by a ‘Religionsprofessor’ (whose name is difficult to decipher), confirming the civil marriage that took place before a magistrate four years previously. The date of the original marriage is given as 8th April 1933, ‘geschlossene’ (literally ‘closed’, perhaps translatable as ‘sealed’?) before the magistrate in Vienna’s ‘Department 50’, and then on 10th April 1937 ‘nach kanonischen Rechte geschlossen’, presumably meaning confirmed according to canon law.
The name of the bridegroom is given as Franz Seraph Lerch, described as an academician and painter, born on 30th August 1895 in the parish of St Othmar, Vienna. The parish was in the Weißgerber quarter, at the northern end of Landstrasse, Vienna’s third district, just across the Danube canal from the Jewish district of Leopoldstadt, in Vienna’s second district, where I believe the Krauss family lived during Steffi’s childhood. Franz is said to be the son of Franz Lerch and Eleonore, née Süküp.
Franz’s address at this time, which unsurprisingly is also Steffi’s, is said to be 3b Große Mohrengasse, on the edge of Leopoldstadt. I wonder if this was close to Steffi’s childhood home, or whether in fact the couple lived with her parents when they were first married? 3b still exists today (see the photograph below), set back from the road behind gates, and now seems to be home to a fitness centre and possibly other business premises.
Franz’s age is given in the register as 41 and his religion as Roman Catholic, while his ‘Stand’ (status) fits neither of the form’s official categories of ‘ledig’ (single) or ‘witwer’ (widower). Instead, what appears to be an abbreviation for ‘civil verheiratet’ (‘civil married’) is written across the box.
The name of the bride is given as Stefanie Krausz (sic), age 32, born on 10th March 1905 in Budapest, Hungary, but having later moved to Vienna, the daughter of Dr Samuel Krausz and of Josefa Irene Tedesco. Steffi is also described as a painter (‘Malerin’), but unlike Franz, and despite her own studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, the abbreviation ‘akad.’ is not appended to her name. The only two religious categories allowed by the form are ‘katholisch’ and ‘evangelisch’, but as a Jew, Steffi was obviously neither, so the word ‘mosaisch’ is inserted in the latter category.
A note written across the document confirms that ‘the couple have hereby concluded their marriage, entered into before the Vienna magistrate on 8th April, 1933, in accordance with canon law.’ It also notes that ‘the oath of manifestation’ (?) was taken on 10th April, 1937.
The two ‘Beistände’ (witnesses?) to the event are said to be Maria Fischer, whose occupation is indecipherable, and Franz Rischka, a parish priest, resident in Pfarrhofgasse in the Landstrasse district. In the final column, under the heading ‘Anmerkungen’ (remarks), and under the subheading ‘Verkundet’ (announced or proclaimed), we learn that there is a dispensation ‘from all three (illegible word) against (obeying? obligation?) of the oath of manifestation’. I’m not sure what this means: were the couple dispensed from the obligation to appear in person to validate their marriage, or were they dispensed from the usual obligations relating to it, such as (for example) the need to promise to raise any children as Catholic?
Beneath this is a list of documents provided as evidence for the canonical marriage, which appears to include a baptismal certificate (presumably Franz’s) from St Othman’s church in 1901, a birth certificate (presumably Steffi’s) from Budapest, and confirmation of their civil ceremony before the magistrate in 1933.
I’m intrigued by Franz and Steffi Lerch’s motivation for having their civil marriage validated by the Catholic church. Was Franz particularly devout, or was this validation to please his parents? The description of Steffi’s religion as ‘mosaisch’ would seem to rule out a conversion on her part, certainly at this stage. Alternatively, given that this was April 1937, less than a year before the German annexation of Austria, was this a pragmatic move to protect Steffi from the growing threat of Nazi antisemitism, even though, with hindsight, we know that Christian affiliation or connections wouldn’t be sufficient to protect Austria’s Jews from deportation and death? It certainly wasn’t enough to save another talented Austrian Jewish artist, Helene von Taussig, who believed her conversion to Catholicism would protect her, but who was murdered by the Nazis in a Polish concentration camp.
Steffi Lerch, née Krauss, often sat as a model for her husband Franz. I reproduced his 1935 portrait of her in the first post on this site. Then there is the charming, and rather daring, double self-portrait, used as the header for this blog, in which the artist represents himself standing behind his young wife, cupping her left breast in his hand. Franz places himself very much in the background with his face in shadow, and there is little doubt that it’s the pretty, colourfully-dressed Steffi who is the star of the picture:
Franz Lerch, ‘Selbstporträt mit Gattin’, 1934 (Belvedere Museum, Vienna)
I’ve also come across two drawings which explicitly bear Steffi’s name. Both pictures, in which she is either wearing her hair long and loose, or else wearing a long head covering (as in the painting above) appear strikingly modern, and in the second, Lerch manages to capture his wife’s youthful beauty with just a few pencil lines:
Franz Lerch, ‘Steffi, sitzend’ (1932-33), private collection
Franz Lerch, ‘Steffi Lerch, Frau des Künstlers‘ (undated), private collection (via artnet.com)
There are many other pictures by Lerch which, though not naming her, would appear to take Steffi as their model, some of them from the years immediately before their marriage, which took place in 1933. Once again, the intimacy and sensuality of this first example has a decidedly contemporary feel:
Franz Lerch, ‘Schlafendes Mädchen’ (1930), Wien Museum
This attractive charcoal drawing, from the same year, has a similar subject, and may also be of Steffi:
Franz Lerch, ‘Ruhendes Mädchen’ (1930), private collection
The young woman in these two paintings also resembles Steffi, as seen in the named portraits, and it seems likely that she was the model for them:
Franz Lerch, ‘Junge Frau mit Kopftuch’ (1931), Wien Museum
Franz Lerch, ‘Mädchen mit Hut’ (1929), Belvedere Museum, Vienna
As I’ve written elsewhere, to this unsophisticated viewer, these pictures reflect the artist’s deep affection for his wife, as well as his sheer delight in her youthful beauty. Franz’s love for Steffi radiates from these works, and in a way, he makes us fall in love with her too.
Postscript
Having written this post, I realised I had been naive in my discussion of Steffi’s head covering in some of these pictures. I’d overlooked Steffi’s Jewish background, and the fact that, according to Jewish law, a woman must cover her hair after marriage, when in the presence of anyone besides her husband or a close family member. This would explain why, in Franz’s double portrait of the couple, in the paintings ‘Junge Frau mit Kopftuch’ and ‘Mädchen mit Hut’, as well as possibly in the drawing ‘Steffi Lerch, Frau des Künstlers’, Steffi’s hair is covered by a scarf, not to mention the hat covering her hair in ‘Mädchen mit Hut’, if indeed this is her. I suppose I had assumed that, given her cosmopolitan, art-world connections, Steffi Lerch was not a religious Jew, but I was forgetting that she was the daughter of a respected Talmudic scholar. Of course, this raises the question of Steffi’s (and indeed Franz’s) religious affiliation, something I find intriguing and plan to return to in future posts.
Franz Seraph Lerch was born in Vienna on 30th August 1895. His mother was Eleonore Sukup and his father, who worked as a bookbinder, was also named Franz Lerch. Franz junior painted this portrait of his father in old age:
Franz Lerch, ‘Der Vater des Künstlers’ (1934), private collection
This drawing is also thought to be of Franz senior:
Franz Lerch, ‘Porträt des Vaters?’ (1934), private collection
On leaving school, the young Franz Lerch attended a commercial academy, then worked for a time in the administration office of a building firm, before the outbreak of the First World War led to his conscription into the army. In 1918, when he was already twenty-three years old, Franz began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he attended classes taught by Josef Jungwirth, Karl Sterrer and Alois Delug (perhaps best known for purportedly rejecting Adolf Hitler’s application to the Academy), becoming one of Delug’s master students in 1922 and completing his studies in 1927.
It was at the Academy that Franz met and befriended the Salzburg-born artist Theodor Kern, who painted the portrait of Lerch reproduced below. As young and struggling artists in Vienna, both men would be supported by the writer and patron of the arts, Ida Zifferer Waldek.
Theodor Kern, ‘Bildnis des Malers Franz Lerch’ (1935 – 38), Salzburg Museum
After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, Franz Lerch undertook study trips to Paris and the Netherlands. In 1927 he joined the artists’ association known as the Hagenbund and remained a member until it was dissolved by the Nazis in 1938. Lerch also exhibited with the Vienna Secession. His receipt of numerous prizes and the purchase of his works by Austrian galleries meant that, from 1931 onwards, he was able to make a living from his art.
Franz Cizek was born in 1865 in the town of Leitmeritz on the Elbe River in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). When he was 19 he moved to Vienna and studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1885 Cizek rented a room with a carpenter’s family with many children. The young children loved to visit Cizek’s room, where he would give them drawing materials and encourage them to express their ideas. Without instruction and in this friendly atmosphere, Cizek witnessed a joyful self-discovery as these youngsters loved to make art. Cizek was truly impressed with the directness and purity found in these drawings and upon further study he learned that children, the world over, drew in very similar ways when they work in an unrestrained atmosphere working from their imagination.
During his own university study, Vienna was a hotbed of artistic activity. He was friends with many of the Vienna Secessionist artists and architects of the day; Otto Wagner, J. M. Olbrick, Koloman Moser, and Gustav Klimt were fellow artists. He shared with them his research and the work of his young students, and they were fascinated by the authentic expression found in these untrained illustrations. They encouraged Cizek to start his own school, and as a result of this encouragement, he soon applied to the educational authorities to begin his own practice. In his application he had stated a most simple mandate, “Let children grow, develop and mature.” The authorities did not immediately accept such a simplistic mandate, but with time and further development of his program, Cizek was allowed to open the Juvenile Art Class in 1897.
The doors to the Juvenile Art Class were open without charge to the children of Vienna, to work at their own free will. Children were interviewed and selected by Cizek, but not for their artistic promise or social standing. It was a place where children were respected as fellow artists. There were about 50 students in attendance each Saturday. Cizek had teaching assistants from his university classes at the School of Applied Art (Wien Kunstgewerbeschule), of which Erika Giovanna Klien was one. These younger artist/educators acted as assistants. Some would specialize in a specific media, be it embroidery or printmaking. Children were encouraged to explore a variety of materials: drawing with chalk, or pencils, cutting paper collages and silhouette cutting, wood and plaster carving, modeling with clay, embroidery, crocheting, etching and wood block printing and tempera painting. As Cizek would tell the children, ‘From every material, something creative can be made.‘
Cizek also discovered the process of linoleum block print, commonly referred to as the linocut. Linoleum was a fairly new material used for floor covering made of linseed oil, cork and wood dust and attached to a fabric backing. This was a highly effective material for young children to carve, making it easier to cut into the pliable surface than the traditional wood block. As a result of Cizek’s experimentation with the children, the success of the Linocut as an art form. Embraced by the Secessionist printmakers, the method expanded and traveled to Germany and France as the newest printmaking vogue of the day.
An interesting account by the American educator Mary Gutteridge of a visit to Cižek’s class in 1929 can be found here.
Photographs of Franz Cižek’s art class in Vienna (via researchgate.net)
Despite Cižek’s hands-off, child-centred approach, art historian Ruth Gooding argues that ‘a definite Cizek style did emerge, reminiscent of Austrian folk art with an emphasis on flat decorative surfaces and the repetition of motifs such as Tyrolean peasants, details of popular festivals such as Christmas and simple Catholic devotional images’.
These stylistic elements are clearly in evidence in the series of colour lithographs by students in Cižek’s class, collected in Christmas: pictures by children, published by Burgerverlag in Vienna in 1922 and later by Dent in London. The plates depict a variety of Christmas scenes, and at least two of them are by Steffi Krauss, who would have been about fourteen years old when she created them. The first depicts a family, in traditional peasant dress, gathered around a Nativity scene:
The rich colours, combined with the costumes of the figures, remind me of nothing so much as the Austrian-born artist Marianne Stokes‘ paintings of Slovakian peasants, from the tour of Hungary that she and her husband Adrian made in 1909 (see this post on my Theodor Kern blog).
In the second plate, of a girl with toys presumably given to her as Christmas presents, the main figure almost fills the frame, giving a distinctively Alice-like feel to the picture:
In addition to these colour plates, I’ve found another Christmas picture by Steffi, a monochrome print created in March 1919, of three children standing around a Christmas tree, with a Nativity scene beneath:
This print can be found in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Another version resides in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, alongside two further woodcuts by Steffi Krauss from 1920, both depicting traditional rural scenes, which wouldn’t look out of place as illustrations in a book of fairy tales:
Steffi Krauss, ‘Man and two children gathering firewood’
Steffi Krauss, ‘Old woman and boy shovelling snow’
It’s fascinating to see these early examples of Steffi’s artistic work, especially as very little of her adult work is in the public domain. As we shall see, her professional work as an illustrator of children’s books, after she and her husband Franz Lerch arrived in America, was in a very different and arguably less interesting style than these childhood creations.
Franz Lerch, ‘Portrait of the artist’s wife’ (1935), private collection
Stephanie Krauss or Krausz (the spelling varies in the official documents) was born on 10th March 1905 in Budapest, which at the time was part of the dual kingdom of Austria-Hungary. Her mother was Josefa Irene Tedesco (1872 – 1938) and her father was Samuel Krauss (1866 – 1948).
Samuel, the son of Max (Meir) Krauss and Fanny Kohn, had been born in the village of Ukk, in the county of Veszprém, a hundred miles or so to the west of Budapest. He studied at the rabbinical seminary and university in Budapest and taught at the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary in the city, where he achieved fame as a Talmudic scholar and expert on ancient Judaism.
Besides Steffi, there were at least two other children, both older than her. Marie Krauss, born in 1899, married a man with the surname Heimberg, but he would die early in their marriage, though not before Marie gave birth to a son, Ludwig Alvin (later anglicised to Louis Alwyn) in 1929. Marie qualified as a chemist and would work as a food analyst. Stephan (later anglicised to Stephen) Krauss, born in 1902, became a physician and medical psychologist.
In 1906, Samuel Krauss took up a new post, at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Vienna, and the family relocated to the Austrian capital. Here they remained until the death of Samuel’s wife Irene, and the Nazi annexation of their new homeland, prompted them to flee the country.
Franz Lerch, ‘Portrait of Samuel Krauss’ (1936), Leo Baeck Institute
The Krauss family emigrated to England, where Samuel managed to find work in Cambridge, which would be his home for the remainder of his life. Stephen, who seems not to have married, and the widowed Marie, as well as her young son Louis, can be found sharing their father’s address at 15 Leys Avenue when the England and Wales Register for 1939 was taken.
When Steffi and her husband Franz Lerch were also forced to escape from Austria, they would join Samuel and his family in Cambridge briefly, before travelling on to the United States.
Franz and Steffi Lerch 