Anton Filkuka - Buy or sell works
30 April 1888, Vienna (Austria) - 4 February 1957, Vienna (Austria)
Anton Filkuka was a Viennese landscapist, portraitist, and genre painter.
Anton Filkuka received his artistic training at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Siegmund L’Allemand and Christian Griepenkerl, among others. Further stations of his formation were the master schools of Heinrich von Angeli and Kasimir Pochwalski.
During World War I, Anton Filkuka worked as a war painter. He became successful very early in his career, making a name for himself particularly as a portraitist of Viennese society, with members of which he maintained close contacts. Among those who sat for him were Ignaz Seipel, Alma Mahler, and Wilhelm Kienzl, and in 1950 he painted the princely Liechtenstein family in Vaduz. There also exist numerous portraits of his wife Magdalena and their daughter, Eva Maria. Magdalena Filkuka posed as a model not only for her husband, but also for Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.
Although his commercial success was primarily linked to portraiture, Anton Filkuka saw himself more as a landscape painter. He found his motifs in the vicinity of his villa in Altaussee in Styria. As a genre painter, he depicted scenes from everyday peasant life. Anton Filkuka’s output, especially his landscapes and genre compositions, are to be assigned to the movement of poetic realism. His mostly subdued palette is a characteristic feature of many of his paintings.
In the early 1950s, Anton Filkuka was also active abroad: during an official state visit in Egypt he portrayed General Mohamed Naguib, the first Egyptian president, and his family; he also conceived a number of landscape studies and designed a poster for the construction of the Suez Canal.
During his artistic career, Anton Filkuka was awarded the honorary title of professor, the Gundel Prize, the Albrecht Dürer Medal in Gold, and the Prize of the City of Vienna.
Filkuka’s oeuvre comprises some 1,000 paintings and a multiple number of drawings. His paintings are preserved in Vienna’s History Museum and in various public collections, such as in Cairo, Stockholm, and New York.