(Vienna 1895–1985 Rekawinkel, Northern Austria) ‘Trude mit Schleier’ (wife of the artist), monogrammed, dated CH 29, oil on plywood, 57.5 x 48.5 cm, framed, (K)

Exhibited and illustrated in the catalogue: Carry Hauser 1895–1985, Frauenbad, Baden near Vienna,1989, p. 74, no. 30 Provenance: private ownership, Vienna THE PAINTER, CARRY HAUSER Franz Theodor Csokor At the beginning of Carry Hauser’s career as a painter, there was an apprenticeship at the Kunstgewerbeschule, this temple to the Austrian Lukas Guild. Since from it issued almost everything that counts in the history of contemporary art in Austria. A Viennese artist, who wished to attend a state school before the war – or had to (since it was cheaper after all than a private teacher), had only one option if he wanted to be trained in a contemporaneous manner, something not on offer from the conservative Academy – the School of Applied Arts, the Kunstgewerbeschule am Stubenring, which was filled with all sorts of audacity. Its teaching methods were based on the free development of the artistic personality. There was, of course, a certain amount of danger there, where art was no longer imprisoned by purpose, but instead strove after the value of work for its own sake. There are applied art references in Kokoschka’s early work, for instance in the tapestry-like ‘Träumenden Knaben’. The highly gifted and too soon departed, Egon Schiele, never quite managed in his entire career to escape Caneva’s applied art complexes, and Carry Hauser also found it had to cleanse his pictures from his memories of the school of his youth. The bloody caesura of the war would at last rip out these strong roots. Five years of horrors of all kinds, a campaign which led him off as far as Asia – that freed him from the mosaic tendency with which Klimt and Kolo Moser were afflicted. From the start a romantic of the mind. Now he would follow his own authentic urge, completely and uninhibitedly, which would take him into the realms of the visionary. And from there – via a detour into sociological types – he arrived (‘for the time being’, let’s say, since the development of this highly gifted artist does not appear to have come to an end yet) at the religious. Carry Hauser’s creative sensitivity entered the world of appearances as an ‘anima candida’. He did not conceive of it as objectivity so much as a typifying spiritualisation of the concrete, as demonology around a persisting centre, which he has found in the idea of humanity and his eternal expression and symbol of the deity. His figures can be divided up (since landscape fascinates him but little) into those who still suffer physically and those who have refined their physical being into unearthly transparence and thus have transcended it. This is the Gothic way to God, this young artist’s path. His religious tendency is not satisfied with the blue flowers of the Nazarenes. It does not represent a flight from reality at all, such as was the case with Overbeck and his kind; Hauser has a true religious sensibility. And for this reason he is in no way deaf to the needs of the era and social outrage burns alongside his faith as a hot revolutionary protest in all his works. His work pleads for all the disinherited of this world. His saviour is the saviour of those who toil and are burdened, and yet is still the quarrelsome saviour who spoke the fearful words about the eye of the needle and the rich man and who could chase the moneylenders from the temple with a whip. Combative outrage and religious lyricism – they speak out of the great luminous colours of his paintings which are dominated by blue and yellow; invisible scaffolds stand behind them. His pictures are constructed, a cathedral of the heart, which knows itself to be linked to God and the World. Then this romantic artist senses his nameless antecedents in the medieval cathedral construction yards and their toiling and the way in which they were burdened by the nature and appearance of the whole of life, and all of their desires and suffering because of their knowledge of this uncharted deity who would only reveal his will to those who toiled and were burdened and yet were pure in heart. Published: Österreichische Kunst, vol. 1, no. 2, 1927 also seen cat. no. 1146