Karl Bauer: The Depth of Being
An art and cultural historical look at the artist on the occasion of his 120th birthday
“Simultaneously with the irreparable breakdown of tradition (note: the tradition of craftsmanship in the previous (19th) century), the entire art scene changed: people wanted to be free in art and forgot that freedom also means loneliness. Today, the development has reached a point where there seem to be no fixed points at all. One often has the impression of a battle of everyone against everyone”. In the 1975 essay “Thoughts on the Situation of Art in Our Time,” Karl Bauer (born 1905 in Graz – died 1993 in Klagenfurt) describes his view on art at a mature point in his life. In contrast to highly abstract painters, or painters who want to primarily express emotional states or to draw attention to the medium of paint itself, Bauer uses paint in the way most beloved in the canon of art history: as a tool for visual description. Paint is to Karl Bauer what words are to a writer or notes are to a musician.
This is understandable, as music and text (poetry, philosophy) have been important his entire life long. His mother had a grand piano, and sang in the church choir. His father played the double bass, his older brother the violin. When the family made “house music”, Karl Bauer preferred to appreciate it from his seat under the piano, listening and and contemplating. His entire life long Bauer maintained an intense love of music, and listened to music as he painted. Already as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, music played an important role in his circle of fellow students. Bauer purchased a gramophone in order to be able to hear music at will. He had a predilection for the composer Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) and the poetry of Eduard Mörike (1804-1875) that Wolf set to music. Karl Bauer was delighted that he was able to make the acquaintance of Hugo Wolf’s sister.
His admiration of Mörike was so great, that the name of his daughter, art historian Rotraud Bauer (1941-2006), comes from the ballad of “Rotraut, beautiful Rotraut” (1838). Eduard Mörike wrote: “What is the name of King Ringang’s little daughter? Rotraut, beautiful Rotraut”. Mörike lived during the transition from Classicism and Romanticism to the bourgeois Biedermeier period. This was a time of great upheaval, yet his texts focus on everyday life. He dealt with the environment in which he lived, Lake Constance and Swabia. In his poems, he described an idyll. But he went beyond the everyday and created Orplid, his own literary fantasy world. A world in which gods and demons, nature, and the security of a world that he had lost with progress, technological developments, and political innovations still existed. Karl Bauer is not unlike the great German poet that he admired. He drew his inspiration from the landscape (Fig. 1) where he lived, in Carinthia, and used mostly the people in his friend and family circle as the models that he based his figures on. He also created many of his strongest and most enduring works in “another” world, but this world was not one of his imagination. Karl Bauer’s most well-known artworks were commissions for the Catholic Church, full of angels, saints and holy persons of Christianity, Maria and Christ himself (Fig. 2).
His canvases are quiet vignettes, almost like painted soft-focus snapshots, that open up deep seated levels of emotion and reflection in the viewer. Neither his portraits nor his landscapes are straightforward depictions of their subjects. His figures are characterized by being built up in blocks of color (Fig. 3). One has the feeling that the artist is placing the areas of paint on the canvas with the deliberation of a composer setting notes to the page to create a musical score. Each color area is has a separateness that insists upon being perceived individually. The color sections imprint themselves upon the eye in many instances as if they were building blocks of an architectural construction. These colors, presented as individual entities, still come together to form a harmonious whole. Yet it is first through the viewing experience, the time that the observer uses to assemble to different parts of the canvas in the mind’s eye, that is the elusive and perhaps defining quality of the work of Karl Bauer. Each canvas is suspended in time. To interact with the art of Karl Bauer is to embark upon a journey, to be transported just as one is transported by sublime musical melodies or melodious texts. The concept of time is one of Karl Bauer’s central concerns.
Karl Bauer was born in 1905, which places him in a group described in American cultural terms by the American journalist Tom Brokaw as the “greatest generation”. Bauer lived through some of the most drastic and shocking societal upheavals of the modern era, and, reflecting the name that the generation was given, went on to make a prosperous and successful life despite the turmoil that he witnessed and also participated in. As a child, Bauer lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At this time, it was said that the sun never set upon the British Empire. Abroad with Queen Victoria or at home with Emperor Franz Joseph, these long-serving European monarchs could be taken as symbols of stability and continuity. In his childhood, this societal security would be shattered with a violence that must have been close to unbearable. Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg throne is assassinated, the emperor started World War I, and died in 1916 during the war. The population of Europe is decimated, death rained from the skies for the first time in human history, as airplanes dopped bombs on both military and civilian targets. Over ten million military men died, over eight million horses and in total, 20 to 40 million people were killed in World War II. By the time Karl Bauer was 13 years old, the world that he was born into was either destroyed or transfigured beyond recognition. The aftermath of the war left Carinthia with uncertain borders. The Austro-Slovenian conflict – with Slovenia forming part of the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – meant that no process of demilitarization took place in the area where Karl Bauer lived.
One of the favorite anecdotes told about Bauer as a young artist is that he won a drawing competition at the age of fourteen. An exhibition of middle school drawings was held in the Klagenfurt Künstlerhaus, and the jury was made up of the associations’ members. His prize was a sketchbook with various types of paper. This was Karl Bauer’s first exhibition in this building. This building and this organization become one of the most important focal points in his life. These events took place around 1919.
In 1925 Bauer moved to Vienna to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Fig. 4). Apparently the professors were not so interesting, but the interaction with the fellow students was creatively enriching, and it was a fruitful period in Karl Bauer’s life. He was certified to teach middle and high school in 1929, and taught from 1930-34 in a school in the Diefenbachgasse Vienna’s 15th district. Bauer maintained close contact with his home city throughout this time, and became a member of the Klagenfurt Art Association in 1932. The Künstlerhaus Klagenfurt is one of the most beautiful Jugendstil buildings in Austria, a small but wonderfully proportioned building set in a beautiful expanse of green called Goethe Park, not far from the central church of the city (Klagenfurt main parish church St. Egid) and the Capuchin church and monastery. Bauer was the Vice-President of the association for many years, and one of its strongest proponents over decades. The artist Christine de Pauli (born 1946), also a member of the association, considers Karl Bauer as one of her mentors. She credits her own vigorous activity in the interest of the association in part as being modeled on Karl Bauer’s.
His main interest in art is in the transportation of feeling, mood and atmosphere. This makes Karl Bauer’s work so appealing, and complex. One is drawn into a fascination with the images he presents us, because they have the timeless lack of pictorial depth reminiscent of Byzantine art. The faces and landscape features that he creates, in their consistent verticality and denial of perspective that we have grown to consider the standard for art since the Italian humanist Leon Battista Alberti wrote De pictura (1435/36), present us with an enigma and one could almost say, a rejection. Karl Bauer does not allow us to enter his artistic universe so easily. He is a painter who invites the viewer to contemplate his works over and over again (Fig. 5), the same way that one reads poetry or literature that one loves repeatedly, or listens to musical compositions that one loves over and over again. At first glance, the work of Karl Bauer is like a closed door. The introspection of the viewer, the examination of one’s own memories and personal references, are the key that unlocks the door and grants entrance to Karl Bauer’s creative cosmogony. Author and philologist Alois Brandstetter (born 1938) said of the artist: “For me, Karl Bauer is Carinthia’s, indeed Austria’s, Rouault, a “convinced man” who convincingly continued the tradition, the long tradition of an art (…) – and if it really has been torn down or finished, then I would say: he has completed it”. Brandstetter aptly highlighted the similarities between Karl Bauer and the French artist. The Parisian Georges Rouault (1871-1958) was active in important circles of his day and one of the founders of the Salon d’Automne to promote young and unknown artists. He was an artist who used many different materials, but was not able to be placed in a particular category of a style or trend. Rouault also made many innovative works of religious art.
Despite the art of the 20th century encompassing a wide variety of work with very different attitudes and postures, much of it is quite emotionally removed – although this emotional distance is often disguised by the bright colors or exaggerated gestures that we associate with it. Karl Bauer’s self-contained paintings present us with a challenging conundrum. They are mostly static, the picture composition formal and primarily frontal (Fig. 6). Yet the pleasure or enjoyment that one receives from Bauer’s art is in the depth of emotionality that we can experience when viewing the works. This enjoyment, however, in contrast to the work of most commercially successful and/or well-known artists, must come from inside the viewer. The observer is the final piece of the puzzle necessary for an understanding and appreciation of the art of Karl Bauer. Bauer was a man of many secrets, and interacting with his art is a bit like being an archeologist of the soul. One must sift through one’s own depths and layers of memory, in order to finds ways to awaken the works that he has created to their full splendor. The art of Karl Bauer is a cross between the riddle of the Sphinx and the combination lock on a treasure vault. His art is unpretentiously ambivalent. The words of the German art historian Dr. Friedhelm Häring (about a different artist) apply aptly, however, to the oeuvre of Karl Bauer: “In this passing of fleeting time, his works of art remain valid, they are a mouth of truth”. On the occasion of the exhibition celebrating Karl Bauer’s 100th birthday in 2005, Franz Kaindl wrote about Karl Bauer that he is not a “modern” painter, but still a contemporary one. He does not rebel against social norms, but he does try to resist the banality of everyday culture, always searching for authenticity in his work. His work does not bear any naturalistic, post-impressionist or expressionistic traits, according to Kaindl, but Karl Bauer is immensely expressive in his color palette. He is not a conventional traditionalist, but he does stand in the great Austrian painting tradition. More than all of that, what really touches him is the spiritual aspect of art.
Individuals have different identities, and each individual has changing identities, chosen by himself or herself, according to the different life situations and roles taken on. In Western society in the mid-2020s, this kind of choice is more than encouraged. Changing one’s identity several times – randomly, capriciously – is almost expected. Identity is not seen as a fixed entity. It is fluid, to be designed, to be shaped, with a reflection of the cultural, social and historical context. Let us look at some of Karl Bauer’s life choices from the perspective of today. Between 1935-1938, Karl Bauer was occupied as a freelance painter and graphic artist, between Vienna and Klagenfurt, and also worked as an illustrator for newspapers in Munich. In March 1938 Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. In the same year in Munich, Karl Bauer married Leopoldine Koci from Vienna. He requested admittance to the party on May 17, 1938, which was granted and backdated to May 1. From 1938-1942 Karl Bauer taught at an upper school in Klosterneuburg. What is familiar to us today as an exclusive suburb north of Vienna in the state of Lower Austria became, as part of the Nazis’ expansion project “Greater Vienna”, the 26th district. After the war, Klosterneuburg returned to its former jurisdiction and Vienna returned to having 23 districts.
The family’s first of two children Rotraud, who became an art historian, was born in 1941. Their son Herbert was born in 1955, and went on to become a career military officer. Karl Bauer was drafted into military service in 1942, leaving behind his position as a schoolteacher. As a member of a supply company, he passed through southern Italy and was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces in Tunisia.
He spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp at Camp Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. During this time, Bauer was able to make use of his drawing skills, creating portraits of guards and fellow prisoners of war (Fig. 7), and experimenting with artistic techniques that had long preoccupied him (Fig. 8). He also taught drawing at the camp’s school, and several examples of the materials he produced during this period have been preserved.
Bauer illustrated scenes in a pocket Bible issued by the War Relief Services of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in New York. He adorned its margins with delicate, finely executed drawings (Fig. 9), which he used for contemplation and personal reflection. At the request of the camp administration, he also created a series of portraits of all US presidents.
After returning to Austria in 1946, Karl Bauer was once again confronted with the task of creating a new world for himself. While he was held as a prisoner of war in the United States, the war that had led to his captivity came to an end. On April 27, 1945, the Second Republic of Austria was proclaimed. Not yet forty years old, Bauer had already survived two world wars, death, destruction, chaos, the hardships of captivity, and societal collapse. In order to find his footing and build a successful life despite the profound experiences of his first four decades, he had to develop and rely on effective personal strategies. To shape the current life of the future required historical awareness. Karl Bauer returned to Klagenfurt to a wife and child, and needed a new understanding of social contexts and power structures. Striving for autonomy and freedom, Karl Bauer used his skills as an artist and his profound understanding of human nature, honed from his experiences, to create a life and body of work as an independent artist. His journey through his own “heart of darkness,” as the novelist Joseph Conrad described it, led him, on the one hand, through service to the artistic community, which he rendered through his involvement in art organizations, and on the other hand, through service to the highest ideals of humanity, as expressed in the commissions he carried out for the Catholic Church. This journey did not mean for Karl Bauer a lingering in hopeless darkness, but rather a courageous confrontation with existential questions and the depth of being.
Already a member of the Carinthian Art Association since 1932, upon his return to Klagenfurt Karl Bauer became an absolute champion of the organization, participating in exhibitions, spending time in the café when it was a legendary meeting spot in the Klagenfurt social scene, and mentoring young artists. From its founding in 1949, Karl Bauer was also a long-standing member of the board of the Carinthian branch of the Professional Association of Visual Artists in Austria. He balanced his time working individually in his studio with his activities in organizations and groups, dedicated to collective action to advance and promote art in society. Therefore, it seems understandable that Karl Bauer would be attracted to making art for the Church, and that those in the Church looking for artists would find him to be an ideal candidate to illustrate scenes from the Bible in a way that the beauty of the suffering and the ultimate triumph over it would be palpable for a wider audience. Rotraud Bauer explained, “My father enjoyed spending time in this spiritual limbo, where the earthly paradise is clearly perceptible, and a hint of transience can be sensed. He was very familiar with the painful beauty and uplifting sadness of this world and of our existence”.
What does Karl Bauer present us with? Contemporary social media saturated society has declared that a quality of “authenticity” is the important aspect of almost anything being presented to the public. In the arts, the measurement parameter of “quality” has been replaced by “authenticity”, ideas about excellence have given way. The measurement of success or even the intrinsic value of an art or entertainment offering is not whether it is beautiful or aesthetic, but rather, how authentic is it perceived to be. Karl Bauer painted in the canonical way: oil on canvas, standing in front his workspace on the easel, in the spirit of the Old Masters (Fig. 10). The seeming simplicity of his renderings can seduce the viewer into forgetting how much effort, practice, precision and loving attention to detail is being demonstrated on each canvas. He used mosaic and stained glass (Fig. 11 and12) for his commissions for the Catholic Church, glad to work with the artisans who caried out his designs in these materials, and to thus help keep the knowledge and skills of these artistic traditions available for future generations. In addition to his work on the group or societal level in art associations, he also did individual art instruction and mentoring. One of his most accomplished student was Karin Bauer, who spent about 10 years (1983 until his death) taking private art instruction in painting with oil and egg tempura in his studio. She is not only a psychologist, who worked for most of her career for the Catholic diocese in Innsbruck, she was also his daughter-in-law and mother of his only granddaughter. It is a tribute to the quality of Karl Bauer’s instruction that helped her to find her own artistic voice. Her works are unlike his in almost every way. Karin Bauer paints boldly expressive washes of bright color that could almost be seen as the flip side of the coin to what he attempts to do on canvas, the slow and painstaking building up of almost impenetrable layers of paint.
Karl Bauer’s granddaughter, Eva-Sophie, is the editor of this catalogue volume. In a touching echo of history, she gave birth in 2017—also on February 14—to his great-granddaughter, Emma-Katharina Valentina, exactly 112 years after Karl Bauer’s own birth on Valentine’s Day.
Karl Bauer carries his artistic vision across the media of painting, prints, drawings and mosaics. He create a world of pure imagination for us, where we can be free to indulge ourselves in the pleasure of enjoyment of inner-directed contemplation. The world of his creation is not innocent, there is a sense of brooding, waiting or foreboding in the scenes he presents us with. Although a masterful illustrator who is able to draw physiognomies with lifelike realism, in his mature, characteristic work, the faces of the figures are simplified to an archaic neutrality, like witnesses who silently experience but do not judge. The figures are waiting either to reveal something or to be revealed. They have the energy of dormant oracles (Fig. 13). The monumentality of the human shapes that Karl Bauer renders gives them characteristics that one associates with the features of landscapes, with trees or rock formations. Art historian Dr. Gerbert Frodl, former director of the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, said about his oeuvre: “The uniqueness and strength of Karl Bauer’s art lay in his ability to combine influences and memories – from Vienna and Munich – as well as his knowledge of current developments in art with his own high intellect and the specific characteristics of the Carinthian landscape – including the region’s lively painting tradition – to create a concentrated form of pure painting and intellectual depth”.
Karl Bauer was a distinctive figure in twentieth-century figurative painting. His work stands apart from prevailing movements, shaped instead by meditative calm, frontal compositions, and a deep spiritual undertone. Colour, for Bauer, is not a tool of illusion but a vessel of meaning; perspective gives way to timeless presence. Especially in his sacred work, he achieves a quiet union of human form and transcendence. His art does not demand—rather, it offers: an invitation to inward attention, and to the stillness where meaning begins.
Karl Bauer worked hard in this world, and was simultaneously free of this world. No one who survived two cataclysmic wars with a semblance of psychological and emotional health could perhaps ever be overly attached to the things of this world again. Karl Bauer demonstrates through his life’s work that he is aware of how much the world can be a double-edged sword. His art gives us the opportunity to join him in the exploration of our memories, fears and quiet hopes. Studying the life and works of Karl Bauer, and pondering his art, is an ever-renewing opportunity for us as viewers to challenge ourselves and our belief systems as we search for the elusive, final answer to all our questions. The greatness of Karl Bauer is that he indicates clearly to us that no definitive answer can be found. Yet though art, music, poetry, service to family, to friends, to communal organizations, and service to a higher, spiritual ideal in Christ, Karl Bauer shows us that the fabric of time can be rendered, loneliness can be overcome, and individual mercy and grace obtained.
© Dr. Renée Gadsden, 2025
Vienna, April 27, 2025