On January 4, a pillar of Vienna’s cultural scene, Arik Brauer, turned 90, beginning a year both of celebration and retrospection.
Whether as a painter, songwriter, costume designer, architect or environmental activist, Brauer is a true renaissance man who has made a lasting impression upon the city of his birth. Now, with Arik Brauer: All of My Arts, Vienna’s Jewish museum has chosen to celebrate the man in full.
He was born Erich Brauer in Vienna’s working class Ottakring district in 1929. His father, Simcha Moshe Segal, arrived in the Austrian capital, where he worked as an orthopedic shoemaker, in 1905 using false documents bearing the name Simon Brauer.
In April 1939, following the Anschluss and months before the outbreak of war, Segal took flight to Riga, hoping to bring the rest of family with him. But Nazi forces occupied Latvia in June 1941 and before war’s end he was murdered in a concentration camp.
My Father in Winter — Brauer’s haunting, surreal 1983 work — shows Segal, face turned downward, standing in the snow, wrapped in a blue shawl with a yellow star upon his chest painted as a flower, awaiting the inevitable.
Having survived the war in Vienna, which included months spent in hiding, Erich Brauer began his artistic career, winning a place at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.
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'My Father in Winter' by Arik Brauer (Photo: Sebastian Gansrigler)
Around the same time, he become politically active in the youth arm of the Austrian Communist Party , as was the case for many young Jews at the time before leaving in 1950, disillusioned with the pernicious influence of Stalinism.
At the Academy, Brauer became part of a pioneering new movement called the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. In opposition to the prevailing abstract trends of the time, it sought to pair the realist techniques of previous centuries with disorienting, unreal religious, natural or erotic symbolism.
This surrealism and fantastic realism defined his artistic style. Collected in the main room of Arik Brauer: All of My Arts, his paintings lean on Jewish stories and mysticism, as in his blood red depiction of Cain’s murder of Abel, as well as fables and environmental themes.
Until Brauer’s career began in earnest in the 1960s, he lived a nomadic existence. In 1954 he took his first trip to Israel where he met the love of his life, Naomi Dahabani. They married in 1957, the year Brauer changed his name from Erich to Arik.
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Arik Brauer pictured in the Vienna art academy in 1948 (Photo: Sebastian Gansrigler)
For several years after 1958 Brauer and Dahabani lived in Paris in a small apartment at the centre of the city’s artistic scene above Café La Contrescrape.
In 1963, Brauer and Dahabani bought and subsequently renovated a property in the artist’s Israeli colony Ein Hod, at the foot of Mount Carmel.
The following year, Brauer returned to Vienna, where he came an integral part of cultural life.
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A 1963 Arik Brauer self portrait (Photo: Sebastian Gansrigler)
He wrote and released songs written in Viennese dialect, whose vocabulary borrows from multiple languages including Hebrew and Yiddish. He was a set and costume designer for the Vienna State Opera. He was also a journalist, writing reports from Israel for the Austrian daily Kurier during the Yom Kippur War.
And Brauer also contributed to Vienna’s building heritage.
The Arik-Brauer-Haus at 134-136 Gumpendorfer Strasse, built between 1991 and 1994 in collaboration with the architect Peter Pelikan, is bedecked with ceramic murals whose motifs reflect Brauer’s fascination with nature and man’s search for harmony with it.
A concern for the environment is integral to the building’s design, replete with vertical and rooftop gardens.
Arik Brauer is, then, an artist of all the talents and All of My Arts is a wonderful summation of a working life that, with a new theatrical production and an illustrated book of Jewish jokes also out this year, is not over just yet.
“Arik Brauer: All of My Arts” runs at the Jewish Museum Vienna until October 20, 2019
