Icon: enlarge
Arik Brauer (1929-2021)
Photo: Robert Jaeger / APA / picture alliance / dpa
His large oil paintings shine from the walls of important museums around the world.
Arik Brauer brought the stories of the Old Testament, dreams and heroic legends onto the canvas with great meticulousness.
The Jewish artist also openly addressed current grievances in society and politics and incorporated them into his works.
"When people are in misery, they develop a tremendous imagination," said Brauer about the origin of his creativity.
The all-rounder worked full of vigor and zest for life until the end.
Now the painter, singer and set designer has died at the age of 92.
Brauer survived the Nazi era in bitter poverty in Vienna and emerged from the horror without any displeasure.
"I fell on the buttery side of life, otherwise I would have been dead long ago. Why should I be bitter?"
Icon: enlarge
Arik Brauer in a recording from 2008
Photo: Christian Fürst / picture-alliance / dpa
According to his own statements, the cornerstone of his style were encounters with peculiar characters in his childhood.
Whether the one-legged alcoholic in the basement of his house or the man who swallowed frogs as an attraction and brought them back alive.
Together with his friends Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Rudolf Hausner and Wolfgang Hutter, he founded the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism".
The current, which is close to surrealism, became commercially successful.
She was often ridiculed in art circles.
In wooden sandals at the academy
The brewer, who was born in 1929 and was never a believer, grew up in a working-class district of Vienna.
He survived the last months of World War II, hiding in a relative's garden.
His father died in the gas chamber.
After the war, Brauer immediately went to the Academy of Fine Arts.
He didn't have any shoes at the time.
Just a pair of homemade wooden sandals.
That didn't bother him.
"I was so carried away by my personal freedom that I didn't even notice anything else." He later returned to the academy as a professor.
After he had devoted himself to communism as a young man in the hope of a better world and shortly afterwards turned away in disappointment, the time of extensive travel began.
He rode his bike to Paris and through North Africa.
He lived as a dancer in Israel and performed on stage in Vienna.
With his wife, the mother of his three daughters, he performed as a singing duo in Paris for seven years before moving back home.
But before his breakthrough as a painter, he became famous as a singer.
The charismatic artist, who was typically dressed in black with a jacket and hat, was considered one of the fathers of Austropop in the 1970s.
With his critical protest songs in Viennese dialect like "Sie hab'n a Haus builds" and "Sein Köpferl im Sand" he was played on all German-speaking pop channels.
Singing was only a by-product for him.
His vocation was painting.
Brauer, who described himself as a feminist, created more than 2000 pictures.
It was always a struggle to paint a good picture, he said before his 90th birthday, which he was able to celebrate in an enviable fit, both physically and mentally.
He left out excesses all his life.
"I'm so intoxicated that I don't want to bother myself with additional drugs."
Age freed him, who lived alternately in Vienna and an Israeli artist village.
“I've done about what I wanted to do.
I am a happy person. «And he felt the greatest pride for something outside of art: According to his own statement, his love-free, crisis-free marriage for over 60 years.
Icon: The mirror
Sandra Walder, dpa
