Hans Franta

(1893-1983)

The Austrian painter was born in Linz in 1893. In 1914 Franta went to Vienna and enrolled in the philosophical faculty, where he mainly attended art history lectures with well-known professors. At the beginning of the First World War, Franta volunteered and was deployed on the Russian front. In 2014 he was taken prisoner by Russia. The artist stayed in Siberia until 1921, where he met his future wife Zinajda Nikolaevna Stavrovitch and married in 1918. In Russia, Franta made the acquaintance of the Russian avant-gardist David Burljuk. In 1921 the couple returned to Austria, where Franta made contact with artists such as Klemens Brosch. Until 1929 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Professor Karl Sterrer and then taught as a professor for freehand drawing at the City High School Linz Spittelwiese and at the Realgymnasium in Linz. In 1941 he had to do military service again in World War II, but was transported home after a heart attack in 1942 and released from military service in 1943 due to illness. From 1943 to 1957 he taught again as a professor at the secondary school in Linz. He worked intensively with painting and after his retirement went on numerous study trips through Europe and the USA. His works have been shown in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, including the Neue Galerie in Linz, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Center Pompidou in Paris.

If you compare Hans Franta’s earliest works – from around 1911 to 1920 – with his later work from the years after the Second World War, the fact becomes obvious that you are dealing with an artist personality, which one has never left an artistic position once taken. Regardless of the current art movements and stylistic changes that were characteristic of the first half of our century.

Hans Franta’s artistic conception was shaped by his very personal view of reality, as well as by his long stay in Siberia. Franta did not neglect the environment of contemporary art creation, so that relationships to Art Nouveau and Impressionism can be felt, but these have not had any lasting influence on the consistent further development and formulation of his personal artistic concerns.

Franta’s thematic focuses are particularly impressive in his preferred pastel technique, as well as in the drawing. On the one hand, it is his almost passionate turn to landscape, which he makes visible in its archaic structures. On the other hand, his interest in architecture, which in his work he reduces to the essential structural elements of surface, line, light and shadow and thus gives it the character of that which is constant over time. In his landscapes, however, Franta never sees himself as a cool, distant observer. Through the sovereign use of color, he achieves a condensation of mood values ​​and thus proves himself to be a committed observer, whose work is characterized not only by aesthetic interest but also by personal experience and intense sympathy.

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