WILLY EISENSCHITZ (Vienna 1889 - 1974 Paris), Canal Saint-Martin, Paris

WILLY EISENSCHITZ*
(Vienna 1889 - 1974 Paris)
Canal Saint-Martin, Paris
oil/canvas, 81 x 100 cm
signed W. Eisenschitz and verso stamped Sennelier, Paris
Provenance: private property Vienna

ESTIMATE °€ 10.000 - 15.000
START € 8.000

Austrian-French painter of the 20th century. Came from a Jewish family and began studying painting at the Academy in Vienna in 1911. Went to Paris in 1912 to the Academie de la Grande Chaumière. Acquaintance with the painter Claire Bertrand, marriage before the beginning of the First World War. Interned during the war and released at the end of the war. 1921 first stay in the south of France, transformation of his artistic work under the impression of the southern light. Suffered repeatedly from health problems, stays in the climatic health resort Dieulefît. Moved to La Valette- du-Var near Toulon. Member of the Societé Nationale des Beaux Arts, exhibited at the Salon d'Automnes in Paris, also at the Galerie Durand-Ruel and the Museum in Toulon. Maintained contacts in Paris with Josef Floch, Viktor Tischler, Georg Merkel and Walter Bondy. During World War II, retreated to Dieulefît, signed his works with the pseudonym Villiers. From 1951 also travels to Ibiza, lived alternately in Paris and Provence. After the death of his wife in 1969, he returned to Paris. Created mainly oil paintings and watercolors with landscapes and cityscapes, influenced by nature and the light of southern France.

Willy Eisenschitz, born in Vienna into a Jewish family of lawyers, found his future field of work in art only indirectly, because his parents urged him to first learn a day job. In contrast, during this personal development phase, his passion was with the French Impressionists, whom he met at the international exhibitions of the Vienna Secession between 1897 and 1905. Fascinated by French art, he went to Paris in 1912, where he subsequently studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1914 he married his fellow student Claire Bertrand. From 1921 Eisenschitz spent the summers in Provence and took part in exhibitions throughout France. Since then, Willy Eisenschitz has felt an inseparable connection to Provence. Thanks to his flexibility in painting and compositional security, he was soon able to capture the most diverse moods and, above all, the light of the south in his oil paintings and watercolors. He masterfully combined rocky, rugged elements with the simultaneous tenderness and harmony of these impressive stretches of land. Stylistically, his colorful works can be assigned more to French modernism and the École de Paris than to an Austrian art movement. In the works selected here, too, Eisenschitz invokes the coloring of the artistic genius loci; to Paul Cézanne and his landscapes from Provence created after 1880. With muted olive green, rusty brown and ocher tones, which Cézanne prefers to use in this phase, Eisenschitz builds up the partially terraced landscape here, on the level of which the roads and field edges are lined with tall poplars and cypresses. When Eisenschitz puts these landscapes on paper as watercolors, he achieves an even more direct effect. The landscapes captivate with their colorful multifacetedness as well as their painterly verve, with which Eisenschitz captures the most diverse landscapes and their inherent mood. In a letter to a French friend and collector, Eisenschitz wrote: "As always, one has to get off the road and climb the hills off the trail to feel the scenery. But then I am overwhelmed to be here and find it difficult to work because the views and wealth of the region are so magnificent.”

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