Kurt Regschek

Unlike the main members of the Fantastic Realists, Kurt Regschek did not study in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s class at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but rather in Paris. Thereafter he took part as a guest in classes at the Vienna Academy with the professors Robin Christian Andersen and Herbert Boeckl. The former was the director of the master’s class in painting, and after Gütersloh he was an important teacher for many artists in the Vienna Fantastic Realism school. Unlike international surrealism, the Fantastic Realists addressed historical painting techniques with Anderson, even if Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter, Ernst Fuchs, and Anton Lehmden left his class after just a few months in order to study under Gütersloh.

Regschek was born in 1923 and was six to seven years older than most of the group’s members, but he only came later to the Vienna Academy, after time as a prisoner of war and then his studies in Paris, joining the Fantastic Realists around 1952 and 1953. He was nonetheless of great significance for the group.

The Austrian art historian and director of the Kestner Society in Hanover at the time, Wieland Schmied, wrote about Regschek in a contribution to the catalogue for the exhibition The Painting of Fantastic Realism – The Vienna School in 1964, although Regschek did not participate: ​“This is perhaps the place to speak of the specifically Viennese in the painting of the Vienna School. Figuratively legible and specifically identifiable memories of the city appear in the pictures of Hausner and Hutter relatively frequently, rarely in Fuchs and Lehmden, and not at all in Brauer. A picture with such clear references like Vienna, Vienna, Inner City by Kurt Regschek, which I would say could be seen as programmatic for the trend and contents of the entire Vienna School, cannot be found in the works of the other painters. Kurt Regschek paints a Vienna that is seen from above as quite undamaged, there is the spire of St. Stephan, there are the roofs in untouched solidarity, clouds pass from the Vienna Forest across the holiday skies. […] The roofs of this Vienna are the facades of a Potemkin village; they conceal the dangerous subconscious of this somber and self-analytical city.”¹

Regschek’s friend Ernst Fuchs organized his first exhibition in 1958 in his gallery in Millöckergasse. Just as Fuchs supported Regschek in this case, Regschek himself went on to set up his own gallery (Galerie zur Silbernen Rose) and to organize exhibitions. Particularly noteworthy was the exhibition Vienna School of Fantastic Realism in Galerie Zum Basilisken, where a total of twenty-three artists were shown in one of the exhibitions of Fantastic Realists that included the highest number of artists of the group.

In the late 1960s, Regschek suddenly and surprisingly turned away from the group. His disappointment probably had a number of reasons that all came together, and he continued to paint in the style of Fantastic Realism after his departure.

The work Basilisk (1966) was produced during this period of upheaval and alienation. A basilisk is a mythical animal whose gaze can turn the beholder into stone. In medieval depictions of animals, basilisks were often shown as hybrids with the upper body of a cockerel, a crown on their heads, and the lower body of a snake. Regschek depicts this kind of hybrid creature with a gaping wound in its belly. The picture hanging on the wall behind the creature is remarkable; the format and white color might indicate that it is a photograph, although it is not a naturalistic illustration of the mythical creature but rather shows a chicken-like animal whose body is lost in abstract forms. This work can be seen as a humorous comment on the function of painting after the invention of photography, which also led painting toward the abstraction against which the Fantastic Realists then turned.

 

1. Wieland Schmied, Malerei des Phantastischen Realismus – Die Wiener Schule, exh. cat., Vienna/​Hanover/​Berne 1964/72, p. 19.