Anton Romako

Anton Romako was arguably the most idiosyncratic artist in Austrian painting of the late 19th century. Meeting with incomprehension and contempt, his oeuvre changed the paradigms of perception and depicting reality in an unconventional manner and ahead of its time. What was particularly unusual was that different painterly tendencies coalesced in Romako s work simultaneously from realism and Impressionism all the way to a new psychologizing expressive art. Especially the paintings of his last 14 years, which Romako spent in Vienna from 1876, allow us to trace his development from a popular manner of depiction towards a fundamental renewal of history-, genre-, and portrait painting. At the point of intersection between a traditional naturalism and its affected exaggeration, Romako distanced himself from the conventional concept of rendering reality and embarked on new paths of perception. Romako s psychologizing painting did go on to inspire the representatives of Vienna s early Expressionism, especially Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.