Oskar Heller was a Jewish painter born in 1870 in what is now the Czech city of Olomouc- which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and was known by the German form of the name, Olmutz. Heller was one of seven children, born to a prosperous grain merchant who could afford to send him to study fine art at the Berlin Academy. After his studies, Heller returned to his home town to work and remained there for the rest of his life, never marrying but playing a very active role in the social and cultural life of the city.
From January 1922, Heller presented his works at the German section of the Association Metznerbund, which developed from a former ‘Society of the Friends of Art.’ The Metznerbund was founded in March 1920 in Teplitz as a federation of German-speaking visual artists (painters, sculptors and architects) working within the newly-formed state of Czechoslovakia, in order to be able to better promote their artistic, social and socio-economic interests. It was named after the sculptor Franz Metzner (1870–1919). The concept of these regional associations was based on nationality and territorial affiliation, not on the orientation of their members, who represented a wide variety of artistic approaches and styles. Heller was active as the group’s president and vice-president, whilst the paintings he displayed at its exhibitions were always highly regarded by contemporaries.
Heller died of cancer and pneumonia in 1938. Sadly, it appears that other members of his family may have perished during the Holocaust.
Heller’s favourite subjects were landscapes and still-life studies, but he also painted portraits, genre and mythical scenes and nudes. Josef Maliva, in the introduction to his Figural Paintings of the Artists of the Olomouc Region (Figurální tvorba umělců Olomouckého kraje, 2010), said of Heller’s earlier work that, “Out of the works of a wide community of German-speaking Olomouc artists who were engaged in painting, graphics or illustration work before the First World War, the work of Oskar Heller… received the widest popular response…. The colours of his early work were impressively fresh and some of his works transcended local realist conventions.” However, Maliva also recognised that Heller’s later work “fell into the conventional artistic plane,” when he was criticised for adhering to the academic style he had learned as a student. Hence, the entry on Heller in Prokop Toman’s New Dictionary of Czechoslovak Visual Artists (Novém slovníku československých výtvarných umělců) of 1936 contained this rather terse and dismissive summary of his work: “Landscape and still life painter. He paints views and still lifes.” A similar assessment was made much more recently by Alena Schulzová in Artistic Life in Olomouc in the Twenties of the Twentieth Century (Výtvarný život v Olomouci ve dvacátých letech dvacátého století, Ph D thesis, 1993) who wrote that: “Among the Olomouc painters, German critics positively evaluated Oskar Heller for his portraits and still lifes; [he was] a traditionalist of conservative inclination, whose work gained a strong local following.” Heller’s later work was marked by the pursuit of popularity, apparently for commercial reasons- and it’s fair to observe that the canvases he exhibited in the regular group exhibitions were often amongst the most expensive on display.
The reason for featuring Heller is simply to contrast him to other contemporary painters whose work I’ve featured recently. Heller’s work is characterised, overall, by the simple necessity to earn a living. He seems to have given priority to remaining near his family, rather than living in a large city like Berlin, Munich, Vienna or Paris, where the artistic avant-garde were concentrated. Without a wealthy patron or progressive art market, Heller had to cater to the more conventional tastes of local purchasers. He therefore stuck to a variety of subjects which sold reliably; the staples were local scenes, portraits and paintings of vases of flowers, to which he added certain works reflective of his Academic background. V jabloňovém sadu at the head of the page is an example of this: it’s a vaguely pastoral, classical scene- it could be a shepherd and his girl, it could be Pan and a nymph. It’s cultured, but safe and familiar at the same time. The Shepherd (1909) is a little more daring; close examination reveals that the gambolling babies are actually pink and blue winged putti, definitely transporting the scene from an Arcadian pasture to somewhere mythical. I connect this picture with the Waldnymphe of Paul Hermann Wagner; they’re of broadly the same period, they mix mythical genres (fairy, nymph, cupid) and they appeal to an audience who want something for their home that suggests a familiarity with the classics, but which is also ‘cute’ and charming. There are also echoes of the work of Hans Makart, an artist who- as a leading figure of the Viennese artworld of the preceding generation- must surely have been familiar to Heller.
Lastly, Heller’s nude is, again, aware of wider stylistic developments, with its loosely impressionistic technique and its choice of subject matter (life studies such as this were extremely popular from the late nineteenth century onwards) but it’s not too challenging either. The Girl with Dog seen below is similar- these pictures may be compared with the works of Bouguereau, Emile Munier and Perrault that I’ve featured previously, giving a sense of a much wider, ‘pan-European’ popular taste.
johnkruseblog 
[…] famous figures such as Edvard Munch (Puberty, 1894-95) to much less well-known painters like Oskar Heller, Paul Hermann Wagner and Richard Muller. More particularly, a range of artists of the same period […]
LikeLike