PAUNZEN, ARTHUR (1890-1940)

"Portrat Eines Japaners (Mano Toshio)" (1927)
Original etching
22.5 x 12.5cm
Signed lower right
*private collection, Killara
 
Paunzen was an acclaimed Jewish Austrian Symbolist, Illustrator, & Printmaker. He studied under Ludwig Koch in Vienna, before enrolling in the Académie Julian in Paris. He was a gifted drawer, engraver, prolific printmaker and painter. His work spans the dramatic to the whimsical with a deep attachment to place, people, literature and, almost always, music. His bookplates (exlibris) are penetrating psychograms which, as a whole, offer a portrait of Viennese intellectual life between the end of World War One and the beginning of Hitler's Third Reich. Assisted by London gallerist Lionel J. Rothschild and the Rev. Arthur C. Macnutt, Paunzen and wife, Nelly, fled Austria in 1938, and found refuge in Hove, East Sussex, where, for a short time, he had a small studio. On the 12th May 1940, he, with other innocent male refugees between the ages of 16-60, were suddenly reclassified as "enemy aliens“. He was arrested by plain-clothed agents of the Home Office and taken to the temporary holding camp at the Brighton race course – several camps throughout the U.K. had been readied secretly for the great Whitsun "round-up". The internees of these camps were soon transported to the main camp at Huyton (Liverpool) and from there to the Isle of Man. Paunzen died of tuberculosis and medical neglect at Central Internment Camp Douglas on the 8th August 1940. His works are represented in famous institutions such as the British Museum, Cleveland Museum Of Art and the Albertina Museum in Vienna. This incredible, original Social Realist Conte work, shows a mother cradling her dying son; an image not unlike the work of German Expressionist, Kathe Kollwitz.