page_title: Hanns Diehl
section_title: Career in Vienna
hierarchical_section_title: Hanns Diehl / Career in Vienna
caption_attribution_description: English: Oil painting on hessian of a woman in front of caged gorillas
context_page_description: Hanns Diehl was a German-Austrian artist influential as the founder of Vienna's Künstlerbund Segantini.
context_section_description: In 1906, Diehl moved to Vienna, at the invitation of his mother's brother August Herb, who ran a decorative glass-making company, Herb & Schwab. He designed the company's logo, and provided many designs for Art Nouveau-style glass windows that were then the fashion for private homes and hotels. He was meant to take over the business, but had no interest in running a company, nor did he possess any business acumen; he wanted only to be a professional artist. In need of work, he experimented in a variety of styles, imitating the methods of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger. He painted ambitious oils and watercolor landscapes, but also produced prints for magazines and tried his hand at every medium. He also designed the cover for an avant-garde magazine founded by his brother Gustav Eugen Diehl, Moderne Revue. He was still experimenting artistically and had yet to find his own artistic voice.
  In 1916, he married Anna Pangratz (1887–1946), a capable businesswoman. She gave up her position at the Handelskammer (Chamber of Commerce) when she thought she was marrying a man who would be a director of a business. When Diehl rejected this position, Anna went back to work as the supervisor of the correspondence department of the Anker-Brot bakery firm, a position she held for 25 years. Hanns was now free to pursue his career solely as an artist. Hanns and Anna had one daughter, Ingeborg, born in 1917.
  Ambitious and energetic, Diehl was intent on emulating such figures as Trübner—his ideal of an academic artist. He painted all genres, from mythological narrative images to landscapes and still-lifes, both in oil and in watercolor. He sketched constantly and seemed most confident in creating colored landscape drawings, which demonstrate excellent perspectival rendering and shading.
  After the war, he brought together a group of like-minded artists in Vienna and established the “Künstlerbund Segantini” in 1921. He served as its director for the remainder of its lifespan until the onset of World War II. This artist's organization was committed to a traditional idea of painting, emulating the Austrian-Swiss painter of symbolic Alpine landscapes, Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899). This romantic Germanic style appealed to Diehl's emotional instincts, but his work never copied Segantini's motifs. Critics speak of his work as showing an individual streak within traditional painterly parameters—of going his "own way" —and by the 1920s, Diehl was indeed formulating his own stylistic preferences. His portraits and still-lifes of the decade reveal a firm linear outline, with a near-impasto use of thick color. One critic of the first Segantini-Bund exhibition described his works admiringly as depicting "architectonic fantasies". Throughout he made masterful drawings and amusing sketches wherever he traveled, and began to produce full-fledged watercolor landscapes.
  
  Ever short of patrons and often without enough money to buy materials, he did take on students, and at times offered drawing classes.
   In one of his most cryptic and intriguing works, Affenballade (Ballad of the Apes), he created a grid of bars that are painted along the lines of the Hessian sacks he used as a canvas. In the late 1920s, he began to create, apparently for private amusement, a series of eccentric, caricature-like watercolors that reveal a knowledge of works by such modern figures as Emil Nolde and Alfred Kubin. These often satirical commentaries are unlike any of his other, more formal works, and are described by later critics as revealing both a scurrilous sentiment  and a debt to German Expressionism. These sometimes anguished images are the pieces that have endured and are of greatest interest to contemporary audiences, who see in them a psychological reflection of the time between the wars in Vienna.
caption: Ballad of the Apes
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