Ludwig Mestler
Encyclopedia
Ludwig Mestler was an artist in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

 before the Anschluss
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....

 and then later in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. While not a major artist, he was an innovator, creating a new style of watercolor painting
Watercolor painting
Watercolor or watercolour , also aquarelle from French, is a painting method. A watercolor is the medium or the resulting artwork in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-soluble vehicle...

.

History

Ludwig Mestler was born in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 on August 25, 1891 to Joseph and Jenny Kuten Mestler. His father was a choir singer in the Imperial Opera House (now called the Vienna State Opera
Vienna State Opera
The Vienna State Opera is an opera house – and opera company – with a history dating back to the mid-19th century. It is located in the centre of Vienna, Austria. It was originally called the Vienna Court Opera . In 1920, with the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy by the First Austrian...

), where he sang under Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...

, and also in Vienna’s oldest synagogue. As a child Ludwig became devoted to both art and music but, acceding to his parents’ that he should receive professional training, after finishing Realschule in 1910, he proceeded to Technische Universität Wien from which he graduated in 1916 an Engineer Architect, the equivalent of a Masters of Architecture.

After three years of military service, during which he rose to the rank of first lieutenant engineer, he worked as a professional engineer for seven years, during which period his pay rose from $19.00 a week to $80.00 a week. He immigrated to the US on February 11, 1923, on the Steam Ship Hanover. In 1927, he became a registered architect in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 state.

On August 14th of the same year he married Miss Wilma Allerhand. This marriage resulted in stress on both sides, and three years later Mestler left his wife to take a job outside New York City. They never reunited. In 1932 Mestler brought action for annulment of their marriage which was granted in 1934.

The Depression following the stock market crash of 1929 made it difficult for Mestler to obtain employment, and this he took as a sign that the time had come for him to give up his architectural career, for which he never cared, and to do what he had always longed to do by exclusively devoting himself to art.

After becoming a US citizen on March 16th, 1931, he decide to return to his native Austria where the money he had saved during his years as an architect would last him longer. Back in his homeland, he applied himself industriously to the study of etching, drawing and painting. He studied under Arthur Paunzen
Arthur Paunzen
Arthur Paunzen was an Austrian artist.-Biography:Paunzen was born on the 4th of February in fin de siecle Vienna where he studied with Ludwig Koch...

 and for three years at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna, where in his last year, 37-38, he worked successfully under Karl Sterrer
Karl Sterrer
Karl Sterrer, was an Austrian painter and engraver.-Biography:Karl Sterrer was the son of the sculptor Carl Sterrer.He studied at the Academy of Vienna under August Delug and Griepenkerl. Equally adept at both landscapes and portraits he won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1908...

 in the Meisterschule fur Malerei. He also found time for travel and took a Mediterranean cruise in addition to seeing much of Austria and Italy. These were productive years producing many sketches, watercolors and etchings.

An etching of this period, “A View of Sievering”, gave him his first recognition in the United States as it was included in the 4th International Exhibition of Etching and Engraving at the Chicago Art Institute. It later toured the country in a museum exhibition of the nation’s best etching. In Austria he acquired an avid collector in Dr. Fritz Eisenberger, an art historian, who bought some twenty watercolors and one or more copies of all the etching Mestler produced in Austria. He had a one man show in Vienna in 1936.
The advent of Hitler to Austria brought Mestler back to the United States on the . This time he settled in the Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

 area, first in Brookline
Brookline, Massachusetts
Brookline is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States, which borders on the cities of Boston and Newton. As of the 2010 census, the population of the town was 58,732.-Etymology:...

 and later in Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

. Throwing himself wholeheartedly into the practice of art, this was a productive period for him. It was at this time that he developed his highly individualistic parallel stroke technique in watercolor. His work was represented in a number of art exhibits, and he had two one man shows: one at the Worcester Art Museum
Worcester Art Museum
The Worcester Art Museum, also known by its acronym WAM, houses over 35,000 works of art dating from antiquity to the present day, representing cultures from all over the world. The WAM opened in 1898 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is the second largest art museum in New England...

 in 1939 and one at Boston's Symphony Hall
Symphony Hall, Boston
Symphony Hall is a concert hall located at 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. Designed by McKim, Mead and White, it was built in 1900 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which continues to make the hall its home. The hall was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1999...

 in 1941. Etchings were purchased by several leading museums and many private collectors.
Despite this success, Ludwig Mestler was unable to support himself at his art. Not only was he temperamentally unsuited to supplementing his income by teaching or lecturing, but he developed ideas about the value of his pictures which made it impossible to sell them. For instance, a friend relates that he indignantly turned down an offer by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to buy one of his watercolors for $250.00.

A temporary solution to his financial problem was provided by the WPA art project which employed him for two years. When that work ceased, illness ensued and he had his first experience as the recipient of charity – first through a private and later a public organization. Friends pulled strings and got him a position with Stone and Webster.

This proved one of the pivotal points in his life, comparing work at a job he disliked to receiving public relief, as he had done for the first time the year before, he gave up the latter and resigned from Stone and Webster after only three months. He never worked at another job or paid income tax again. It was at this time he began to feel an interest in music.

He didn’t know music theory at the time. He acquired a music library through friends and plunged into the study of harmony and counterpoint. He struggled alone with this for years only gradually gaining the attention and interest of local professors, top men in their field, who helped him over some of the more difficult hurdles in his musical education.

Song cycles and various small pieces of chamber music began to emerge and he found student musician glad to perform them for him. The apathy regarding his music began to dissolve. He wrote in 1958, “Musicians start to take to my work – resistance is diminishing visibly.” He began making mastersheets.

In 1958 he had the satisfaction of having a student recital of his work at the Longy School in Cambridge devoted entirely to his work.

However, in the opinion of many who knew him, Ludwig Mestler’s talent as an artist was far greater than his talent as a composer. And while he continued to sketch, make pencil portraits and experiment with oils, he stopped producing watercolors.

The Board of Welfare was willing to pay for his regular expenses but not for private vacations in the country. Private charitable organizations, on several occasions, made it possible for him to convalesce in the country after illness and several friends turned over cottages in the mountains or the seaside. But such experiences were infrequent and year sometimes followed year before he was able to get out of the city again. In 1958 he wrote, “I long to return to Nature, then I could paint again.”

To Mestler, the freedom from non-artistic toil which relief money gave him was highly important and he would become furious with friends who tried to find him jobs. Yet he paid a high price for acceptance of public charity, for it placed him in a humble, often humiliating position which his sensitive nature often found intolerable. As years wore on, he became increasingly unhappy and embittered, and more and more governed by feelings of frustration, futility and failure, seeing slights and rebuffs where none existed.

In June 1955 he wrote in his diary, a series of draft letters mostly never sent, “I am very depressed over my hopeless situation in life.” In November 1957 he confided,”…I feel…utterly lost and isolated. All my efforts in obeying the demands nature have been in vain and there is nowhere, even a trace of an indication that things will turn for the better. All I can hope, later on, my for will speak for me and explain me in the heart and brain of a very few people at a time when I will not know it any more.”

In the winter of 1958-59 Ludwig Mestler fell on the ice, hitting his head. Late in February he was taken to Beth Israel Hospital, apparently suffering from brain injury. On March 20th he died there and through the offices of the Hebrew Free Burial Society was laid to rest in the Mount Lebanon Cemetery
Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries
The Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries are a group of 42 Jewish cemeteries in use since the 1920s on Baker Street in the West Roxbury section of Boston...

 in West Roxbury
West Roxbury, Massachusetts
West Roxbury is a neighborhood in Boston bordered by Roslindale to the north, the Town of Dedham to the east and south, the Town of Brookline and the City of Newton to the west. Many people mistakenly confuse West Roxbury with Roxbury, but the two are not connected. West Roxbury is separated from...

. He is buried in the section Shara Tfilo. Friends took up a collections to provide a headstone for this strange, gentle, persistent man of art and music.

From His Journals

Great Pleasure:
“Matisse has great maturity, and the temper of the eternal pupil, he is always willing to learn anyhow, anywhere, and from anyone.” Leo Stein, Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose.

This sentence gives me great pleasure. To think that this was the attitude of one of the finest artist since the French Impressionist! I like it because it is my own attitude, only that I am no Matisse. Ludwig Mestler 17. X. 1957

Complicated Life:
We have allowed our life to become exceedingly complicated. But even now it is still possible to find, here and there an individual that loves simplicity and tries, whenever he can to eliminate or reduce complicated and replace it with simple. This task in itself is complicated, or should I say, complex, and yet again simple, because it means as often to avoid things, or methods, as to use other things or other methods. Ludwig Mestler 15. IX. 1957

Critical Responses

An interview with Arthur Polonsky
Arthur Polonsky
Arthur Polonsky is an American draughtsman, painter and academic.Born in Lynn, Massachusetts to East European Jewish immigrants, Polonsky is a graduate of the Boston Museum School, where he was a student of Karl Zerbe. In 1947 he was a teaching assistant to Ben Shahn at the Boston Museum School...

 concerning the three man show he shareed with Ludwig Mestler:

"They had a three-man show, at that time, which must have been in the early fall of 1948, I was one of the three artists and a man named Ludwig Mestler, who was . . . an older European artist who had settled in the Boston area, not well known, and Panos Ghikas. But each one of us represented an obviously different approach in painting. Ghikas was in what was then considered to be a geometric or abstract style, and Mestler, representational, but very much personalized, somewhat close to Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Charles Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist.-Life and work:...

, Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...

; kind of quiet, small format, beautifully drawn, and so on. . And my work which I suppose seemed to some to be at least characteristic, if not typical, of what was going on then among some of the people emerging, for example, from the Museum School, Boston artists of a younger age. A 3-man show. It was widely reported, the show. It got into Art News, for example, in New York, with serious and lengthy reviews."

Legacy

When the garret room he occupied for the last three and a half years of his life was examined after his death, the walls were lined with stacks of fruit crates containing his extensive library and most of the floor was covered with packing crates full of most of a lifetime's artistic output.

While there has been some discussion about his mental health, it seems to exist as a misguided approach to selling his work to an increasingly superficial and uneducated market. Commentary on his journals points to a highly educated person who just happened to be in an unfortunate situation for most of his life in the US.

His work now hangs in the National Gallery
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...

 in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 and the Hirshhorn Gallery, which is an extension of the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

. While not a member of any of the major movements of the 20th century, the fingerprints of his influence can be seen in the work of artists as diverse as R. Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...

 and Alexis Covato. Like many people uprooted or destroyed by the Nazi Occupation of Europe, his life and memory were nearly lost.

Quoting Mestler, "I came to America in steerage class and remained in steerage ever since."

Collectors

Private collectors of Ludwig Mestler’s work as recorded in his journals between 1954 through 1958.

Francis Henry Taylor
Francis Henry Taylor
Francis Henry Taylor was a distinguished American museum director and curator, heading the Metropolitan Museum of Art for fifteen years.He was born in Philadelphia, and started his career as a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art...

, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

 1940-1955.

Dr. Phil Fritz Eisenberger (graduate art historian) of Vienna purchased about 20 watercolors painted in Austria between the years 1934 through 1937 directly from the artist.

Perry B. Cott, chief curator of the National Gallery of Art Washington DC.

Professor. Victor Polatschek, first clarinetist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Boston Symphony Orchestra
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is an orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the five American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1881, the BSO plays most of its concerts at Boston's Symphony Hall and in the summer performs at the Tanglewood Music Center...

 and formerly a member of the Vienna Philharmonic.

Paul J. Sachs
Paul J. Sachs
Paul Sachs was Harvard associate director of the Fogg Art Museum, a partner in the financial firm Goldman Sachs and the developer of one of the early museum studies courses in the United States.-History:...

 (1878-1965), Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard and associate director of the Fogg Art Museum
Fogg Art Museum
The Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums....

.

Professor Dr. Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin, born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, was a German-born American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, then Imperial Germany, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna. He became a teacher and then an associate professor of political science at the...

 (1901-1985 Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the University of Vienna
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

, where he became a professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, immigrated to the United States. They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of his career at Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, most often referred to as Louisiana State University, or LSU, is a public coeducational university located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The University was founded in 1853 in what is now known as Pineville, Louisiana, under the name...

, the University of Munich, and the Hoover Institution
Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a public policy think tank and library founded in 1919 by then future U.S. president, Herbert Hoover, an early alumnus of Stanford....

 at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.

Henry L. Seaver, Professor of the department of Architecture, Harvard, Cambridge MA. Art Historian.

Frederick B. Deknatel
Frederick B. Deknatel
Frederick Deknatel was a member of Harvard's Department of Fine Arts for 40 years. Although his graduate training was in the field of medieval art and his Ph.D. dissertation on 13th century Gothic sculpture of the cathedrals of Burgos and León, increasingly he became interested in the art of the...

  was a member of Harvard's Department of Fine Arts for 40 years.

Laura M. Huntsinger, Author of "Harvard Portraits".

Lee M. Friedman, Author of “Three centuries of American Jewish history in Massachusetts”.
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