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September 19th, 2020 
Awake Goy 
Described by Swiss anatomist, physiologist and poet Albrecht von Haller (1732-1777) as ‘an area of mythical purity’ The Alps, with its amazing mountainous landscapes and lakes, have been a great inspiration for many artists over the centuries. Adolf Hitler (a painter himself) had a lifelong romantic fascination with the Alps and by the 1930s established a home at Berghof, in the Obersalzberg region outside of Berchtesgaden. One of the aforementioned artists was precisely Hitler’s Austrian fellow-countryman Felix Heuberger.
Felix Heuberger was a landscape painter whose pictures seemed to capture some kind of magic realistic atmosphere. Heuberger went through both world wars in Europe as a combatant. He became a POW at the end of WWII, which did not prevent him from being able to return to his passion of landscape-painting soon after being released. There is very little information about Heuberger available in English, so the sources I have used for the biography next come almost exclusively from German-speaking sites.
I hope you enjoy Felix Heuberger’s landscape paintings as much as I have enjoyed myself putting them together for the gallery below. Comments, as per usual, will be welcomed.
Biography
Felix Heuberger (March 7, 1888 in Vienna – January 25, 1968 in Hall in Tirol), also known by the full name of Felix Christof Stefan Heuberger, was an Austrian painter, etcher and engineer. Felix Heuberger was born as the second son of the Austrian composer and music writer Richard Heuberger and his wife Johanna Herr. His two siblings were the older brother Richard and the younger Grete. Felix Heuberger’s became known as a painter for his favoured subjects which included landscapes with mountains, forests and lakes, often characterized by beautiful and atmospheric light.
Heuberger attended the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna after a carefree childhood. He reported that “he could not make friends with the language of Pericles”, and so he moved to secondary school; this marked the way to technical university. He graduated with a civil engineering diploma in 1914. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the Third Dragoon Regiment (Dritten Dragoner-Regiment) as a volunteer. As an officer and enthusiastic rider, he got to know the beauty of the Galician and Northern Italian plains during the war years after he had spent his childhood and youth in the Salzkammergut and the Tyrolean mountains during the summer season with his parents. This laid the foundation for his deep love of nature.
During his studies at the Technical University in Vienna he met his future wife Christine Clanner von Engelshofen, whom he married shortly before the end of the First World War. He experienced this as a cavalry officer on the southern and eastern fronts. At the end of the war, the newly married man with his pronounced artistic ambitions -music also played a major role in his life- was faced with a difficult time choosing a career.
As a painter Heuberger soon found his own personal style, which he described as “timelessly romantic”. For him, the mood of every landscape was essential since this is subject to constant change depending on the light.
Felix Heuberger became known through the exhibition of his paintings in the Vienna Kunstlerhaus in 1919, where he received excellent reviews. Heuberger’s landscapes were shown in over twenty exhibitions in Austria, Germany, England and America.
After the Second World War, in which he took part as a reserve officer, he returned from captivity to his work again and created many beautiful pictures, some of which were inspired by southern landscape experiences. Good graphic works, especially etchings and several portraits, are also part of his oeuvre. But he was always most fascinated by the mood in the landscape: light and shadow, fog and clouds, the air that can be felt in contrast between foreground and background that so few artists can make tangible.
At the height of his career, on January 25, 1968, a sudden death took the brush from Heuberger’s hand, just a few weeks before his 80th birthday. The fact that he had succeeded in conjuring up the landscape of many people’s daily lives with his pictures became the best reward for his work.
Sources: Arnot Gallery, Wikipedia (Deustch), Le Prince Lointain, and AlpinWiki (‘Der Bergsteiger’ 1973, volume 5, page 295).
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