Paintings by Neo-Realist Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch

August 31st, 2017

Awake Goy

Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch (1898-1937) was an Austrian painter who came from a family of Austrian military officers. While Herbert was exempt from military service in WWI due to chronic lung disease, his father was killed in action in 1914. He started studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1917, but quickly switched to Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule (the school of arts and crafts Vienna). He began a career as a freelance artist after graduation.

From Reyl-Hanisch.com:

Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch was a painter of the Neo-Romanticism and the Neo-Realism. With his nude portraits and his window views he got close to the romantic tendencies within the Magic Realism, which he had in common with his friend Franz Sedlacek. Many of his works and details such as the Latin and Greek inscriptions, the technique of the old master paintings, the richly detailed work and the use of the triptych form bespeak of his historical references. In his own metaphysically oriented mentality Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch understood the Neo-Realism as a returning to nature, order and genre. His landscapes are “Seelenlandschaften” (soul-landscapes) in which human emotions and feelings express.

In addition to landscape paintings and nudes portraits where his most important motifs. Because of ecological reasons they became his main subject during the 1930ies, when he painted the rich and influential upper class industrials of Vorarlberg. But Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch painted not only landscapes and pictures of a world of beauty and purity but also confronted himself and his buyers with the political violence of the First Republic. War, violence and revolution where among his recurring motifs.

Herbert exhibited his works in Vienna, Germany, and Italy. Even though the economy was depressed in the 1920s, Herbert’s portrait skills resulted in a number of commissions. His artwork continued to grow in popularity, but in 1935 Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch fell gravely ill and died of a sudden hemorrhage two years later.