top of
BIOGRAPHY
37
-10
+10
End
  I also met Ernst Fuchs who, at that time, lived in the villa of the celebrated Austrian architect Otto Wagner. He lived surrounded by young women. He was not a professor at the academy and with his skull cap and flowing beard, he looked more like a rabbi than a famous painter. His paintings were a fantastic fusion of symbolism, surrealism and historicism. My efforts at selling a painting or getting a promise for an exhibition, amounted to nothing. The Viennese art market seemed impenetrable; the cards were stacked in favor of the five major representatives of the "Weiner Schule" of fantastic realism; Hausner, Fuchs, Hutter, Lemden and Brauer.
    My goal in Vienna was to stabilize my situation (financial, official, etc.) and then to create a counter current to the monopoly established by fantastic realism. But the importance of the school and the deep roots that it had established in the Austrian psyche made my project rather unrealistic to say the least. In the meantime, with the free month that I owed Hausner still due, life together was pretty much impossible financially and my wife went to live with her parents in Turkey taking our young daughter with her. I sold my cameras to finance their trip. I was so occupied and distracted during this period that the paintings I had begun in Vienna I would only finish ten years later in Paris.
 ................