Oswald Tschirtner

1920–2007, Austrian

Tags: Drawing

Born in Perchtoldsdorf, Austria, Oswald Tschirtner was raised by a devoutly Catholic aunt and uncle in Vienna. He graduated from high school with honors. He wanted to become a priest and enrolled in a seminary. Drafted in 1939, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in France until 1946. Following these experiences, he showed signs of distress and was institutionalized at the psychiatric hospital in Maria Gugging, near Vienna, in 1954. There Dr. Leo Navratil encouraged him to draw. The forms of cephalopods inspired his early pen-and-ink drawings, from the late 1960s. These developed into his distinctive elongated groups of figures—their similar forms creating a patternlike, graphic quality— celebrated for their economy of line. He moved to the House of Artists at Maria Gugging, founded by Navratil, when it opened in 1981 and spent the rest of his life there.