Große Gesellschaft

“I am a chronicler, meaning that I draw things as they are. I make a record of the world, of people, of society,” said Wolfgang Herzig. He was born in the Austrian region of Styria, and from the very beginning, his art was figurative and often critical of society. In 1968, he became well known overnight thanks to the Realities exhibition in the Vienna Secession. The young artists presented there also included Martha Jungwirth, Franz Ringel, and Kurt Kocherscheidt, and they developed their own alternative to the Vienna school of Fantastic Realism and the abstract artists associated with the Galerie St. Stephan. Herzig’s motifs derived from his Vienna environment. They were ironic and sarcastic portraits of a so-called “better society” that included politicians, museum directors, and priests, and also well-known waiters and waitresses. “Large Society” was painted in 1970 and 1971 and is one of Herzig’s largest paintings. It shows members of high society in their eveningwear, overdressed women with low-cut necklines and self-satisfied men in dinner jackets, frozen into an ornamental and geometrical ensemble before a cool smooth facade. Herzig prepared his painting by making numerous studies and sketches in which he meticulously tested spatial distribution and arrangements of people. The press saw these tragicomic portraits of society as a “disturbed idyll”—this was the title of one review of 1971. These works captured a true petit-bourgeois state of mind. To quote from a review: “His scenes of everyday life are as pointed and as precisely painted as they could possibly be. Herzig, a Vienna painter from green Styria, has no patience with that Baroque posturing that many people take to be the true character of Austria.”