Anton Ažbe (30 May 1862 – 5 or 6 August 1905) was a Slovene realist painter and teacher of painting. Ažbe, crippled since birth and orphaned at the age of eight, learned painting as an apprentice to Janez Wolf and at the Academies in Vienna and Munich. At the age of 30, Ažbe founded his own school of painting in Munich that became a popular attraction for Eastern European students. Ažbe trained the "big four" Slovenian impressionists (Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar, Matej Sternen, Matija Jama), a whole generation of Russian painters (Ivan Bilibin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Igor Grabar, Wassily Kandinsky, Dmitry Kardovsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, to name a few),Baranovsky and Khlebnikova provide 42 biographical entries for the Russian alumni of Ažbe school and 42 entries for their own trainees Serbian painters Nadežda Petrović, Beta Vukanović, Ljubomir Ivanović, Borivoje Stevanović, Kosta Miličević, and Milan Milovanović, the Hungarian painter Sándor Ziffer or a Czech painter Ludvik Kuba.
Ažbe's training methods were adopted by Beta and Rista Vukanović when they took over Kiril Kutlik's atelier and school and by Russian artists both at home (Grabar, Kardovsky) and in emigration (Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky).Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 9.
Ažbe's own undisputed artistic legacy is limited to twenty-six graphic works, including classroom studies, most of them at the National Gallery of Slovenia.Only three works are on permanent display – Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 36. His long-planned masterpieces never materialized and, according to Peter Selz, he "never came into his own as an artist".Selz, p. 176 His enigmatic personality blended together alcoholism, chain smoking, bitter loneliness, minimalistic simple living in private, and eccentric behaviour in public.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 8. A public scarecrow and a bohemian socialite, Ažbe protected his personal secrets till the end, a mystery even to his students and fellow teachers. The public transformed the circumstances of his untimely death from cancer into an urban legend.
Biography
Twins Alois and Anton Ažbe were born in a peasant family in the Carniolan village of Dolenčice near Škofja Loka in the Austrian Empire (now in Slovenia). Their father's paternal aunt was Ana Ažbe (1780–1850), Slovenian farmer and folk singer. Their father died of familial tuberculosis at the age of forty when the boys were seven years old.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 11. Their mother lapsed into severe mental distress (there is unreliable evidence that she later committed suicide) and the boys were placed into foster care. By this time, it was evident that while Alois developed normally, Anton suffered serious congenital health problems: he lagged in physical growth, his legs were weak, and his spine was deformed. His legal guardian reasoned that Anton was not fit for farm work; after completing an elementary school, he sent Anton to "study commerce" in Klagenfurt.
After five years of living and working at a grocery store, Ažbe ran away from Klagenfurt to Ljubljana. At some point in the late 1870s, he met Janez Wolf, a Slovenian painter associated with the Nazarene movement who handled numerous church mural commissions.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 12. Little is known about Ažbe's experience with Wolf, apart from the facts that in 1880, Ažbe assisted Wolf with the frescoes of the Zagorje ob Savi church and, in 1882, with the facade of the Franciscan Church of the Annunciation in Ljubljana.
In the same year, Wolf helped Ažbe with admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where Anton studied for two years. He was dissatisfied with outdated, uninspiring Viennese training and barely made passing grades. In 1884, he relocated to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, then a "liberal" and "modern" school as opposed to the conservative Viennese Academy.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 14. There, he made a superb impression on his teachers, Gabriel Hackl and Ludwig von Löfftz, and earned a free scholarship. To make a living, Ažbe teamed up with Ferdo Vesel, selling classroom works and run-of-the-mill kitsch scenes to wholesale dealers. Half of Ažbe's surviving legacy dates back to the Munich Academy years; by the end of this period, he was recognized as a professional portrait painter and was regularly exhibited in the Glaspalast.
Wolf died in bitter poverty in 1884; later, Ažbe frequently spoke that shortly before death (rendered by Ažbe in chilling detail), Wolf dictated to him his last will – that he, Ažbe, must train a successor of Wolf's art, an ethnic Slovene who would surpass his seniors and strike the world with his genius. The free-of-charge training should last no less than eight years.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 13. For this purpose, said Ažbe, Wolf entrusted Ažbe with the "secret" of his art. It is not clear how much of the "Wolf's myth" is real; the "great Slovene painter" did not emerge, and Ažbe complained that all Slovene students, apart from faithful Matej Sternen, were leaving the school too early, preferring absolute freedom to the benefits of professional training.
In 1892, Vesel and Rihard Jakopič offered Ažbe the informal job of examining and correcting the students' paintings.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 15. The seven clients rented a study room and paid Ažbe for fixing their homework. Two months later, an inflow of new clients allowed Ažbe to rent his own premises, thus starting the Ažbe School. After a brief stay on Türkenstrasse, the school relocated to its permanent base at 16, Georgenstrasse in Schwabing (the building was destroyed by an allied air raid in July 1944). Later, Ažbe rented another building for the school classes and moved into his private workshop (also in Georgenstrasse).Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 37.
The school was never short of students, with a normal complement reaching 80. The total number of Ažbe alumni stands at around 150.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 38. Some, notably Alexej von Jawlensky, Matej Sternen, and Marianne von Werefkin, attended the school for nearly a decade. Ažbe remained the sole instructor, except for a brief period in 1899–1900 when he hired Igor Grabar as an assistant.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 43. Long-established competitors, the Munich Academy and the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, recognized the Ažbe School and recommended it as a preparatory, or "refreshment", course.
In 1904, Ažbe, a lifelong smoker, developed throat cancer and by the spring of 1905, he could hardly swallow food.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 19. Matej Sternen noted that the feeling of near death was obvious to all witnesses. Ažbe agreed to a surgery that passed without immediate complications, but on 5 or 6 August 1905, Ažbe died.
The public had transformed a sad but ordinary and expected event into a melodramatic urban legend. Leonhard Frank, who studied with Ažbe in 1904,Heisserer, p. 189 reproduced the legend in Links, wo das Herz ist (1952): "Nobody ever saw his paintings. Nobody knew if he ever painted at all. Nobody knew his past. One chilly December night, intoxicated with cognac, he fell asleep in the snow. He was found dead in the morning. Nobody knew where he had come from."Citing Russian translation in Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 19. A similar story was retold by Mikhail Shemyakin.
The school of Anton Ažbe survived its founder and existed until the onset of World War I.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 91.
Personality
Modern understanding of Ažbe's personality is based on the interpretation of biased and conflicting statements made by his alumni. Ažbe never wrote for the public and never attempted to formulate his own teaching methods on paper. His letters to Alois were destroyed according to the family's will; the rest of his archive contained only business papers. The only evidence of Ažbe's own handwriting is limited to three postcards and a letter to Sternen.
It is not known if Ažbe ever had a personal life; he himself mentioned that he was engaged twice, and both marriage attempts failed. There was some bond between him and Kathi Kobus, owner of the Simpli pub, but they both took the secret of this relationship to their graves.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 39. According to Sternen, he was consumed by a mysterious personality split that drove him into binge drinking and slovenly appearance. Likewise, Kandinsky wrote that Ažbe's apparently unremarkable life was itself a mystery.
Physically, Ažbe was not a dwarf but still a man of a very short and irregular stature. Niko Zupanič described him as having unusually short and weak legs, with a twisted upper spine. His head combined a large cranium with a disproportionately narrow face. Igor Grabar noted that his wide forehead was covered with a web of red pulsing veins; the rest of the face was uniformly red, as if in a fever; at the age of 33 Ažbe seemed to be at least forty years old. He groomed his long chestnut moustache to the style of Wilhelm II. He always wore black, and of the best make; in winter his attire was complete with a tall oriental karakul hat.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 16.
The oddly shaped and expensively (if not tastelessly) dressed schoolmaster, slowly walking with a cane and always smoking, became a target of tabloids and cartoonists. Boys taunted him on the streets, shouting "Atzpe! Atzpe!" (incorrectly pronouncing Slovenian Ažbe in German).Grabar, chapter 6. Ažbe's own German was not perfect either; he, particularly, abused the word nähmlich ("namely", "that is...")Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 18. and was called "Professor Nähmlich".Leonhard Frank used the alias Professor Nähmlich in his autobiographic fiction Links, wo das Herz ist. He normally spoke German in Munich but used Slovenian in a Slavic company.
Ažbe never had a proper home, sleeping on an untidy sofa in a workshop filled with his students' paintings. He always painted in his studio and never ventured into open-air painting. Ažbe frequently spoke of his planned future masterpieces, none of which moved past the sketch stage. He left Munich only once, visiting Venice in 1897; otherwise, his life revolved between the school and local pubs. Their owners regularly allowed a drunken Ažbe to sleep on their premises. With age he became more and more sedentary and replaced his daily walkouts with a circle ride on a tram.
Ažbe maintained ties with brother Alois but eventually severed all contacts after Alois' savvy wife reprimanded Anton for wasting too many matches lighting his cigars. The housewife's frugality was completely alien to Ažbe, who never hesitated offering free tuition to students in needKuzma Petrov-Vodkin and the Burliuk brothers were admitted free-of-charge -Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 19. and lending them cash. An obituary noted that "he was a man of almost proverbial modesty... one of the most original and best-known personalities of Munich."As cited, in English, by Selz, p. 176.
Ažbe as a creator
Loyal students Igor Grabar and Dmitry Kardovsky noted portraits by Ažbe for his "superb drawing"Russian: "великолепно построенная и нарисованная голова" - Grabar. marred by dry, if not dull, paint technique. Modern critics divide over Ažbe's significance as a painter, not in the least because his surviving undisputed legacy is limited to twenty-six works. Eleven of these are early paintings and classroom studies from his college years. Only four paintings, dated from 1890 to 1903, can be considered mature art influenced by the Munich Secession.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, p. 27. The largest and most complex of these, The Village Choir, has been irreversibly damaged by a botched restoration.Baranovsky and Khlebnikova, pp. 23–24. Photographs and memoirs testify to the existence of his other works, now lost or hidden in private collections.