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Rudolf Ribarz

Vienna, 1848 - 1904, Vienna

BiographyRibarz was trained at Vienna's trad school to take over his family's business; but he developed a penchant for drawing early, and worked in nature during his holidays. Because of his family's hesitations, Ribarz did not enter the academy until 1864; he was fortunate, however, to find as a teacher Albert Zimmerman, who was very advanced in his encouragement of plein air painting. Ribarz came into contact with fellow students Schindler and Eugen Jettel with whom he shared a special interest in landscape painting. Although Ribarz's early works demonstrate a traditional approach to the subject, by 1860 he began to loosen up his color and to concentrate more effectively on the depiction of light. His preference for green-brown tones throughout his career attests to the enduring inspiration of Dutch art which he first studied in the 1870s. In 1869 Ribarz attended the International Exhibition in Munich, where he first learned of the work of Courbet, Corot, Millet and Monet. This exhibition, along with his discovery of the "paysage intime" of the Barbizon painters, had a great impact on his own landscape painting. In 1875 he went to Brussels and finally to Paris, where he shared a studio with Eduard Charlemont. His style now developed an ever more Barbizon-like plein-airism, which was most successfully manifested in his views of the Picardy coast in 1878. By this time, Ribarz had consciously rejected Austria, to the extent that he would only speak French. When Charlemont received the commission to decorate Vienna's Burgtheater in 1886, he asked Ribarz to paint a "Midsummer's Night's Dream" in the buffet; in the end, Ribarz only painted the fresco's background landscape. Here he demonstrated a purely decorative style which, to a great extent, indicates his experiments, like so many other European artists, with Japanese art. He moved toward an ever more decorative art, with specific concentration on floral studies. This emphasis led to his appointment in 1892 as professor of floral painting at the Kunstgewerbeschule in his native city. The early 1890s can be seen as the peak of his career; by the end of the decade, illness and new artistic directions which cast him as a traditionalist led him to resign his post. Despite his rejection by and of the Secession aesthetic, Ribarz's contributions to landscape and to a purely decorative art contributed significantly to modern art in Vienna.

Erika Esau, Pre-Modern Art of Vienna 1848-1898, Edith C. Blum Instutute of Bard College, 1987.

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