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Tina Blau

Vienna, 1845 - 1916, Vienna

BiographyBorn into a Jewish family originally from Prague, Tina Blau was one of the best womean artists of the late nineteenth century. Blau's artistic talents were encouraged and supported by her father. Since women were not allowed to study at Vienna's academy, Blau took private lessons in Vienna, and, from 1869-1873, at the academy in Munich. She also taught at the Women Artists' Club. (In 1897, she founded an art school for women and girls in her native city.) In 1870, Blau returned to Vienna from Munich and met Emil Jakob Schindler, the leader of the group of artists who becamse known as "Austrian Impressionists" because of their concern for fluid colors and the effects of natural light. After 1874, Schindler and Blau shared a studio, and at times worked so closely that both names appear on the same landscape painting. Significant for Blau's development was the discovery of Vienna's Prater Park as an "artistic landscape"; her "Spring in the Prater" of 1882 is considered the first Austrian "Impressionist" work and was greeted with the same lack of understanding by critics and public as the first French Impressionist works. Trips to the South and to Holland enhanced her style of naturalism, which in color and technique is more akin to a Corot-like pleinairism than to the optical methods of the Impressionists. In 1883, she married the Munich animal painted Heinrich Lange, and settled in Munich, where she painted cityscapes and scenes of the Austrian Alpine districts. Upon her husband's death in 1891, she returned to Vienna. Her palette expanded in the 1880s, with colorful garden scenes, only to become quieter in the more rigid compositions of the 1890s. Color, however, remained Blau's primary compositional element, even in her late years, when she introduced stricter outlines to the forms in her paintings. Despite a ban on women members of the Künstlerhaus, Blau gained great recognition in her later years, and was patronized by Franz Joseph as well as the Prince Regent of Bavaria.

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

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