Wilhelm Kaufmann

Wil­helm Kauf­mann was born in Salzburg in 1901 and stud­ied at the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Vien­na from 1919 to 1923. In 1923 he became a pupil of Anton Fais­tauer and worked on his fres­coes in the Morzger parish church near Salzburg. Study trips to Bel­gium, France and Eng­land fol­lowed. In 1926, he worked with Anton Kolig and Robin Chris­t­ian Ander­sen on the tapes­tries for the Salzburg Fes­ti­val The­ater. In 1935, the artist is rep­re­sent­ed with four land­scape paint­ings in the Aus­tri­an pavil­ion at the “Expo­si­tion uni­verselle & inter­na­tion­al de Brux­elles”. In 1937, Kauf­mann was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate a land­scape fres­co for the Salzburg Fest­spiel­haus, which was destroyed dur­ing recon­struc­tion work dur­ing the Hitler regime in 1939. From 1952 to 1958, Kauf­mann lived and worked as an art teacher and free­lance painter in Penn­syl­va­nia (USA) and Cana­da. In 1963, he trav­eled for five months to vis­it Albert Schweitzer in Lam­baréné, Africa. In the years that fol­lowed, the artist focused on the orig­i­nal lifestyles and ways of life of prim­i­tive peo­ples. The cen­tral theme in his works was always the search for har­mo­ny between nature and man. Wil­helm Kauf­mann, who worked in his stu­dio in the Salzburg Kün­stler­haus until old age, died in Salzburg in 1999.
1995 — first exhi­bi­tion at the Welz Gallery.