Untitled Document

Artistic isolation and radical change
In his voluntary artistic solitude during the Third Reich, Boeckl chose politically harmless subjects such as family portraits, still lifes and religious motifs. In order to avoid difficulties, he was forced in 1939 to exchange the painting class he directed at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts for the so-called "Abendakt" (an evening class in nude painting, far less open to scrutiny) - an institution attended by all major artists of the post-war generation. The National Socialist concept of art meant nothing to him. Had his early work been more widely known, he might even have had to fear being classified as a "degenerate artist". He was rightly exonerated from charges of being a passive supporter. Nevertheless, his insecurity as an artist must have been immeasurable. Symptomatic of this was not only his change of style, his radical new step in 1945 towards abstraction: "The old art is a thing of the past. Everything is quite new - I can feel it in my work." At 50, no longer young, but not yet old, he felt he had new powers, which enabled him to liberate Austrian painting from the provinciality forced upon it by Austrofascism and Hitler.