Rudolf Jettmar

Rudolf Jettmar was born in 1869 in Zawodzie near Krakow, then Austrian Galicia. His childhood was marked by changes of place and school due to his father’s frequent changes of station in the civil service. He is very musical, plays the violin, flute and organ, and also draws and paints. Against his father’s wishes, Jettmar began studying art at the Vienna Academy in 1886 and went to Karlsruhe in 1892 to study at the Baden Art Academy. In 1893 he travelled on foot over the Black Forest and the Gotthard Pass to Italy for the first time, then worked as a decorative painter in Leipzig and Dresden in 1894 and 1895. In 1895/96 the Rome Prize and a scholarship enabled him to spend six months studying in Rome, where he lived in the corner tower of the Palazzo Venezia, then the Austro-Hungarian embassy. On excursions to the immediate surroundings of the Campagna and the Alban Hills as well as to Naples and Salerno and Tuscany, he made countless nature studies. After his return to Vienna in 1897, Jettmar studied again at the master school for graphic art with William Unger and found in the etching technique his most important medium of artistic expression. In 1898 he took up a teaching post at the art school for women and girls. In the same year Jettmar became a member of the Vienna Secession and from then on was regularly represented at its annual exhibitions and contributed to the Secession’s art nouveau magazine “Ver Sacrum”. The following years were marked by repeated travels to Bohemia to visit his paternal family, to Styria, to Istria and repeatedly to Italy. On the way, Jettmar filled numerous sketchbooks with portraits, city views and countless landscape and nature studies of trees and rocky areas. In addition to the annual Secession exhibitions, the Art Salon Artin 1900 in Vienna showed a special Jettmar exhibition, and he was also represented at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1907, in an exhibition at the Arnold Gallery in Dresden, in 1908 in Prague at the Deutsches Haus and in 1911 at the winter exhibition of the Vienna Secession in Munich. In 1910 Jettmar was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in 1924 he became director of the master school for painting and in 1934 of the master school for graphic arts. Jettmar retired in 1936 due to health problems, the Academy appointed him an honorary member and presented an exhibition of his complete works. He was also made an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1937 was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Austrian Order of Merit. Rudolf Jettmar died in Vienna in 1939 and a memorial exhibition was held in the Secession building. Jettmar is one of the important representatives of Viennese late Symbolism. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Albertina in Vienna and the Belvedere, the East German Gallery in Regensburg and the Modern Gallery in Prague, among others.