Have one like this?
Upload a photo for a free check of what yours may be worth.
Lot description
Leopold Löwy (Vienna 1871 - 1940 Vienna) The watcher oil/cardboard 13,8 x 8,9 cm monogrammed LL, inscribed 360 SCHÄTZPREIS / ESTIMATE °€ 1000 - 2000 STARTPREIS / STARTING PRICE °€ 1000 Leopold Löwy Jr., artist and chess player, was born into a Viennese industrialist family. Instead of taking over the family business, he devoted himself to the self-study of astronomy, attended lectures in various fields of knowledge, mastered five languages, and amassed an encyclopedic knowledge while living in modest circumstances. His great passion was chess; in 1893, he joined the New Vienna Chess Club, achieved rapid success against grandmasters such as Tarrasch, Réti, and Tartakower, and was a regular at Café Central, mingling with Vienna's elite. The majority of his graphic work—drawings, caricatures, and prints between 1900 and 1916—portrays celebrities and chess players in a style that anticipates fantastic realism and surrealism: bizarre, humorous, and eccentric, comparable to medieval grotesques, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or Hieronymus Bosch, yet of a unique, expressive quality. Löwy created designs for postcards, illustrated Viennese magazines, and in 1920 published a collection of fables with its own cover. His characters are reminiscent of Alfred Kubin, Franz Sedlacek, or Egon Schiele, but with a playful, Kubinian fantasy and Schieleian dynamism. Within the Viennese Modernist movement, he was in contact with pioneers such as Josef Hoffmann, Carl Moll, Koloman Moser, Heinrich Lefler, Josef Engelhart, Ferdinand Schmutzer, Rudolf Jettmar, and Jules Pascin, as well as with Oskar Kokoschka and Josef Krejcik, whose expressive portraiture and graphic precision complemented his work. As a Jew, he was dispossessed by the Nazis on March 1, 1940, evicted from his apartment on Praterstrasse, and committed suicide to avoid deportation—a tragic fate that preserves his oeuvre as a testament to Viennese artistic freedom amidst caricature, fantasy, and intellectual wit. PLEASE NOTE: The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights. In the case of normal taxation (marked ° at the estimate), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax is added to the sum of the highest bid and the buyer's premium. This amounts to 13% for paintings, drawings, graphic works and sculptures and 20% for photographs and all other items. The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.