Anton Faistauer

Snapshot

Anton Faistauer painted the entrance hall of the Grosses Festspielhaus in 1926 and was dead four years later. The Nazis destroyed his frescoes as degenerate art in 1938. The reconstructed versions you see today in the Festspielhaus foyer are the city’s acknowledgment of what was taken.

The Story

Faistauer was born in 1887 in St. Martin bei Lofer, a small village in the Salzburg Pinzgau, in the kind of remote Alpine landscape that would keep appearing in his paintings long after he had left. He had little formal schooling, poor grades, and a childhood mostly spent on the family farm, which is not the usual biography for someone who would go on to reshape Viennese modernism. He made it to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, then left in 1909 as part of the same cohort that produced Egon Schiele, co-founding the Neukunstgruppe in a direct protest against the Academy’s conservatism. Their manifesto called for “unrestricted color and form.”

His Cezanne-influenced style, bold brushwork, and the influence of the French Impressionism he had absorbed through Vienna’s exhibition circuit put him in a circle that included Oskar Kokoschka, and his reputation spread to Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam in the years before the First World War. The most direct Salzburg connection came in 1926, when he received the commission to paint the fresco cycle for the entrance hall of the Grosses Festspielhaus. It was his most prominent public work, and it placed him at the centre of the city’s cultural identity.

He died in Vienna in February 1930, aged 42. Eight years later, the Nazis declared his frescoes entartete Kunst and had them destroyed. The reconstruction that was finally completed in the 1980s is what stands in the Grosses Festspielhaus foyer today. For anyone paying attention, the frescoes are not just decorative; they are a record of what happened to Austrian modernism and the particular violence with which a culture can turn on its own.