Franz Wacik

Illustrations by Franz Wacik for the humor magazine Die Muskete, circa 1906–1911 Vienna

1909 Li-An has been posting a ton of material from Die Muskete on his tumblr. As I work my own way through the complete archive at Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Franz Wacik's strange out-of-time work keeps catching my eye. Apparently he published 600 drawings in the magazine from 1906 to 1919. (I've made it through mid-1911 and have hoarded a couple hundred.) Information about Wacik (Vienna, 1883–1938) is scant, so luckily Barbara Copeland Buenger discusses him in her essay "Unwieldy Wien" (from Design, Vienna: 1890s to 1930s):As one of the group's greatest founders and practitioners, [Czeschka] has always received central notice in histories of modern Viennese art and design. Such is not true of Franz Wacik, widely admired as a political and social cartoonist for a popular Viennese humorous weekly, occasional theater designer, and illustrator of children's books (he designed three volumes in the Gerlach series). Wacik is all but forgotten in texts that present the Wiener Werkstätte as Vienna's only modern art movement and thus reminds us that a richer, more complicated history of modern art often falls outside a too-strictly-construed modernist canon. Wacik was a regular member and exhibitor with the Secession, and illustrated Hugo von Hofmannsthal's famous wartime children's book, Prinz Eugen der edle Ritter [Prince Eugene the Nobel Knight] in 1915. [Ed.: See my scan at the bottom of this post.] Another short bio at Kunsthandel Hieke:[Wacik] studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and at the Vienna Academy. [Ed.: he studied with Alfred Roller, Christian Griepenkerl, Franz Rumpler, and Heinrich Lefler.] From 1906 to 1919, he worked for the magazine “Muskete” -- 600 of his drawings are from this period. In 1924, he designed the frescoes on the first floor of the Vienna Secession, and in 1927/8 the frescoes in the arcades of the municipal building on Vogelweidplatz...For his work, he was awarded the Lampi Prize and the Füger Medal as well as the State Prize in 1934. The Vienna Secession held a memorial exhibition in 1939. Buenger mentions "the artist Marianne Wacik, Franz Wacik's wife" — I haven't yet looked her up. Anyway, ENJOY. At the end of the post I provide some non-Muskete work.