Alfons Walde is an exceptional figure. In an art world at the beginning of the 20th century that moved between isms and manifestos, and often had more superstructure than substance, he created works in a down-to-earth, yet innovative, local, but at the same time international style characterized by a tremendous quality. It is a powerful, sculptural monumentality with which he designs his environment and thus artistically exaggerates them. Looking for comparisons to his magnificent renditions of the impressive Alpine landscape, you have to take a closer look at Alfons Walde's career.

Influences from his time in Vienna
Walde was born in Oberndorf in 1891. and grew up in Kitzbühel, where his father worked as a drawing teacher. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Vienna from 1910 to 1914 and at the same time continued his training as a painter. In the metropolis on the Danube, he found an important supporter in the architect Robert Örley, who introduced him to the Vienna art scene, where Walde was part of artistic circles around Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, who had strong influence on his work. Walde’s strong top view of the subject is comparable to Egon Schiele; it would become manifest in Walde’s works. He found further inspiration in Ferdinand Hodler, who had participated in several Vienna Secession exhibitions since the turn of the century and was appointed member of the Vienna Secession. Even if Hodler was not personally in Vienna during Alfons Walde's study years in Vienna, one can assume that he was occupied with Hodler's work, which was highly valued by the Secession artists. Alfons Walde himself showed four pictures with peasant scenes the 1913 Secession exhibition. In his paintings, Ferdinand Hodler stages the mountains in a completely new way. They stand on the horizon as a mystical place of longing. These mountain ranges radiate an appeal created from the unique choice of colors. Alfons Walde created a new genre of local painting by placing de-individualized figures in snowy mountain landscapes.

With the beginning of the First World War, Alfons Walde was suddenly forced to interrupt his studies: from 1914 to 1917 he served in the mountain warfare forces in the fierce Dolomite battles. After military service, he resumed his architecture studies in Vienna and then returned to his hometown Kitzbühel.

Walde – the uncontested master of the winter landscape
In his immediate surroundings, Alfons Walde found the motifs that characterize almost his entire artistic work: the Alpine region Tyrol with its small mountain villages and their inhabitants. With his impasto brushstrokes, Walde described the Tyrolean character like no other, and was recognized from an early point on. His figures are firmly defined, almost rough, as mountain farmers are by nature. His hermetic and anonymized design of the figures suggests the undertone of the roughness and nature of a rural life, but the radiant beauty of the mountain nature and the presence of the scenery, untainted by anything urban, is sublime and overpowering.

It is precisely the simplicity of the stylistic devices that benefit the sparse subject matter that made Walde one of the most outstanding painters of Alpine folklore. Walde's painting style is, as here, very impasto. He lets the blue shadows of the houses fall like silhouettes into the backdrop-like, muted snowy landscape with the generous white heightened parts. The matt and sometimes impasto and almost relief-like application of paint is also typical of his work . Alfons Walde, who remained unnoticed by Austrian art history during his lifetime, has now finally been elevated to the rank that he deserves. [EH]