Alfons Walde

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Cover of a monography (ISBN 3702216413) showing the typical painting style of Walde

Alfons Walde (1891-1958) an Austrian from Kitzbuhel in the Tyrol was the first painter to successfully bring skiing topics into painting. These sporting scenes together with his winter landscapes and farming images, rendered in a unique tempera style with impastose colouring, complemented his other artistic gifts as both an architect and graphic artist.Many of his paintings can be seen in the Museum gallery in Kitzbuhel.

Alfons Walde's first watercolour and tempera paintings already emerge during his schooldays. From 1910 to 1914 Walde studies architecture at the Technische Hochshule in Vienna and at the same time continues his education as a painter. In Danubian metropolis he moves in artistic circles that include Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt and he is influenced by Ferdinand Hodler. In 1911 he has his first exhibition in Innsbruck; in 1913 he is already represented by four farm pictures at the exhibition of Vienna's Secession. From 1914 to 1917 he actively participates as a Tyrolean Kaiserchutze in the high mountains battle of World War I. After returning to Kitzbuhl, he fully devotes himself to painting and participates again in exhibitions of the Secession and the Wiener Kunstlerhaus in the twenties. Around 1928 he finally finds his own characteristic style that gives expression to the Tyrolean mountain scenery - particularly the living winter landscapes - and its robust people through the use of highly reduced inland drawings and a pastose colouring. Through his whole life he stays with the subject of his homeland and remains obliged to a very native style; however, it is the impressionistic, momentary feeling, which he captures with great talent that lifts him in the spheres of international art history. His fulfilled life includes many exhibitions, competitions in painting and architecture and awards. Alfons Wade died on 11 December 1958 in Kitzbuhl.