Joachim Waldenheim, Austrian Impressionist (1873- 1945)

SELF PORTRAIT ‘38

Lifetime resident of Vienna and Honor Graduate of the Academy of Arts, Waldenheim was well known in Austrian and German artistic circles. Following the Anschluss of 1938, however, he was not able to maintain contact with the art and academic institutions with which he had been associated. He was

Jewish and unemployable except as an unpaid Artist-Adviser. However, his obvious talent and high good humour continued to attract many students and patrons to his studio as late as 1939. During the war years, life became truly difficult. Admirers of his work in high positions, including officers in the Luftwaffe, protected Joachim and his wife, Hannah, until the very end of the war when direct orders from Berlin put an end to all efforts on their behalf.

In his role as an advisor to the the admissions office of the Academy of Arts in 1907, when Adolf Hitler’s application for admission was rejected, Waldenheim’s negative comments may have had a bearing on that decision. "His drawing is hopeless. He cannot draw a vertical line; his drawings of buildings are all askew," was one of the (supposedly anonymous) remarks preserved in the Academy files on Hitler. One of Hitler’s biographers has noted that his "deep depression, violent harangues and a ‘vicious anti-semitism which drove aquaintances away’ dates from this period".

Waldenheim refused several offers to teach in American schools in spite of increased difficulty in maintaining himself and his studio. An offer of a teaching position at Wesleyan University in Connecticut ( an offer which his old friends, Siggy and Hansi Neuemann, who had left Vienna for America in 1936, may have had a hand in arranging) was rejected. He could not think of leaving his beloved Vienna.* The choice proved fatal . He and Hannah died in January, 1945.

Joachim died without heirs. Separate suits have been brought by the Schoenberg family, the family of Lotte, an early mistress, and the Kogans, family of his widow, Hannah, claiming a share in the works reported remaining in Joachim’s studio at the time of his deportation and death.

*It is possible that Joachim was not able to raise the "Refugee Tax" demanded by the Nazis which would have permitted the removal of his studio, his household and all his accumulated artistic properties to a safe haven. Sigmund Freud, at this same time, was assisted financially by interests outside of Germany and Austria in meeting this "Tax", thus making possible the removal of his study, library, consulting room and his collection of antiquities to the safety of London. Freud’s sisters were not saved. Joachim and Hannah perished in the same camp, Theresienstadt, in which Freud’s sister, Dolfi, died of starvation.

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