Leopold Löwy 1871-1940

Leopold Löwy was born in Vienna in 1871 into a Jewish family of industrialists. At an early age, he rejected the future his parents had planned for him in the family business, choosing instead to pursue an independent artistic path fuelled by an insatiable intellectual curiosity. After studying astronomy and attending courses in numerous other disciplines, he continued his education largely as an autodidact, acquiring a broad culture and fluency in five languages, both written and spoken.

Based in his native city, he became a regular at the celebrated Café Central, where he mingled with leading figures of Vienna’s artistic and literary circles. A passionate chess player, Löwy joined the Neues Wiener Schachclub in 1893, won several tournaments and successfully competed against such masters as Siegbert Tarrasch, Richard Réti and Savielly Tartakower, although he never reached the highest ranks of international chess.

Löwy produced the greater part of his graphic œuvre between 1900 and 1920, creating numerous portraits, caricatures and satirical drawings of figures from his circle, including writers, artists and chess players. He also gradually developed a fantastical world inhabited by hybrid creatures and grotesque figures, recalling medieval drolleries and the imagery of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, while anticipating certain aspects of Surrealism.

In addition to working as an illustrator for postcards and Viennese periodicals, he published a collection of fables in 1920, which he illustrated himself. Persecuted as a Jew following the Anschluss and expelled from his home by the Nazi authorities, he took his own life in Vienna on 29 February 1940 to escape deportation.

He left behind a highly distinctive body of work in which humour, satire and fantasy combine to offer an original testimony to the intellectual and cultural life of fin-de-siècle Vienna.