Two Leopards

Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel was born in Wunsiedel in Upper Franconia in 1881. The graphic artist and painter, known as a ‘painter of animals’, studied at a young age at the Munich School of Arts and Crafts. Following a one-year stay in Italy, he went to Vienna in 1898, where he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts as a student of Christian Griepenkerl, and
then at the School of Arts and Crafts under Alfred Roller. Within the Wiener Werkstätte, Jungnickel stood out as one of the most important designers of textiles, rugs and postcards. As a colleague of Gustav Klimt, he was involved in the decoration of Palais Stoclet in Brussels. He achieved outstanding results by experimenting in the most varied graphic methods, especially in spray techniques and woodcuts. Through his links to Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, Jungnickel became familiar with the style of Austrian Expressionism, recognising it as a suitable mode of expression for his art. From 1938 to 1952 Jungnickel lived in self-imposed exile in Opatija, Croatia. Besides landscape details, animal motifs served as desirable picture subjects for Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel’s unique template spray techniques employed up until 1908. Inspired by the diversity of the animal world in Schönbrunn, the artist created several pictures of big cats, exotic birds and long-tailed monkeys using this technique. In this context, Jungnickel dispensed with any form of background design, placing the individually characterised animal figures directly on to the white sheet with minimal interior drawing. In most cases, the animal figures
were arranged in pairs – one animal frontally and significantly shortened, the other rendered in side view. Sometimes, noticeably reduced groups of animals on the upper edge of the picture reinforce the spatial impression. Echoes of the preference for clear lines, stylised forms, and colour-filled surfaces common to Japanese woodcuts are obvious and
quite deliberate. The leopards shown here are an impressive example of Jungnickel’s work using the spray technique.