Osttirol honours Albin Egger-Lienz on centenary of his death

East Tyrol is marking 100 years since painter Albin Egger-Lienz died in South Tyrol, with tributes including a memorial mass in Lienz. In his home region he has acquired almost saint-like status, although his expressive, pared-down art divided society during his lifetime, ORF reports.

Egger, who adopted the name Lienz himself, was eventually buried in the war memorial chapel he designed. The memorial was built as an extension of St Andrä parish church in Lienz in 1924 and 1925 by the young architect Clemens Holzmeister, whom Egger had insisted on appointing.

Eggers cycle of paintings in the chapel refers to events of the First World War, some of which he experienced himself. Its central image, titled “The Resurrected”, shows an emaciated figure and sparked a fierce dispute. Critics objected to the depiction of the Saviour as consumptive.

The chapel was opened on 8 September in a ceremony attended by 10,000 people, the then Federal President Michael Hainisch, Tyrol’s governor Franz Stumpf and Bishop Sigismund Waitz. It was intended in part to help give Lienz, then a young district separated from the rest of Tyrol, its own identity. A dispute between Lienz dean Gottfried Stemberger and Egger followed. On 5 May 1926, the Vatican imposed an interdict. The chapel was not reconsecrated, and Egger-Lienz was not buried there, until 1987.

His standing after his death was also contested. As a favourite painter of leading National Socialists, including Alfred Rosenberg, his expressive depictions of rural life were seen as an aesthetic precursor to “blood and soil” art. After the Second World War, his work was more clearly placed in the context of European modernism, in part because of his exchanges with the Secession movement.

Art historian and painter Wilfried Kirschl remains a leading expert on Egger and wrote the standard work on the development of his art. That development also shows that painting in the region at the time looked more to Munich than to Vienna. Attempts to establish Egger in the capital with a professorship failed during his lifetime.

Albin Egger-Lienz is also being remembered with a mass at St Andrä parish church.