Anton Ažbe

Ažbe, crippled since birth and orphaned at the age of eight, learned painting as an apprentice to Janez Wolf and at the Academies in Vienna and Munich.

Ažbe's training methods were adopted by Beta and Rista Vukanović when they took over Kiril Kutlik's atelier and school[2] and by Russian artists both at home (Grabar, Kardovsky) and in emigration (Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky).

[3] Ažbe's own undisputed artistic legacy is limited to twenty-six graphic works, including classroom studies, most of them at the National Gallery of Slovenia.

[5] His enigmatic personality blended together alcoholism, chain smoking, bitter loneliness, minimalistic simple living in private, and eccentric behaviour in public.

[6] A public scarecrow and a bohemian socialite, Ažbe protected his personal secrets till the end, a mystery even to his students and fellow teachers.

[6] Twins Alois and Anton Ažbe were born in a peasant family in the Carniolan village of Dolenčice near Škofja Loka in the Austrian Empire (now in Slovenia).

[7] By this time, it was evident that while Alois developed normally, Anton suffered serious congenital health problems: he lagged in physical growth, his legs were weak, and his spine was deformed.

[7] At some point in the late 1870s, he met Janez Wolf, a Slovenian painter associated with the Nazarene movement who handled numerous church mural commissions.

[9] To make a living, Ažbe teamed up with Ferdo Vesel, selling classroom works and run-of-the-mill kitsch scenes to wholesale dealers.

[9] Half of Ažbe's surviving legacy dates back to the Munich Academy years; by the end of this period, he was recognized as a professional portrait painter and was regularly exhibited in the Glaspalast.

[11] After a brief stay on Türkenstrasse, the school relocated to its permanent base at 16, Georgenstrasse in Schwabing (the building was destroyed by an allied air raid in July 1944).

[23] The oddly shaped and expensively (if not tastelessly) dressed schoolmaster, slowly walking with a cane and always smoking, became a target of tabloids and cartoonists.

"[26] Loyal students Igor Grabar and Dmitry Kardovsky noted portraits by Ažbe for his "superb drawing"[27] marred by dry, if not dull, paint technique.

[32] Supporters (Igor Grabar) and opponents (Mstislav Dobuzhinsky) of Ažbe training system agree that it relied, at least in the beginners' classes, on two paramount ideas: the Main Line and the Ball Principle (German: Kugelprinzip).

[33] Dobuzhinsky admitted that these intrusions into his early work were an eye-opener, "an excellent tool against dilettante, myopic copying of reality..."[34] although for many students it spelled their end as painters: overwhelmed by the "Main Line", they did not dare to step over it and "beef it up" with relevant details.

[35] Once the student mastered these basics, Ažbe carefully led him to a different interpretation, that of a head as a polyhedron composed of flat surfaces and sharp ridges – in Dobuzhinsky's opinion, a precursor to cubism.

[35] Ažbe, himself a master of human anatomy, enforced rigorous training in this subject, from nude figure drawing to attending autopsies.

[33] Igor Grabar, who approved this approach, recalled that in the process he memorized all human muscles and bones by heart to the point where he easily reproduced them in plaster with closed eyes.

[33] Wassily Kandinsky, on the contrary, dreaded figure drawing sessions: "I quickly encountered a constraint upon my freedom that turned me into a slave, even only temporarily in a new guise – studying from a model.

Students of both sexes and from various countries thronged around these smelly, apathetic, expressionless, characterless natural phenomena who were paid fifty to seventy pfennig an hour... the people who were of no concern to them... they spent not one second thinking about art.

"[36] Kandinsky, in his mature years, stayed aside from portraiture or nude figures, and his few rare examples were "featureless, weightless and transparent, a mere cipher without substance"[37] – an opposite of Ažbe's own intentions.

[41] While Igor Grabar praised this style and elevated it to a level of a whole system developing in parallel to impressionism, Dobuzhinsky (who never mastered the power stroke) called it "an artful magicians' trick... colourful but greasy painting devoid of its essence, the 'tone'.