Famous Artists from Austria

Reference
Updated August 30, 2019 60.6K views106 items

List of the most popular artists from Austria, listed alphabetically with photos when available. For centuries artists have been among the world's most important people, helping chronicle history and keep us entertained with one of the earliest forms of entertainment. Whether they're known for painting, sculpting, etching or drawing, the famous Austrian artists on this list have kept that tradition alive by creating renowned pieces of art that have been praised around the world. You can find useful information below about these notable Austrian artists, such as when they were born and where their place of birth was.

Artists here include everyone from Wilhelm J. Burger to Josef Eduard Teltscher.

This list answers the questions, "Which famous artists are from Austria?" and "Who are the most well-known Austrian artists?"

For further information on these historic Austrian artists, click on their names. If you're a fine art lover use this list of celebrated Austrian artists to discover some new paintings that you will enjoy.
Ranked by
  • Lucian Freud

    Lucian Freud

    Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink, Woman with a Daffodil, Girl with a White Dog
    • Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
    • Associated periods or movements: Contemporary art, Realism, Realism, Surrealism, Expressionism
    • Nationality: United Kingdom
    • Art Forms: Painting
    Lucian Michael Freud, OM (; 8 December 1922 โ€“ 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draftsman, specializing in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. From 1942โ€“43 he attended Goldsmiths College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War. His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.
  • Arnold Schoenberg

    Arnold Schoenberg

    Denken, Der rote Blick, Blue Self-Portrait
    • Birthplace: Vienna, Leopoldstadt, Austria
    • Associated periods or movements: Der Blaue Reiter
    • Nationality: Austria, United States of America
    Arnold Schoenberg or Schรถnberg (, US also ; German: [หˆสƒรธหnbษ›ษฬฏk] (listen); 13 September 1874 โ€“ 13 July 1951) was an Austrian, and later American, composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works were labeled degenerate music, because they were modernist and atonal. He emigrated to the United States in 1933. Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has been one of the most influential of 20th-century musical thought. Many European and American composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea. Schoenberg was also an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, Nikos Skalkottas, Stefania Turkewich, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Robert Gerhard, Leon Kirchner, Dika Newlin, and other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many significant 20th-century musicologists and critics, including Theodor W. Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as the pianists Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eduard Steuermann, and Glenn Gould. Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schรถnberg Center in Vienna.
  • Richard Neutra
    • Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
    • Nationality: Austria, United States of America
    Richard Joseph Neutra was an American architect. Living and building for the majority of his career in Southern California, he came to be considered among the most important modernist architects.
  • Egon Schiele

    Egon Schiele

    Portrait of Edith Schiele In A Striped Dress, Self Portrait with Black Vase, Self-Portrait
    • Birthplace: Tulln an der Donau, Austria
    • Associated periods or movements: Expressionism, Vienna Secession
    • Nationality: Austria, Czech Republic
    • Art Forms: Painting, Drawing
    Egon Schiele (German: [หˆสƒiหlษ™] (listen); 12 June 1890 โ€“ 31 October 1918) was an Austrian painter. A protรฉgรฉ of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and the many self-portraits the artist produced, including naked self-portraits. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele's paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism.
  • Gustav Klimt

    Gustav Klimt

    The Kiss, Danaรซ, Beethoven Frieze
    • Birthplace: Baumgarten, Vienna, Austria
    • Associated periods or movements: Art Nouveau, Symbolist literature, Vienna Secession
    • Nationality: Austrian Empire
    • Art Forms: Painting
  • Alfred Kubin

    Alfred Kubin

    The Card Cheat, Vathek, Water Spirit
    • Birthplace: Severozรกpad, Litomฤ›ล™ice, Czech Republic
    • Associated periods or movements: Expressionism, Symbolist literature
    • Nationality: Austria
    • Art Forms: Painting
    Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (10 April 1877 โ€“ 20 August 1959) was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator, and occasional writer. Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism.