A last bridge to the lost homeland

Many collectors still have an unbroken love for Alfons Walde's harsh mountain and farm idylls, not to mention the skiers weaving over steep slopes. The creative zeal of the trained painter and architect was also unbroken. Born in Tyrol in 1891, he spent almost his entire life in Kitzbühel.

He designed the station building for the local Hahnenkammbahn and built his mountain house, in which there were lots and lots of celebrations. Walde created the logo that is still valid today for the naturally sedate and cozy winter sports domain, which was still aspiring at the time. Shooting and bubbly came later.

Walde painted the peasants on their way to church, stepping firmly, child and skittle in tow. He painted the farmsteads crouched in the mountain, modeling the play of glistening white snow and dark shadows on the mountain slopes and in the rugged rock with a swift, broad brush. Above, the sky always shines in a radically bright blue. He was a virtuoso of the secessionist and expressionist schooled winter landscape with a barren appearance.

Alfons Walde soon made a name for himself, marketing his motifs on postcards and posters. His second favorite (or maybe his favorite) subject was the female nude. Here, too, his creative power seemed inexhaustible, albeit with less popular results.

Although Walde paintings are by no means rare - the artist worked quickly, he repeated some of his popular Alpine depictions with slight variations - today they are often traded in the high six-figure price range. Last but not least, this may be due to the fact that at least one Alfons Walde is indispensable for furnishing a representative Tyrolean, especially Kitzbühel holiday chalet. And because he was able to reproduce snow and sky so atmospherically and characteristically like no other painter.

The photo biography of the “Kirchenstiege”, which will be called up at the Vienna auction house Dorotheum on November 29, 2022 (estimate price 120,000 to 200,000 euros), shows how strong the attraction could also have an effect on people with an appreciation for art who lived elsewhere. Franz Stiassny and his wife Käte emigrated from Silesia to Palestine in 1933. The national economist, born in Brno in 1901, had previously managed one of the largest German textile factories with 1,500 employees and refused to replace Jewish workers with "Aryan" workers. The young couple could not take money or valuables with them.

But the forest came with me. As an unemployed graduate, Stiassny had to reorganize his life - and became a dairy and vegetable farmer. A hard cut, but the right decision. His sister and her husband Desider Friedmann, then head of the Jewish community in Vienna, could not bring themselves to leave the city. And were killed in Auschwitz.

The “Kirchenstiege”, owned by the son of Franz Stiassny, a university professor of biochemistry, for 27 years, has finally fulfilled its hidden role as a comforting bridge to the lost home, which was intended with a certain sense of exoticism. The coast of the Levantine Sea is a thing of the past.