CURRICULUM VITAE


Impressum

Martin Häusle
1903 Satteins – 1966 Feldkirch

Martin Häusle, who started painting and drawing in early childhood, studied first at the painting school of Toni Kirchmayer in Innsbruck and then from 1927 to 1930 at the Academy of Arts in Vienna under Professor Ferdinand Andri.

In 1931 he returned to the place of his birth, Satteins. His work there primarily consisted of graphic works and landscape paintings. The frescos in the church at Lech am Arlberg (1932) and the stained glass windows for the church at Zürs (1936) were his first public commissions.

From 1938 until his death in 1966 he lived and worked in his studio on Margarethenkapf in Feldkirch. During the war Martin Häusle managed to continue painting in relative freedom. In this period, while he was serving as a customs border guard in the mountains at the Swiss and Liechtenstein border, many of his landscapes and watercolours were painted.

After 1945 he received some commissions for stained glass windows and large-scale frescos, and he also painted portraits and landscapes. In 1947 he was awarded the Great Austrian State Prize for Painting.

His importance for Austrian art is underlined by his participation at the biennale in Venice (1950) and Menton (1951). The Principality of Liechtenstein subsequently commissioned him to design various series of stamps.

After this, Martin Häusle mainly received large commissions for stained glass windows, but continued to produce drawings and numerous other graphic works. He also painted landscapes and portraits of close family members.

His idiosyncratically designed studio house, a former palm house in the protected Margarethenkapf park whose cupolas Martin Häusle covered in aluminium foil in 1962 and whose walls he decorated with frescos and mosaics, prompted widely differing reactions in the relatively conservative district.