Page 114 - Eye of the beholder

108
WALTER LANGHANNER [1905-1977]
The name of Walter Langhammer was closely associated with Progressive Artists Group that was formed Post-Independence in 1947, with a manifesto penned by the firey and dynamic Francis Newton Souza. Langhammer was an émigré artist who had escaped the Fascist regime of Hitler and found his way to Bombay in 1938. He served as the Art Director with the Times of India Newspaper in Bombay [Mumbai]. By sharing his own artistic training as well as his relative wealth, Langhammer nurtured the young artists that would go on to form the Progressive Artists Group. He also helped his students make connections with European émigré intellectuals, industrialists, and physicians who became early patrons or champions of the Progressives, including the Times of India art critic Rudolf von Leyden.
Born in the town of Graz in Austria in 1905, in what was then the great Austro-Hungarian Empire, Walter Carl Maria Langhammer grew up in the period between the two world wars. Young Walter showed predilection towards arts, and studied at the art academy in Vienna under Professors Ferdinand Andri, Hans Tichy and Josef Jungwirth. By the time he graduated with a master’s degree in painting in 1938, he had acquired fame in landscape painting, portraits and caricatures. At the Art Academy Oskar Kokoscha was a teacher and Langhammer struck up a friendship with him during this period, though the extent of closeness between the artists is not well established, but the two artists were contemporaries and certainly were associated with each other.
Walter’s wife Katherine was Jewish, the only daughter of Jewish social democratic district commander in Vienna. Through this connection, Walter received many commissions and despite not a formal member of the art society in Vienna or Kunstlerhaus Vienna, Langhammer participated in numerous exhibitions in the city in the 1930s. However, the Jewish origins of his wife, and his political orientations eventually forced him to leave Austria, and they arrived in India in 1938. At this time in Bombay, there was the presence of other noted émigrés from Europe namely the collector Schlesinger and the Art Critic of Times of India Rudy Von Leyden. By virtue of their interest in arts and in providing patronage to the fledgling art establishment, this group of Jewish expatriates formed a seminal support system with some resident Indians of Bombay and became instrumental in providing the right milieu for the Bombay artists to thrive.
By the middle of the 1940s, Walter Langhammer seems to have been comfortably ensconced in his adopted city, which at that time had already acquired a cosmopolitan character. Apart from the British was also other expatriate population as the Italians, Swiss, Dutch and Austrians. As early as 1939, Langhammer won the gold medal of the Bombay Art Society. Soon the couple would go on to become active members of the ‘Bombay Art Society Committee’.