The Fire Fox: Ernst Fuchs and the Otto Wagner Villa

Wagner's own villa

In Hütteldorf, then a suburb on the edge of the Vienna Woods, Otto Wagner built a villa for himself and his family in the 1880s – on a slope, with a columned portico, a grand stair and stained-glass windows by Adolf Böhm. Intended as a summer house, it soon became the family home and a meeting place of Vienna's cultural world. Later Wagner built a second, smaller house next door and sold the first villa.

After 1945 the building fell into decay; there was even talk of demolishing it.

The painter

Ernst Fuchs (1930–2015) grew up in Vienna. As the son of a Jewish father he was persecuted under the Nazis; his father emigrated to Shanghai. After the war Fuchs studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and became a co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, together with painters such as Arik Brauer and Rudolf Hausner. He lived in Paris for many years and worked as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, stage designer, architect and composer. Religious and mythological motifs run through his work; from the late 1970s he signed some paintings as "Feuerfuchs" (Fire Fox).

Rescue and museum

In 1972 Fuchs bought the dilapidated villa, restored it and redesigned many rooms – with silk wallpaper, painted furniture and, in the garden, the "Nymphaeum Omega" fountain. For a long time it served as his studio. Since 1988 it has housed the Ernst Fuchs Museum.

Other works by Fuchs can be seen, for example, in the parish church of St. Egid in Klagenfurt (Apocalypse cycle) and in the Kunsthotel Fuchspalast in St. Veit an der Glan. Ernst Fuchs died in 2015 and is buried in Hütteldorf cemetery.

Please check opening hours and tours on the museum's website before your visit.

This article is based on "Огненный лис" ("The Fire Fox") by Natalya Novik in Code 43 magazine, spring/summer 2015, and has been newly edited for code43.at.