Jean Egger
1897–1934 · Austria · Expressionism
The story
In the summer of 1930 Jean Egger painted a series of landscapes in Sweden, and that year a solo exhibition in Paris brought him the strongest reviews of his career. The Belvedere's Landscape from the same year shows why curators link him to Chaim Soutine, the Paris painter of twisting, thickly loaded landscapes, whom Egger knew personally.
He was born Hans Egger in 1897 in Hüttenberg, a mining town in Carinthia, and trained at the Munich Academy from 1918 to 1922. In autumn 1924 he moved to Paris, took the name Jean and got to know Soutine, the painter Moïse Kisling and the dealer Léopold Zborowski. Lung disease drove him to Mallorca in 1932, where he kept painting at Pollença. He died of tuberculous meningitis in Klagenfurt in 1934, aged 37.
