John
Quincy Adams (1873-1933) with
embedded web links
Person
John Quincy Adams was born in Vienna on 23rd December 1873[i]. He was the son of the
American tenor Charles Runey Adams (1834-1900) and the Hungarian singer Nina
Bleyer (1835-1899), both of whom were engaged at the Vienna Court Opera. Adams is a distant relative[ii] (but not a direct
descendent) of the Second (John Adams, 1735-1826) and the Sixth President of
the United States of America (John Quincy, Adams 1767-1848), after whom
he was named. In 1879 the Adams family relocated to Boston, where Adams went to
school. In 1886 Charles Runey and Nina Adams separated and in 1887 Nina Adams returned
with the children[iii]
to Vienna.
Adams received his first artistic training at the
painting school Scheffert in 1891. From 1892-1896 he studied at the Vienna
Academy of Fine Arts and completed his studies at the Academy in Munich in 1897
and at the Académie Julien in Paris in 1898 (he was a regular exhibitor at the Académie
until 1912). In 1902, Adams was elected to the Vienna Künstlerhaus (Vienna’s
premier artists’ society, before the Secession was formed in 1897 by a dissident
group of artists from the Künstlerhaus). Adams participated regularly in exhibitions
organized by the Künstlerhaus and was awarded all the prizes and distinctions
possible.
In 1901 Adams married Steffie Sobotka (1881-1952) who, prior to their marriage,
had converted to Protestantism. The couple had two daughters: Gladys
(1902-1932) who upon marriage became Frank (she died tragically in a car
accident in 1932) and Harriet (1905-1999), who upon marriage became Countess Walderdorff[iv]. Adams had three grandchildren: Count Johannes
Walderdorff, Salzburg (1936-), and Barbara (1927-1993) and Nina (1931-2010) Frank
who lived in Austria until 1938. The two girls, together with their father Gustl
and stepmother Hedwig Frank and their grandmother Steffie Adams/von Gutmann,
were racially persecuted[v] by the Nazis and fled
Austria. They all survived the war in exile, Nina and Steffie in Belgium and Barbara
with the Frank family in the USA.
John Quincy and Steffie Adams separated in 1919 and
divorced in 1920. Steffie Adams married Willy von Gutmann in 1921 and John
Quincy married Franziska (Francis/Frances) Zierhut around 1930 or 1932. After
an extended stay in the USA in 1929/30 and 1930/31, when Adams painted many portraits
of members of the US government, the US Senate, academia and society in general,
he returned to Vienna in 1932 and died of stomach cancer on 15th March 1933. He
is buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna (the tombstone was made by the sculptor Otto Ofner).
There have been two large exhibitions of his works in
Vienna: in 1917 at the Künstlerhaus (69 works)
and in 1986 in the exhibition Viennese
Society in Portrait at the Academy of Fine Arts (exhibition and catalogue
include 62 works).
Artist
The artistic legacy of Adams comprises (based on research to date) some 500
paintings and drawings in the fields of genre, landscape and portrait painting.
By subject and style his work spans a very wide range, far beyond the
simplistic label, painter of beautiful and elegant Viennese women, as he is often
characterized in the contemporary press.
After an early formative phase (to about 1900) where he
is firmly grounded in the historical (Markart-style) tradition (this is
exemplified in the painting of the actress Helene Odilon, 1903), he regularly visited the
artist colony in Volendam, the Netherlands. There he painted naturalistic, sometimes
in very large format, subdued colored genre scenes of everyday life and death
of fishermen and workers and their families (e.g. Death Prayer
in the Poor House of Volendam, 1903 or the Tryptich Life’s Journey,
1905).
At the same time his painting style in his portraits evolved towards rapid,
impressionistic brush strokes with a reduced color palette (e.g. the opera
singer Drill Orridge, 1907),
unconventional (and controversial) subjects (The [Gynecological] Operation,
1909) and unusual composition (The Artist and his Family, 1908 – a portrait of the Adams
family), and works that also include irony and humor (The 7 Executioners, 1904 – Künstleraus colleagues judging a
painting for admission to an exhibition, alas lost; or The Comparison [art versus reality],
1914).
Plein-air nude studies in the Jugendstil style (Nude Study at
Wolfgangsee, 1911) expanded Adams portfolio (but drew criticism from being
too close in style to the rival Secession artists). Adams established himself increasingly as a leading
portrait painter of Viennese society. His sitters included all higher echelons
of society: artists, (moneyed) bourgeoisie, aristocracy, ultimately (the highest
distinction) even the Emperor and the Imperial Family (portrait of Emperor
Franz Josef I., 1914; three
portraits of Emperor Karl, 1916-17, and about two dozen members of the (wider) Imperial
Family).
During the war of 1914-1918 Adams was a member of the
group of artists belonging to the war press corps and painted around 50
paintings on practically all war fronts, - the East, the South, the Adriatic
Sea and the Balkans. Partly drawing on a new bright color palette, he painted
the horrors of war (Destroyed Bridge over the
Pruth River, 1915), landscapes (Lovcen-Pass, 1916),
propaganda genre pictures (My Homeland,
1916/17) as well as portraits of character ranging from generals (Ignaz Edler von Korda,
1915), officers (Rudolf Singule, 1916, captain
of the U-4 submarine,) as well as soldiers (studies and portraits of Kaiserjäger soldiers,
1916).
After the war Adams focused exclusively on portraits.
His often glamorous portraits (e.g. Kitty
Countess Schönborn, later Rothschild, 1916, Countess Michael
Karolyi, [née Countess Katalin Andrássy, the so-called “red Countess”], 1918, or
Countess Marie Traun, 1919) responded to the demands of
his aristocratic clientele for self-representation in an age when they had lost
all their high social positions, titles, and even names. Adams complied, but
also countered through varying postures, styles and execution. He introduced
unusual (Christl Fries-Tersch,
1929) or -in the new age unusually classical (Marie von
Stribersky, 1924) postures, ever more sedate, Rembrandt-like style,
color schemes (Countess Alice Harrach,
1919, Madame de Portas, 1925) and
with more and more impressionistic brush strokes (Princess Mena
Fürstenberg, 1927). Backgrounds become simpler and stylized, ultimately
disappearing altogether leaving only a white canvass as the background (Prince Alexander
Dietrichstein-Nikolsburg, 1927). Finally, the models for his portraits
are painted irrespective of rank and class in simple modern clothes and with a casual
posture (Mr William
Stuard-Spaulding Jr, 1930; Prince Karl Egon
Fürstenberg, 1929).
In all his paintings, Adams remained true to a
naturalistic style, where viewers can easily recognize a person or subject. Despite
being a child of the 19th century, John Quincy Adams nonetheless ultimately arrived
in the modernity of the 20th century and can still excite any art and history
loving person of the 21st century.
[i] Multiple
birthdates are given in the literature (1873 to 1875).
The date of 23rd December 1873 is given in Adam’s baptism record and his
registration card and this date was also adopted by the most authoritative
Austrian biographical lexicon (österr. Biographischen
Lexikon).
[ii] Their
direct common ancestor being Henry Adams of Somerset
(1583–1646, see. Adams
entry by Christopher Wenthworth-Stanley in the Laszlo Catalogue Raisonnee.
[iii] Adams
had four siblings in Vienna: Charles V. Adams; Victoria
D., married Biro, Luise E.; married Teltscher; and Mary A., married Teltscher
(multiple marriages between families were not uncommon in Vienna around 1900).
[iv] Owner of the Goldener Hirsch
hotel and restaurant in Salzburg.
[v] Steffie
and Willy von Gutmann were divorced in 1924. Upon their marriage in 1921 Willy conferred
to Steffie the property rights of Würting castle in the province of Upper
Austria, where the vast collection of paintings from Adams’ estate was stored. The
castle and associated large agricultural estates were seized by the Nazis in
1938 (as were the considerable properties of the Frank family) and the castle was
handed over to a SS unit as a training center. Würting castle was restituted
only in 1952 and under a shameful settlement agreement (the agreement required a
considerable financial compensation to be paid by Steffie to the province of Upper
Austria). She was forced to sell the castle to cover the costs of the
settlement as well as lawyers and other legal fees. The final restitution of
all her assets was only completed by 1967, fifteen years after her death.