The Artist Who Painted in Code and Vanished | Franz Sedlacek

Franz Sedlacek painted rooms that looked ordinary until you noticed the thing inside them that should not be there. A bat hangs in the air. A cockatiel glows in a library. Ghosts sit in the branches of a bare tree. A refugee climbs through a storm. Sedlacek was not only a painter. He trained as a chemist, worked at Vienna’s Technical Museum, and painted at night. He once said he could “say with colour” what he thought of his contemporaries and avoid saying it out loud. This video follows Sedlacek through the strange rooms, laboratories, landscapes and coded images he made in Vienna between the wars. It also follows what happened next: the Anschluss, his call-up into the Wehrmacht, his disappearance near Toruń in 1945, and the twenty-seven years before his family finally received a declaration of death. A story about coded painting, Austrian modernism, ghosts, war, and one artist who vanished without a grave. Image credits: An SS officer stands in front of a line-up of Jewish men in a courtyard or public square in Raciaz. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photograph Number 18810. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/... Technische Universität Wien mainbuilding mainentrance northview.jpg, photograph by Peter Haas, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT, via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... AK Wehrmacht Einberufung gel 1939.jpg, Archiv Kamran Salimi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via FürthWiki. https://www.fuerthwiki.de/wiki/index.... #ArtHistory #FranzSedlacek #Surrealism #NewObjectivity #ForgottenArtists CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction (Chapter 1) 01:43 The Polite Nightmare 04:33 The Chemist of the imagination 06:37 Outside is worse 10:12 The Wehrmacht and Disappearance Shoot The Moon bringing overlooked artists back into the light.