Joseph Fleck

Born in Austria, Joseph Fleck studied at Vienna’s Royal Academy of Arts until 1919. He decided to leave bleak post-war Austria for the United States in 1922. After working as a favorite portrait painter among the wealthy of Kansas City, Fleck headed to Taos, New Mexico, drawn by the romance of the West. There, he counted Ernest Blumenschein and Oscar Berninghaus among his close friends. Soon Fleck’s portraits of Native American people and Southwestern landscapes appeared in exhibitions at the Chicago Art Institute, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, D.C. There is an unparalleled sense of poetry within color and form that infuses the work of Joseph Fleck. His loose yet elegant style reflects a rigorous Viennese art education played out in a raw American landscape.