Vienna (AFP)

Austrian singer and painter Arik Brauer, representative of the Viennese School of "Fantastic Realism", died Sunday at the age of 92, leaving behind a prolific work.

"I was happy with my wife, my family, my art and my Viennese forest. But we only live a time, between two eternities where we do not exist": these were his last words according to a statement by his family, quoted Monday by the local press.

Born in 1929 in Vienna to a family of Jewish craftsmen, his childhood changed when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938.

If his father died in a concentration camp, he survived by hiding.

During "Crystal Night", the vast pogrom carried out on November 9 and 10, 1938 by the Nazis against the Jews, he found refuge with the keeper of his father's shoemaker's workshop.

These two days of anti-Semitic violence left at least 30 people dead in Austria, while some 7,800 people were imprisoned and 4,000 deported to the Dachau concentration camp.

After the war, Arik Brauer studied at the Beaux-Arts in Vienna before moving to Paris with his wife, Naomi, where the couple made a living by singing.

Returning to Vienna in the mid-1960s, he became one of the major figures of the Viennese movement of "fantastic realism", alongside Ernst Fuchs or Rudolf Hausner.

His works combine bright colors, attention to detail and biblical references.

He is also renowned in Austria for his career as a musician and composer, favoring lyrics in the Viennese dialect.

Arik Brauer, a jack-of-all-trades artist, was also interested in architecture and graphics and in 1975 had designed sets and costumes for the Paris Opera.

Dividing his life between Austria and Israel, he received numerous prizes and awards not only for his art, but also for his defense of democracy and human rights, a role hailed on Twitter Monday by the Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen.

When asked if he could imagine not working as an artist, he replied in one of his last interviews with the German weekly Die Zeit: "I can only imagine it if I no longer exist, and even then I will not stop ".

© 2021 AFP