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Anton Josef Trcka (Vienna, 1893-1940) was a photographer, painter and poet. The portraitist behind the pseudonym “Antios“ (a combination of his two first names), not only is he forgotten, today, he hardly even existed in the consciousness of the contemporary art scene of his time. Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and many others held his paintings in high regard and recommended them to friends, who preserved them during their emigration. Prints of his drawings and copies of his poems were passed along. At the beginning of 1914 the artist met Egon Schiele, who performed the expressive gestures and poses of his self-portraits before the camera. “Antios“ in strangely winding letters can be found repeatedly on portraits of Egon Schiele. The gestural language of Schiele, which was related to “New Dance“ and likely also to French scientific documentation of the body language of hysterical women, contradicts everything that was typical in portraits up to that time. Schiele was second only to Rembrandt in the number of self-portraits he produced and we know from his myriad works that he was obsessed with his own image. Trcka’s talent is that -- through a completely different art form -- he has captured that same Schiele: a tortured, self-obsessed artist; the wide eyes, the sharp fingers, the posing. Just as Schieles portrait style was to influence Trckas photographic human portraits in the coming years, the young photographers landscapes and his early water-colours show his admiration for Gustav Klimt and the two-dimensional ornamental structure of his paintings. He photographed famous dancers like Hilde Holger and Ellinor Tordis. Although not Jewish, because he always mingled with the creative ’bohemians’, he was probably forced into what appeared to be a suicide in his Vienna studio. After Trckas death in 1940, his atelier was a refuge for the ostracised spiritual movement of anthroposophy in Vienna. In 1944 a bomb there destroyed almost hi
