Portrait of a Woman at a Spinning Wheel by Walter Langhammer

The Austrian painter and art teacher Walter Langhammer (1905–1977) was a fierce critic of the Nazi regime, so much so that he did not even balk at drawing caricatures of Hitler.

In the late 1930s, Langhammer and his wife fled to India, fearing persecution for his views. Upon their arrival, the British initially arrested them and kept them in separate prisons. It was during World War II and tensions were running high. They were eventually released after the authorities were shown newspaper clippings of his work by fellow artist Rudolf van Leyden.

Eventually, Langhammer settled down in Bombay with his own home studio at Nepean Sea Road. He was appointed the first-ever art director of The Times Group (he would later hire a young Mário Miranda, introducing his cartoons to a nationwide readership). He also grew to become a mentor for the young people at the heart of the (then-nascent) Progressive Artists’ Group, introducing the likes of S. H. Raza to the finer points of European art.

In Yashodhara Dalmia’s The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (2002) there’s a fascinating passage describing his tutelage. Langahmmer tells Raza: “You have to practically dissect the paintings. You must be able to say what differentiates a Matisse from a Picasso or a Monet from a Cezanne.”

Langhammer’s own work was influenced by the tenets of Viennese Expressionism, especially the whimsical landscapes of his fellow Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980). Photo-realism was eschewed in favour of subjectivity and raw emotional immediacy, documenting not just a moment in time but a persistent state of mind, a specific psychological setup.

In Portrait of a Woman at a Spinning Wheel, we can feel the warmth of the subject’s yellow sari, as well as the subtle sense of kineticism suggested by the brushstrokes near the wheel. It’s as though the world itself stopped spinning for a moment to admire this one woman at this one wheel.

Langahmmer drew several scenes of everyday rural Indian life in this style—people farming, drawing water at the well, offering prayers at the local temple. It’s fair to say that colour itself was one of Langhammer’s great subjects. Exuberant, saturated colours with visible brushstrokes are emphasised in Portrait of a Woman. Even shadows in his paintings are not drawn in black, but in some combination of the work’s existing colour palette. According to curator and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, Langhammer’s paintings were “imbued with nostalgia for a lost Europe, but also vivid with an awareness of the light of his adopted country.” In the last decade of his life, Langhammer returned to Europe, drawing Alpine villages with the same warm colours and vibrant brushstrokes he deployed to depict India.

This painting was part of an exhibition entitled Epochal: The Period of Pioneers, that was held from 19 April to 11 June 2026 at DAG Gallery 2, The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai.

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