Siegfried Charoux
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Siegfried Joseph Charoux (15 November 1896 – 26 April 1967) was an artist, primarily a figurative sculptor working in bronze, stone, or terracotta. Born in Austria, he moved to England in 1935, where he became naturalised in 1946.
Charoux was born in Vienna. His father Josef Kinich was a civil engineer who had served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. His mother Anna Buchta (née Charous) was a dressmaker. She had Czech ancestry, and was the widow of Johann Buchta. He was given the name Siegfried Buchta at birth, and changed his name to Siegfried Charous in 1914 after his mother's maiden name. Later, as a political gesture and a derivative of Chat Roux (Red Cat) he changed the spelling of his surname to Charoux in 1926, at the time of his marriage to Margarethe Treibl (1895 - 1985). They had no children. Margarethe was in international textile trader who traveled extensively and introduced Charoux's sculptures to many of the countries in which she traded.
Charoux attended schools in Vienna, and was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in early 1915. His right hand was wounded in the First World War, with nerve damage causing paralysis, and he left the army due to his wounds in 1917. He regained use of his right arm after a successful surgical operation.
Career in Vienna
He studied privately under Josef Heu. He was rejected by the Vienna School of Applied Arts (Hochschule für angewandte Kunst), but attended the Vienna Academy (Akademie der Bildenden Künste), under Hans Bitterlich, from 1922 to 1924.
He was a political cartoonist from about 1923 to about 1933, using the pseudonym "Chat Roux". His cartoons were published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung and other left-wing journals. He shifted to sculpture, opening his own studio in 1926, and made memorials in Vienna to Robert Blum (1927) and Matteotti (1929). In 1930 he won an international competition to create a memorial statue to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, erected in Judenplatz in 1935. The statue was removed by the Third Reich after 1939 and destroyed. After the Second World War, Charoux was commissioned to replace the lost memorial with a bronze copy, which was unveiled in 1968, the year after his death, at Morzinplatz in Vienna. It was moved back to Judenplatz in 1981.
