Otto Klar

(South African, 1908–1994)

Otto Klar was an Austrian-born South African artist best known for his landscape paintings and drawings. In his oil painting Baobab, he realistically rendered the texture and surface of a large baobab tree set in the African grasslands landscape. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1908, Klar studied at the Wiener Kunstakademie, going on to exhibit in the cultural centers of Vienna, Munich, and Berlin before emigrating to South Africa at the onset of World War II. There, he taught art classes in Pretoria where he honed his style of representing Bantu people, rural architecture, and grandiose vistas. He was bequeathed the title of Ehrenprofessur by the State Professor of Austria in 1962. Many of his works, including a number of impressive Abstract Expressionist-styled works produced during the 1950s and 1960s, are housed in the Pretoria Art Museum. The artist died in 1994 in Pretoria, South Africa.