Karl Bitter
Karl Bitter (December 6, 1867 in Vienna, † April 9, 1915 in New York ) was an Austrian sculptor.
Background and education
Karl Bitter was born in Herklotzgasse in the 15th district of Vienna. The Protestant father operated a drug store products, the mother raised the three sons in their Roman Catholic faith. The second son Charles, who should take the career in law, the Henrietta High School broke off and came at the age of 14 years in the sculpture class at the Vienna School of Applied Arts. Later he studied at Kuehne and Edmund Hellmer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Life
He left the army prematurely by not returned after a two-month military leave for troops; Instead, he emigrated to the USA in 1889. A Viennese friend introduced him the money for the boat ticket to America.
On November 22, 1889, he went to New York to disembark. At first he worked in a workshop for facade decoration. The New Yorker star architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) was aware of him and let him participate in the construction of a country seat for the big businessmen George W. Vanderbilt. He soon enlisted in New York competition for artificial generic design of the bronze doors at the Trinity Church, which he established his reputation in the United States. By Richard M. Hunt, he was asked to decorate the administration building of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago with statues. He worked with the expatriate only just in the U.S. Viennese sculptor Max von Mauch.
At the age of 30 he was the owner of a large studio with qualified employees in Philadelphia and received U.S. citizenship. He married Marie Schevill, which comes from a German -American family from Cincinnati. He had also been a private country estate on the steep bank of the Hudson.
Due to the success of the artist was appointed head of the entire sculpture decorations the next two major exhibitions in Buffalo in 1901 and St. Louis in 1904.
He also created the caryatids for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, for the Pennsylvania Station in Philadelphia he steered the sculptures at. Decorations for the homes of family and the Vanderbilts Villard- Monument. During his lifetime he was the No. 1 among American sculptors
In 1909, a Viennese friend Bitters to obtain amnesty and this was able to return to Austria to visit his parents. In another home visit, he was accompanied by his wife and three children.
Bittner died on April 10, 1915 in New York City in a traffic accident. When he cross with his wife to Broadway after a visit to the Metropolitan Opera wanted to go to the tram, raced a car approaches. He was just able to pull back his wife, but got himself under the wheels and died at the accident site.
Karl Bitter received several awards and honors. He was president of the National Society Sculpure.
The figure of the knight luck Boniface knight in Gerhart Hauptmann Atlantis had Karl Bitter as a template.