Otto Demus

Otto Demus (* November 4, 1902 in Harland in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, † November 17, 1990 in Vienna ) was an Austrian art historian.

Otto Demus was the son of a fallen during World War doctor. He attended elementary school and high school in St. Pölten and studied from 1920 to 1928 Art History at the University of Vienna under Josef Strzygowski. He was an assistant at the Institute in 1927 and then turned to the care of monuments. 1929 to 1936 he was state conservator in Carinthia and 1936-1939 State Conservator at the central office for monument in Vienna. In 1939 he emigrated to England, where he worked as a librarian at the Warburg Institute and lectured at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. In 1946 he was appointed as head of the Federal Monuments Office Vienna, appointed in 1963 Professor of Art History at the University of Vienna, where he continued the tradition of the Vienna School of Art History next to Otto Pacht. In 1973 he became Professor Emeritus. In 1969 he was awarded the Wilhelm Hartel Prize and in 1975 the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.

His specialty was the medieval and Byzantine art history. He was concerned, however, during his time in Carinthia with modern Austrian painting and was friends with, among others, the painter Gerhart Frankl.

Otto Demus had with his wife Luise two sons: the pianist Jörg Demus and to the poet and art historian Klaus Demus.

Writings

• Art in Carinthia, 1934.
• New paintings in Carinthia, in: Art in Austria, 1934.
• The mosaics of San Marco in Venice, 1939.
• Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 1948; Reprint 1976.
• The Mosaics of Norman Sicily, 1949.
• The Romanesque wall painting, 1968.
• Byzantine Art and the West, 1970.
• The Antiphonary of St. Peter, 1973.
• The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, 1984.
• The late gothic altars of Carinthia, 1991.