Wilhelm List

Wilhelm Franz List was born in Vienna on 22 November 1864. He first studied philosophy at the University of Vienna before turning to art, entering the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1885, where he studied under Christian Griepenkerl until 1889 (one source also names Franz Rumpler as a teacher there). He went on to study in Munich, and then in Paris at the Academie Julian, where he was a pupil of William-Adolphe Bouguereau from 1894.

In 1897 he was among the founding members of the Vienna Secession, participating in its annual exhibitions from 1898 to 1905, and he served at an unspecified date on the editorial team of its journal Ver Sacrum, for which he produced graphic design and illustration. In 1902 he was one of the artists who contributed illustrations to the Secession's fourteenth exhibition, built around Klimt's Beethoven Frieze. In 1905 he left the Secession together with Klimt and the group of artists who split from the organization that year.

List worked chiefly as a painter and graphic artist, known for Symbolist and mythological subjects such as Judith and Holofernes, portraits, and woodcut and lithograph illustration. He died in Vienna on 10 February 1918, at the age of 53. The dossier consulted for this profile does not document a specific cause of death, and none is asserted here.

Detailed period or contemporary criticism of List's work is not well represented in accessible sources, and no exact, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. What is documented places him firmly inside the institutional history of the Vienna Secession: a founding member in 1897, an editorial contributor to Ver Sacrum, and an illustrator for the Secession's 1902 Beethoven exhibition, before leaving with Klimt's group in 1905. His critical standing today rests largely on this institutional record rather than on a body of published reviews.

Wilhelm List's works trade only occasionally at auction. The highest realized price found in research is EUR 102,400 (hammer EUR 80,000) for Junge Frau in Unterwaesche at Im Kinsky, Vienna, against an estimate of EUR 15,000 to 30,000, though the exact sale date could not be confirmed. Two more precisely dated Im Kinsky results are Fruehlingslandschaft mit bluehendem Baum, which realized EUR 10,240 on 18 October 2022, and Twilight, c. 1903, which realized EUR 19,200 on 3 December 2024. A painting by List was also offered at Sotheby's London in 2007, in the sale "19th Century Paintings including Spanish Painting and Symbolism: The Poetic Vision," carrying a pre-sale estimate of GBP 50,000 to 70,000, but the realized price is not published in the available catalogue record. No gallery or estate currently represents the artist in the public record; his paintings circulate through auction houses and appear in a small number of museum collections rather than through primary market channels.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Wilhelm List and no current gallery or estate representation, so authentication generally depends on provenance and period exhibition records tied to the Vienna Secession and Ver Sacrum rather than a certifying body. The public auction record is thin and unevenly documented: confirmed realized prices exist at Im Kinsky in Vienna, but the highest of these, EUR 102,400 for Junge Frau in Unterwaesche, lacks a confirmed sale date, so collectors should treat any single quoted figure with caution. At least one work, a version of L'Offrande ou Miracle des roses, is documented in the collection of the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Quimper in France, which offers a more stable reference point than the auction data.