Raphael Kirchner

An Austrian artist best known for his Art Nouveau style and depictions of women on postcards and in magazines.

Born in Austria, Kirchner attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1890 to 1894. Soon after graduating, he published his first set of postcards. Moving to Paris, Kirchner worked on books, posters and magazines, notably La Vie Parisienne which was known for illustrations of women - "risqué, yet tasteful". Kirchner’s illustrations for the magazine led to his career designing more than one thousand illustrated postcards featuring mostly women.

At the start of WWII, he moved to the United States where he found work on the Broadway theatre scene as costume designer as well as a portrait artist. Throughout WWI Kirchner’s postcards, posters and magazine illustrations became incredibly popular amongst European and American soldiers, forming the basis of the "pin-up" culture of the following decades. One series of Kirchner's work, his "Geisha" women, sold over 40,000 postcards.

Raphael Kirchner produced over a thousand published paintings and drawings in his lifetime and his "Kirchner Girl", a defining standard of beauty of the era.