Wenzel Hablik

Wenzel Hablik (1881⁠–⁠1934) was born in the Bohemian town of Brüx, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). The world opened up to him when at age six he found a crystal. Peering into it he saw "magical castles and mountains", themes that appeared in his art throughout his life. in those natural crystalline forms he saw the power of creative forces in all nature.

Hablik's first paintings, made in Prague between 1905 and 1907, were influenced by seeing Edvard Munch's work and reading the works of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), who characterised the phenomenal world as the product of a blind noumenal will and transcendental idealism, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), whose ideas  challenged the comfortable presuppositions and assumptions of religion, morality and science.