The Enigmatic Master of the Munich School In the smoky, bohemian heart of Schwabing, a figure once moved through the streets of Munich like a living shadow—a man whose physical presence was as fractured and complex as the art he taught. Anton Ažbe, a Slovene painter whose life was marked by early hardship and physical fraress, remains one of the most intriguing enigmas in the history of modern art. Born in 1862 into a peasant family, orphaned young and burdened by a spinal deformity that would characterize his silhouette for a lifetime, Ažbe’s journey from a small village in the Austrian Emp…