Ernst Fuchs was born February 13, 1930, in Vienna. He began his artistic training at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Prof. Albert Paris Gutersloh in 1945. Fuchs is the founder of the so-called Viennese School of painters of the surrealistic and fantastic. Most of the members of this group have been students of his at one time or another to learn the old-master technique which he has developed to a high degree of perfection by painstaking study of the Netherlandish Mannerists and the Venetians. He prefers to call the movement symbolistic rather than surrealistic, since it is more similar to the English Symbolists, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Viennese Secession. The interview (in English) took place in Fuchs' studio in Vienna.