Details

Pasqualucci G 345.
Exhibitions: Max Peiffer Watenphul, Galleria del Cavallino, Venice 1948.
Provenance: private collection, Hessen; private collection, Munich.

Description

Peiffer Watenphul had been living in Italy since the early 1930s, but returned to Germany in 1941 for financial reasons and, as Johannes Itten’s successor and through Georg Muche, took up a position at the technical college for textile surface art in Krefeld. From here, Peiffer Watenphul visited Oskar Schlemmer in Wuppertal several times. After his studio was destroyed during the war, he spent the summer of 1943 in Vienna and then taught at the School of Applied Arts in Salzburg. In 1946, as a German, he was no longer granted a residence permit in Salzburg and moved back to Italy, where he lived with his sister in Venice for the next twelve years, during which time Peiffer Watenphul developed his own lyrical, Arcadian pictorial world, the main subjects of which he found in his surroundings: Above all, he painted southern landscapes, cityscapes of Venice and, time and again, bouquets of flowers in summer. The latter in particular reveal the artist’s unique aesthetic. In this work, the flowers are piled up against a neutral, light-coloured background, literally bursting out of the frame of the picture in the upper section. Peiffer Watenphul juxtaposes the dense staggering of various colourful blossoms on the left with a compact bouquet of orange-red poppies on the right. The result is a lush but carefully staged splendour. It is these compositions that have earned Peiffer Watenphul the reputation of a “classical romantic” in Italy. He does not attempt to reproduce the flowers with botanical precision, but rather to capture their emotional scope. As Gustav René Hocke writes, his art is a “unity of confident taste, sensitive depth and masterful craftsmanship”.