Max Peiffer Watenphul

As well as oil paintings, his extensive body of work encompasses watercolours, drawings, enamel, textiles, graphic art, and photographs.

His family lived there until 1911 before moving to Hattingen, a town on the River Ruhr, where Max's stepfather, who also wrote books on Middle Latin poetry, had been appointed headmaster of the local grammar school.

It was around this time that he befriended Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerhard Marcks, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters and Else Lasker-Schüler.

The art dealer Alfred Flechtheim placed Max Peiffer Watenphul under contract with his gallery, thus largely ensuring the young artist's financial independence.

Stays in Berlin and trips to Paris (where he met Karli Sohn-Rethel and Florence Henri) followed, as well as travels to the South of France and Morocco together with the collector Klaus Gebhard.

Peiffer Watenphul's interest in photography, which had begun during his Bauhaus years, was developed in greater depth at the Folkwang School.

Max Peiffer Watenphul spent the period from October 1931 to July 1932 in Rome at the German Academy in the Villa Massimo, where other artists residing there at the time included Uli Nimptsch, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Karl Rössing and Fritz Rhein.

The floral still-life, which had won him the Carnegie Award and had meanwhile been hanging in the Nationalgalerie Berlin, was shown in the Nazis' notorious "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich in 1937.

In the autumn of that same year, Max Peiffer Watenphul finally decided to move to Italy for good, to which end he was greatly helped by his half-sister Grace, who was married to the Roman architect Enrico Pasqualucci.

It was also in that year that the artist's parents moved to Essen, his stepfather having been prematurely retired from his post as headmaster for political reasons.

In December 1937, Max Peiffer Watenphul travelled to the island of Ischia, where he met several German painters and intellectuals, including Werner Gilles, Rudolf Levy, Eduard Bargheer and the composer Gottfried von Einem.

By 1941, Max was in such financial straits that he was obliged to return to Germany and take up a teaching post – obtained for him by Georg Muche – at the Krefeld School of Textile Design as the successor to Johannes Itten.

As a German national, Peiffer Watenphul was refused permission to reside in Austria after 1946 and so he fled across South Tyrol to his half-sister in Venice, where he then lived for the next twelve years.

It was not until January 1952 that Peiffer Watenphul made his first visit to Germany since the end of the war: Essen, Dortmund, Wuppertal, Braunschweig, Munich were the cities on his itinerary before travelling on to Zürich.

This was followed in 1957 by an exhibition on the premises of the Stuttgart Art Society showing 60 oil paintings, 40 watercolours and a large number of prints and drawings.

He made friends in Rome with the German correspondents Josef Schmitz van Vorst, Gustav René Hocke and Erich Kusch.

From 1964 Max Peiffer Watenphul travelled to the island of Corfu every year, where he usually rented a small apartment for the period from April to June.

In 1965 he was appointed a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and, in the same year, exhibited his works from 1921 to 1964 at the Galleria La Medusa in Rome.