The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea presents the exhibition Max Peiffer Watenphul. Painter of the Bauhaus, curated by Gregor H. Lersch, Director of the Museum Casa di Goethe, promoted and organized by the Fondazione Max Peiffer Watenphul ETS.

The exhibition is realized in collaboration with the Museo Casa di Goethe, with the kind support of the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, and under the patronage of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Director of the GNAMC, Renata Cristina Mazzantini, describes the exhibition as follows: »The exhibition offers the valuable opportunity to rediscover Watenphul’s works, together with masterpieces by some of his teachers, including Kandinsky, Klee, Albers and Itten, displayed in the Sala Mondrian and belonging to the collections of the GNAMC. It also highlights the historical relevance of the legendary Bauhaus School, which from 1919 triggered an irreversible process of renewal in creativity«.

The central focus of the exhibition is to highlight his being a Bauhaus painter whose work, rooted in the interdisciplinary experience of the school, develops in an autonomous and deeply original direction.

As the curator Gregor H. Lersch emphasizes: »At the Bauhaus, in a period of radical reforms and collective experimentation, Max Peiffer Watenphul consistently upheld painting as an autonomous artistic medium. His work demonstrates how painting was an integral part of the school’s artistic research and reflects a fundamental principle formulated by its founder Walter Gropius: »not the creation of a unified style, but the development of a new attitude toward a visual modernity.«

The exhibition, with 80 works on display, reconstructs the artist’s entire trajectory: from his early works to the years of studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar, from Italian landscapes and still lifes to the Venetian period of the postwar years, in which an autonomous pictorial language, among the most intense of his production, matured.

Numerous works are presented for the first time in the exhibition. Of particular importance is Peiffer Watenphul’s earliest known oil painting, from 1917, Grace with Cat, portraying the artist’s sister. Alongside it are watercolours created before and during the Bauhaus period, including Still Life with Lemons (1921), in which a juicer is represented as an object of design and everyday use through a deliberately sober pictorial language. Also, of particular interest is View of Il Pero (1970), a Tuscan landscape from the artist’s late period, in which topography and colour are rendered in a strongly reduced form. The exhibition is further enriched by letters and documents from the artist’s archive, also unpublished until now.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (Italian and English), published by Electa, with the essay by the curator Gregor H. Lersch, and texts by Riccardo Salvatori and Michael Semff.

Max Peiffer Watenphul.
Painter of the Bauhaus

April 21 – August 23, 2026
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Roma, Viale delle Belle Arti 131
gnamc.cultura.gov.it

Tuesday to Sunday: 9am – 7pm
Last admission 45 minutes before closing