Max Peiffer Watenphul was a noble and independent individualist among German painters between the two world wars and after 1945. He lived in Venice from 1946 to 1958, creating around 150 paintings during this time. These works are among the artist’s best known today.

Painting as a process and experiment is what makes these paintings so new and unique in the artist’s oeuvre. His artistic endeavours were fundamentally opposed to any form of ‘lagoon romanticism’ or atmospheric transfiguration.

His Venice paintings are almost always characterised by a high degree of abstraction. The bold cropping of parts of buildings defies any common veduta-like quality.

Peiffer Watenphul’s Venice pictures occupy a unique position within 1950s painting. They capture “intermediate states”, as it were. Light and veils of colour “slur” the contrasts in the picture. These pictures seem to carry a unique “suspended state” of “appearance” and “disappearance”, of “materiality” and “spirituality”.

 

The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts is dedicating an exhibition to these pictures:

VENEZIA

May 8 to June 28, 2025
Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste
Max-Joseph-Platz 3
80539 München
www.badsk.de

Tuesday to Saturday 11 – 17 Uhr