277 Werner Peiner: Der Sünder
Gouache on paper. Signed at the lower right margin “W. Peiner 46”. With mat under glass.
53.5 x 41 cm.
Masterfully executed typical gouache by Werner Peiner.
Werner Peiner (born July 20, 1897 in Düsseldorf; died August 19, 1984 in Leichlingen) was a German painter who was included by Adolf Hitler in the Gottbegnadeten List during the National Socialist era.
Werner Peiner was the son of the merchant Joseph Peiner (1867–1945), born in Eiserfey, and his wife Sophia, née Maintz (1871–1951), from Mechernich. Peiner grew up in Düsseldorf, where his father had risen to become the manager of a wholesale lumber business. He attended school until the upper sixth form. At the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered for service with an Uhlan regiment. He was promoted to lieutenant and served on the Western Front as an adjutant. After the war, Peiner studied from 1919 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, after initially receiving private instruction from Wilhelm Döringer, a friend of his father.
In the 1920s, he stayed and painted at Katharina “Nette” Faymonville's castle hotel in Kronenburg in the Eifel. During this time, he formed the “Three-Man Alliance” with Fritz Burmann and Richard Gessner. In 1923, Peiner married Marie Therese “Resi” Lauffs and moved to his parents-in-law in Bonn. The couple had no children of their own; in 1950, they adopted the orphaned daughter of a cousin. In mid-1925, Peiner set up a studio in Düsseldorf. During this time, through the mediation of his friends, the architect Emil Fahrenkamp and the entrepreneur Walter Kruspig (from 1930 general director of Rhenania-Ossag), he was able to undertake artistic commissions for the decoration of church, insurance, and industrial buildings.
In 1932, Peiner settled in Kronenburg and began converting several houses in the historic town center into a studio. Nowadays, one of them operates as a hotel. Street lamps designed by him can still be found in Kronenburg today.
During the National Socialist era, Peiner was a member of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. For this period, his participation in 9 group exhibitions is definitively documented, including the Great German Art Exhibitions at the Munich House of German Art in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1942 with 33 works. In 1933, he was appointed to the Düsseldorf Art Academy as professor of monumental painting. He thus succeeded Heinrich Campendonk, who had been dismissed shortly before under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Peiner owed his appointment not only to his acquaintance with the acting director of the Art Academy, Julius Paul Junghanns, but probably also to his painting “German Earth,” with which he supported the emerging Blood and Soil ideology. The painting was given to Josef Schramm, the district administrator of the Schleiden district, and later personally presented to Adolf Hitler by Franz Binz, the local party chairman and NSDAP district leader. According to the recollection of Rolf Dettmann, one of Peiner's students, Peiner's friendship with Kruspig may also have played a role in the appointment.
Hermann Göring Master School for Painting
Relations with Peter Grund, the new director of the Düsseldorf Academy from 1933/1934, were marked by tensions. With Hermann Göring's approval, Peiner undertook a study trip to East Africa from February 1935, which Kruspig had organized and financed. Through Kruspig's mediation, Peiner had personal access to Göring. In a dinner conversation with Göring on January 24, 1936, Peiner succeeded in pushing through his wish to establish his own academy. On March 23, 1936, the Minister of Art, Science, and Public Education issued a decree establishing the “Kronenburg Country Academy of the State Art Academy Düsseldorf.” As the Hermann Göring Master School for Painting, it became independent under Peiner's direction in 1938. Peiner's students in Kronenburg included Rolf Dettmann, Heinz Hindorf, Hans Lohbeck, Willi Sitte, and Willi Wewer. He designed, among other things, monumental tapestries for the New Reich Chancellery. A female nude by him hung over Göring's bed in Carinhall. Peiner applied for admission to the NSDAP on July 13, 1937, and was accepted retroactively to May 1 of the same year (membership number 4,913,473). In the same year, he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. Nevertheless, one of his paintings was confiscated as “degenerate.” In 1940, he was appointed Prussian State Councilor. In 1944, in the final phase of World War II, Adolf Hitler included him in the special list of the Gottbegnadeten List with the twelve most important visual artists.
In 1944, Peiner moved with his wife to Gimborn in the Oberbergisch region. After the end of the war, he was interned and all his property was confiscated. In 1948, he acquired the dilapidated castle Haus Vorst in Leichlingen/Rhineland, which he restored over many years. He lived and worked there until his death in 1984.
Painting, Tapestries
Peiner oriented himself primarily to old masters, such as the meticulous painting style of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. An exception is the year 1928, in which he created a series of impressionist-inspired landscapes. With his preference for a realistic conception of art, he was successful not only with his private clients. In the 1920s, when he painted in the style of New Objectivity, he was a sought-after portrait painter of the Rhineland.
Scientific interest focuses on his commissioned tapestry works, the cycle “German Decisive Battles” for the Marble Gallery, also called the Long Hall, of the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, whose designs are exhibited at the Rhineland Regional Museum in Bonn. Six cartoons have been preserved, as well as the theme of a seventh for tapestries measuring 5.40 × 10 meters (The Battle in the Teutoburg Forest, Henry I in the Battle of the Hungarians, The Siege of Marienburg, The Battle of the Turks before Vienna, Frederick the Great at Kunersdorf, The Battle of Leipzig, Tank Battle at Cambrai). The eighth tapestry was to depict a decisive battle from World War II. Peiner also created the cartoon for the monumental tapestry “The Globe,” which was begun at the Paris Manufacture des Gobelins but not completed and was intended for Hermann Göring's monumental estate Carinhall (exhibited at the Munich Hypo-Kunsthalle in the exhibition The Threads of Modernism, December 2019 to March 2020). Since the postwar period, his works have rarely been publicly exhibited due to his involvement in National Socialist art policy.
In the postwar period, Peiner created tapestries for the Gerling Corporation and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.