278 Werner Peiner: Die Hexe
Gouache on paper. Signed “W. Peiner 46” at lower left margin. Matted under glass.
73 x 53 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-Liste (God-gifted list) during the National Socialist era.
Werner Peiner was the son of 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 managing director of a wholesale timber company. He attended school until the Oberprima level. At the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered for the army 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.
During the 1920s, he stayed and painted at the Burghotel in Kronenburg in the Eifel region, hosted by Katharina “Nette” Faymonville. During this time, he formed the “Dreimann-Bund” (Three-man Alliance) with Fritz Burmann and Richard Gessner. In 1923, Peiner married Marie Therese “Resi” Lauffs and moved in with 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 established a studio in Düsseldorf. During this period, through the mediation of his friends, architect Emil Fahrenkamp and entrepreneur Walter Kruspig (General Director of Rhenania-Ossag from 1930), he was able to undertake artistic commissions for the design 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. Today, one of them operates as a hotel. Street lamps he designed can still be found in Kronenburg today.
During the National Socialist period, Peiner was a member of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts. For this period, his participation in 9 group exhibitions is reliably 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 interim 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 the district administrator of Schleiden County, Josef Schramm, 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, a student of Peiner, the friendship between Peiner and Kruspig may also have played a role in the appointment.
Hermann Göring Master School for Painting
The relationship with Peter Grund, the new director of the Düsseldorf Academy from 1933/1934, was 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 table 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 the decree establishing the “Rural Academy Kronenburg of the State Art Academy Düsseldorf.” As the Hermann Göring Master School for Painting, it was made independent in 1938 under Peiner's direction. Peiner's students in Kronenburg included Rolf Dettmann, Heinz Hindorf, Hans Lohbeck, Willi Sitte, and Willi Wewer. Among other works, he designed monumental tapestries for the New Reich Chancellery. A female nude by him hung above Göring's bed in Carinhall. Peiner applied for admission to the NSDAP on July 13, 1937, and was accepted retroactively to May 1 of that 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-Liste with the twelve most important visual artists.
In 1944, Peiner moved with his wife to Gimborn in the Upper Bergisch region. After the end of the war, he was interned and all his property was confiscated. In 1948, he acquired the dilapidated Burg Haus Vorst castle 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.
Academic 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 in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn. Six cartoons are 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 Magyars, The Siege of Marienburg, The Turkish Battle 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 Manufacture des Gobelins in Paris 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 entanglement in National Socialist art policy.
In the postwar period, Peiner created tapestries for the Gerling Corporation and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.
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