from 28 September 2023 to 10 March 2024
Opening: 27 September at 7.00 p.m.
Museo Casa di Goethe, Rome
From 28 September 2023 to 10 March 2024, the Museum Casa di Goethe in Rome is dedicating a retrospective exhibition to a singular artist of modernism, Max Peiffer Watenphul (Weferlingen, 1896 – Rome, 1976), curated by Gregor H. Lersch, Director of the Museum.
Restless, independent, eclectic, lawyer first, artist later, student at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Peiffer Watenphul moved in the avant-garde circles of the 1920s. He was a passionate photographer of subjects with queer identities, a painter of cities and landscapes and an incessant traveller, especially after one of his paintings was exhibited at the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in 1937.
He travelled extensively in Europe, Africa and Mexico, moved dozens of times to many German cities, had a residency in Rome, at the German Academy Villa Massimo in 1931-1932, then lived in Venice, Salzburg and, after 1945 when he crossed the Austrian-Italian border through the mountains on foot, moved to Italy to live with his sister, who had married an Italian, and again travelled and stayed in Venice, Tuscany and Rome where he died in 1976 and where he rests, buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery.
Produced in collaboration with the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Museum Gunzenhauser, the exhibition at the Casa di Goethe traces with 32 paintings and 13 photographs the persistence of Bauhaus ideas in his painting and photography work, following Max Peiffer Watenphul’s path from Germany to Italy and contextualising his work in the tradition of German artists in Italy and the Sehnsucht of Germans for the Bel Paese.
An exhibition in cooperation with the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz – Museum Gunzenhauser
