Max Peiffer Watenphul (1896-1976) German, Color Lithograph. Signed in pencil bottom right. Numbered "XVIII/LX" (18/60) in pencil bottom left. Tag on back reads: "American President Lines SS Jackson, Cabin C-4 Peiffer 'Bouquet.'" Depicts red, yellow, and blue flowers in a blue vase.

Overall size: 23 X 15 1/2 in.

Sight size: 22 X 14 1/4 in.

#1627 .

Max Peiffer Watenphul was born in Weferlingen, Germany in 1896. His father was a dispensing chemist, and he was sent to Bonn to study medicine. He changed to studying law and moved to Munich, where he encountered Paul Klee and first became interested in art. He obtained his doctorate in 1918 with a thesis on church law before serving in the Army at Ruhr. After World War I he became a trainee barrister in Hattingen, which he abruptly quit after less than a year to enroll at the Bauhaus in Weimar to study art. Through Klee and Wassily Kandinsky he met the art dealer Alfred Fletctheim, who contracted him for his gallery, ensuring Watenphul’s financial independence. Throughout the 1920s he traveled to France, Cuba, Mexico, and Rome, where he moved in 1937 after the Nazis included his work in the infamous “Degenerate Art” Exhibition in Munich. In dire financial straits by 1941, he was forced to return to a teaching position in Germany, although his studio was destroyed in an air raid in 1943. He spent the remainder of the war in Salzburg until he fled to live with his half-sister in Venice in 1946. Finally granted a passport in 1951, he began traveling constantly throughout Europe, building his reputation as a painter of still-lifes, although after 1970 he ceased to paint with oils and produced only drawings, watercolors, and lithographs. He died in Rome in 1976.

Location Box 1