Description

Anton Leidl (1900 Frankfurt – 1976 Munich)

Marketplace in Basel, Switzerland

Material: Oil on canvas
Dimension: 100 x 65,5 cm
Frame: Yes

About the Artist:

Anton Leidl was a German painter, graphic artist and caricaturist.

Leidl was the son of the Eggenfelden writer Lina Leidl. He first trained as a teacher in Montabaur and then studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Adolf Hengeler and Martin von Feuerstein from the summer semester of 1922 to 1928.

From 1927, his works were regularly exhibited in Munich, including at the Glaspalast, where he lost three paintings and four ink drawings when the building burned down in 1931. Between 1923 and 1935, his works were traded at Galerie Heinemann, where he showed 30 works as part of a collective exhibition in 1932. In the same year, he was awarded the Dürer Prize of the City of Nuremberg for his work Mainfeld. In 1933, Leidl received a travel grant from the city of Munich for Rome and Florence, where he undertook several painting trips. His naturalistic works, which mostly depicted cityscapes or landscapes and their details, were colorful and focused. Even in his later work, he adhered to this style, which had become unfashionable in the meantime.

Between 1926 and 1932, he was able to publish 15 drawings in Simplicissimus; he also worked for Fliegenden Blätter and Jugend, where a large-format drawing by him appeared every week for a while. In 1932, he took part in the International Caricature Exhibition in Vienna.

He was able to continue exhibiting during the National Socialist era. He was a member of the Münchner Künstlergenossenschaft (MKG) and served on its board from 1934. He had been on the jury of the Glaspalast exhibitions since the end of the 1920s, and after the building burned down in 1931 he juried the MKG’s annual exhibition. In 1934, 16 of his works were shown in Bremen, and in 1941, works by him were exhibited at the Städtische Galerie in Nuremberg. In the same year, he exhibited 58 oil paintings and 17 drawings and watercolors at the Städtisches Museum in Trier, and in 1942 he was shown at the Kunstverein Leipzig.

Leidl exhibited at the propaganda show “Die Straßen Adolf Hitlers in der Kunst” and was represented with eight works at the Great German Art Exhibition between 1940 and 1944. In the 1930s, he created wall frescoes for several barracks and buildings of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, as well as works for ship interiors. In 1943, his studio in Munich was bombed out, after which he moved to Tutzing on Lake Starnberg, where he lived until the end of his life.

After the end of the Nazi era, he was able to continue exhibiting. In 1946, for example, he was represented at the “General German Art Exhibition” in Dresden, one of the first major exhibitions of contemporary artists in the Soviet occupation zone. Leidl’s works were shown in Bielefeld in 1947 and in Cologne in 1952. According to an article in Weltkunst, at this time “eleven of the most renowned state and municipal museums in Germany” owned pictures by him.

In 1948, Leidl once again became a member of the newly founded MKG, the Münchener Künstlerbund and the Munich Secession. He took part in the large art exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst with the Secession from 1950 onwards; he left the Secession in 1958.

In 1954, he undertook a painting trip to South America; he recorded his experiences in the booklet Die lustige Halbwelt-Fahrt, which was published in 1956 (79 pp.). In the 1950s he could be seen in Munich, Mannheim, Cologne and Pforzheim, in the 1960s in Hameln, Mühlheim, Nuremberg, Bremen and Erlangen. Leidl remained unmarried throughout his life and died in 1976.

The Bavarian State Painting Collections own nine works by the artist, and part of his written legacy can be found in the German Art Archive in Nuremberg. There is no detailed art historical research on the painter.