The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea presents, from 21 April to 23 August 2026, the exhibition Max Peiffer Watenphul. Painter of the Bauhaus, curated by Gregor H. Lersch and dedicated to a central yet still relatively little-explored figure of twentieth-century European art.
Trained at the Bauhaus in Weimar between 1919 and 1922, Max Peiffer Watenphul (Weferlingen, 1896 – Rome, 1976) developed an independent artistic path within the avant-garde, consistently maintaining painting as his primary field of research. In dialogue with artists such as Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten, his work reflects a personal and figurative interpretation of the Bauhaus experience, grounded in a constant attention to colour, composition and landscape.
Through around 80 works, the exhibition highlights the full span of his production, emphasising both the coherence and the evolution of his visual language: from his early works and Bauhaus training, to the landscapes and still lifes created during his stays in Italy, and finally to the Venetian period after the Second World War, when his painting reaches full expressive maturity. Paintings, watercolours, photographs, letters and archival materials convey the complexity of his research and the network of artistic relationships that shaped his career.
The exhibition is organised across five rooms, following a chronological and thematic structure that explores the main areas of his activity: his training, the Bauhaus and the German avant-garde, photography, post-war painting, and the Venetian cycle. A selection of works by artists such as Otto Dix, Alexej von Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, drawn from the artist’s own collection, helps to outline the cultural context and the artistic dialogues that informed his work.
The exhibition is organised by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and the Fondazione Max Peiffer Watenphul ETS, in collaboration with the Museo Casa di Goethe and with the support of the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, under the patronage of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.
