Reinhold Koeppel

Reinhold Koeppel (born April 21, 1887 in Oschersleben , † December 15, 1950 in Waldhäuser ) was a German painter .

The son of a bookseller lost his mother at the age of three. From 1905 to 1906 he trained as an art dealer and served as a one-year-old in Dresden with the royal Saxon body regiment .

On an extensive hike, he came to the mountain village of Waldhäuser near Neuschönau in the Bavarian Forest for the first time in 1906 , where he settled for several weeks in 1907 and began to work as a painter. In 1908 he bought the old school building and made it his home.

Koeppel continued his autodidactic training, including on annual study trips to Munich. In 1909 he published his first picture Spring Storm on the Hochmoor in the magazine Jugend . In winter he continued to work as an art dealer and stayed in Paris from 1911 to 1913, where he was accepted into the "Union internationale des beaux arts et des lettres" in 1912. He took part in exhibitions in Munich ( Glaspalast 1910, 1913, 1914, 1921 and 1925 and the spring exhibition of the Secession in 1913), Paris, Passau, Mannheim and Dresden and had been a member of the Munich Artists' Cooperative since 1912.

In 1915 he signed up as a war volunteer and was initially a war painter in Russia , then an aircraft pilot and was shot down three times. After returning home in 1920 he married Hanne Möslinger from Neustadt an der Weinstrasse . His house in Waldhäuser became a meeting place for many artist friends, including Alfred Kubin , who was here for the first time in 1922. Between 1926 and 1930 he made trips to Austria, London, Paris, southern France, the Italian Riviera, Corsica, Switzerland and Spain.

In 1930 he fell seriously ill, whereupon the doctors issued a ban on painting, which he adhered to for a long time. In 1931 his pictures were shown in the Norishalle in Nuremberg, and again in Regensburg in 1933. When the disease progressed, he began painting again in 1945. In 1946 he was the senior at the establishment of the artist community Donau-Wald-Gruppe . In 1947 he saw the complete exhibition of his works in Regensburg for his 60th birthday. He is buried in the cemetery in Grafenau (Lower Bavaria) .

Koeppel created paintings and drawings as well as book illustrations. His subject is often nature with forest workers, shepherds, farmers and stone breakers. Although evangelical himself, he campaigned for the construction of the mountain church “Maria im Wald” in the forest houses and designed the winged altar with the portrait of “Maria with the child”. He also left travel pictures from his painting stays in Spain, Italy and France.

literature

• Andreas Roider: Reinhold Koeppel. Once someone laughed - despite all suffering. Morsak Verlag, Grafenau, 2018. ISBN 978-3-86512-158-5

Web links

• Literature by and about Reinhold Koeppel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Detailed presentation