Reception

Reception of Alfon Zeileis

Alfons Zeileis studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. At the turn of the century, this until then rather traditional educational institution was clearly influenced by the Munich Secession and had a high attraction for later modernist painters. Lovis Corinth. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Franz Marc studied here - while Emil Nolde was rejected. Alfons Zeileis' admission to this institution is therefore already a sign of his high artistic abilities. The fact that Alfons Zeileis won no less than four awards from the Academy speaks all the more for him.
There are two main reasons why he is not better known today: 1. he left Munich, where an artistic career would have been much easier. 2. in order to make a living, he became an art teacher in the Palatinate, which at that time was not a place where modern artists could make a career. As a teacher, he also lacked the time to market his work in the way that artists who earn their living from art must do.
In the Palatinate, Alfons Zeileis met artists who had also studied in Munich and some of whom he certainly knew. Thus he was able to participate in the exhibitions of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Pfälzer Kunst from the beginning with his name mentioned.

In reviews he was mentioned on an equal footing with artists who were well-known at the time, such as August Croissant. His paintings were mentioned there, such as in "der Rheinpfälzer" on 15.10.1926 on the exhibition in the Winter School: "Zeileis is represented with an interesting Neustadt landscape."
The review of the APK art exhibition in "Der Rheinpfälzer" of 18.10.1927 beautifully reflects the situation of art at that time: "The main currents of painting of the last decades can also be observed here, as in every exhibition in the big city. Therefore, the same basic principles and observations apply to this exhibition as apply to exhibitions of modern art in general. Also in this exhibition, which is not too big and too important, we note the crisis that our art has been going through for years, for decades. In our minds we relive Impressionism from its beginnings to the present day, Monet to Slevogt and Liebermann. Images that once seemed bold and presumptuous, we now face as historical cool and measuring. Dill is no longer frightened. His horse races are routine, his landscape Taormina is dark and empty. How much stronger and more skilful than Dill is Hans Fay. Even if his Slevogtian origins are unmistakable, here, in contrast to Dill, we have a lively personal work before us. ... Whereas the artists we have discussed so far are, in terms of style, in the middle line of Impressionism, they are not very prominent in terms of personality, in Hermann Croissant we already have a painterly personality before us. While the gifted Alfons Zeileis ("Stubaital") strays into Kokoschkaian confusion, Croissant presents us with no fewer than 13 paintings of his intrinsically calm yet strange artistry."

The Landauer Anzeiger writes about the same exhibition in Landau on 21.10.1927:
"Dill and Fay are distinct impressionists and are related to each other in terms of their intentions. Dill's "Horse Races", "Riding Hunt" and likewise the "Herds of Goats" are painted grey in grey. The dullness and colourlessness extends into the lightlessness of the air. ... Zeileis - Neustadt believes that the essence of landscape painting consists unilaterally in the preference for glaring luminosity of colour. Only when spatial design, depth, light and air are solved in the same way can a complete work of art be created."

Alfons Zeileis is directly compared here with Kokoschka. What a comparison. Alfons Zeileis wanted to paint differently and in a modern way. He wanted to stand out - and he succeeded in doing so.

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the "Graphisches Kabinett", the morning edition of the Neue Mannheimer Zeitung wrote on 4 March 1929: "Mental experience should be shaped as directly as possible, should determine the artistic form as uninhibitedly as possible. The keyword for this is Expressionism. Nolde, who probably feels colour most directly of all, is represented with a few watercolours, the somewhat more constructive Pechstein - quite different, balling up forms from chaotic strokes and colours: Kokoschka."

The proximity of Alfons Zeileis to Oskar Kokoschka is abundantly clear in the reviews. Alfons Zeileis paints in a modern way, both in terms of colour and form. He stands out. Critics cannot get past his works. However, since he exhibits far fewer works than his freelance painter colleagues, who have to live from the sale of their works, his works do not end up in the exhibition like those of Kokoschka, Dix, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Feininger and Kandinsky. "Degenerate Art", which takes place in Munich in 1937, the paintings he submits to the Great German Art Exhibition in 1941 are nevertheless labelled "inferior" and destroyed by the National Socialists. He is only allowed to exhibit after receiving permission.

You can see how popular he was by the fact that after the re-foundation of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Pfälzer Künstler (Palatinate Artists' Association), he took part in exhibitions and was even requested by the Buslat Artists' Guild near Pforzheim for an exhibition.

In 1991, Karl Ritter wrote about Alfons Zeileis in the Donnersberg Jahrbuch: "When we look at all the painter's pictures, we feel it to be great luck that Zeileis painted beyond all "isms". He painted what he saw, but he did not depict: "He made visible what his senses recognised in nature through the veil of his soul" (E.A. Poe)."
Ursula Biffar wrote in "Die Rheinpfalz" of 4 June 1991 on the occasion of the Bad Dürkheim solo exhibition: "The pictures of Alfons Zeileis are only today, 28 years after his death, receiving the attention they would have deserved during his lifetime. But the Franconian-born artist, who lived in Neustadt for 43 years and worked there for a long time as a drawing teacher, never felt the urge to go public; he always painted for himself alone. Today, however, it is thanks to this modesty and restraint that his artistic estate is so large and allows for closed exhibitions. ...
His pictures are prime examples of orderly construction, of masterly composition. This architecture is characteristic of his best paintings. In every work, the powerfully contoured line, which corresponds with the colour in the same tonal strength, is decisive. His expressionist gesture intensified in his last years, when he turned to a strong colour palette. Bold colour combinations created a lively surface with a strong distant effect. ... The two portraits exhibited show the painter to be no less of a master portraitist, who was equally adept at psychological interpretation as he was at meticulously drawing facial expressions."