Several years ago, I unknowingly acquired a painting by Georg Arnold-Graboné, a prominent member of the German Impressionist Movement in the 1930’s & 1940’s. Of more interest, in the 1950’s, he became the painting teacher of General Dwight D. Eisenhower & Sir Winston Churchill.
Biography
Georg Arnold-Graboné (September 11, 1896 – February 10, 1982) was a painter of German impressionism and an art teacher.
Early life
Born in Munich on September 11, 1896, Arnold was the son of the Regional-President Wilheim von Arnold. He went to study at Munich Art Academy. In 1914 the young Arnold passed his Abwalt (exit examination), and volunteered as an enlistee in the German Army. While serving in World War I he suffered a head injury from a grenade explosion. The injury left him temporarily without hearing or speech. Because of his injuries he was discharged from the army and returned to Munich.
Maturity
He became a member of a circle of painters known as the “Licht-Gruppe”. Arnold abandoned these experimental forms and returned to more traditional painting. After Vienna, Arnold returned to in Munich where studied landscape painting under Heinrich von Zügel and Leo von Konig. After Munich, he traveled to Berlin where he further refined his painting style under the well-known German impressionist Max Liebermann. Arnold once wrote that Liebermann made him into a true painter. On his stylistic naturalism, Arnold once wrote: I show the texture of the landscape in the way that I feel it and, as also how I want the viewer to feel it. In 1928 Arnold was awarded a gold medal in Vienna for his oil painting: Hardanger Fjord. In 1932 he moved to Zurich to teach at an art academy. His painter friends included Otto Pippel and Franz Xavier Woffel. Although he was financially successful as a painter, Arnold painted because of his love of the aesthetic. Once, it is told, he traded a painting for taxi fare.
Relationship with Eisenhower and Churchill
In 1951 U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was stationed in Garmisch as the commander of occupied Europe. Sir Winston Churchill encouraged Eisenhower to take up painting as a hobby. Eisenhower followed Churchill’s advice and began to take lessons from Arnold-Graboné. At that time Arnold-Graboné had his studio only a few miles from Eisenhower’s headquarters. For a period of time Eisenhower flew twice weekly from Paris where he took his art lessons from the professor. They formed a friendship and one of Arnold-Graboné’s paintings hung in the White House. Later the former president hung one of the paintings, "Zugspitze" in his home in Gettysburg.
Arnold-Graboné’s circle of American friends acquired at NATO headquarters also included General Nordstrom and Robert L. Scott (author of "God is my copilot"). The artist marketed his works to the junior officers stationed at NATO headquarters and he often invited them to exhibitions his work. As a consequence, many young American officers purchased paintings and brought them back to the United States.
Through Eisenhower, Arnold-Graboné eventually became acquainted with Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill was interested in the artist's spatula technique and asked him for some tutelage. The two of them spent several weeks one summer in the early 1950s painting together on the Isle of Man.
Although he maintained his studio in Tutzing the artist exhibited throughout the world. In the 1950s and 1960s Arnold-Graboné had exhibitions in the United States, including New York City, Chicago, Washington DC and Sarasota, Florida.
German Impressionist Movement in the 1930’s & 1940’s
Twentieth-century German art is mostly coined by the expressionism at the beginning of the century, epitomized by Kokoschka, Klimt, Schiele and other German/Austrian painters of the period. Scholars are naturally inclined to study the arts in its indigenous nation. The rise of a new school often signifies a change in social environs, thus enabling a broader study in social science. In contrast, after a new style has jettisoned the older schools long enough to become established or even transplanted to other countries, the scholarly interests diminish and consequently the art market marginalizes its share.
Such a case can be seen in the German art in 30’s and 40’s when Hitler denounced the expressionism as decadent and degenerate. Hitler, an amateurish water-colorist, favored realistic works with monumental quality. But there was also the German Impressionism school that was not perfectly aligned with propaganda, yet still tolerated with a certain degree of artistic freedom. Perhaps examining Arnold Grabone’s career spanning from the first world war to the post-WWII can shed some lights on this topic.
After a series of experiments of different modernism styles, Grabone studied with Max Liebermann, the founder of German Impressionism. Although not an indigenous style, by the 1920’s, impressionism, with its bright palette, scientific theory, and direct visual pleasure did not “shock” Europeans. Libermann’s art was also heavily influenced by the French Barbizon school. Thus, he and his circle, unlike French impressionists, retained a sense of solidity in forms and narrative angles. Arnold once wrote that Liebermann made him into a true painter, a painter who showed the texture of the landscape in the way that he felt and also how he wanted the viewer to feel it.
Grabone was almost a pure landscape painter: more precisely, a landscape painter of natural beauty such as mountains and seas. If Max Libermann adopted Impressionism to his techniques, subjects and perspective (some of his urban scenes feature wide angles, vanishing points and merging lines, probably inspired by modern photography), Grabone was an Impressionist only relevant to purely aesthetic manners. In most of the landscapes, he kept a certain distance to the depicted scenes with a coolness of objectivity. Almost universally objects such as trees, boats or log cabins were in the middle ground, off-center while the rest of the pictures such as mountains, waters or sky provided atmospherical effects.
Grabone with one of his works
Pallet Knife Painting Style
Perhaps because of his obsession with the texture, he used palette knife exclusively. His signature style of palette knife with jewel colors is a celebration of dexterity of painterly skills. One may feel his personality from those moderately-varied, loosely controlled yet well-defined knife strokes. Grabone’s pictures are amicable with a patterned use of pallet knife. He mostly dotted and pressed the blade without dragging it too long to form a visible trace or a direct mixture of paints. For areas of sky or still waters, he tended to press the knife downward harder so that the same amount of paint were dispersed to a greater area and looked thinner. Regarding the main subjects such as trees or boats, he reduced the blade contact area and quickly built up or juxtaposed strokes of paints of different colors so that the texture looked almost architecturally rich. Grabone repetitively painted the same subjects such as the Alps of Bavaria and South Tirole, the Isle of Capri, or the English Garden in Munich. Such a near obsession with painting multiple versions of familiar subjects provided the painter the advantage to probe deeper meaning and varied characters of the subject under different light effect. In these quiet pictures, Grabone celebrated the fleeting light, the reflected, the shadowed, the diffused, the fogged or the direct light that gives the color and the texture a lively play.