Dancing by sea

Adolf Münzer was born in Pszczyna and started his artistic education in 1886 in the Wrocław studio of Georg Heintze and continued at the Handicraft School in Wrocław; between 1890 and 1897, he studied at the Royal and Bavarian Academy of Arts in Munich in the class of Karl Raupp, Otton Seitz and Paul Höcker. After a period of study trips in Italy, Switzerland and a brief stay in Paris, he settled for a couple of years in Munich and in 1908 moved to Düsseldorf. Eventually in 1938 he settled in Holzhausen near Landsberg over the Lech River where he died in 1953. Münzer was an easel and large format mural painter. As a graphic designer and a draughtsman, he created narrative illustrations of fairy tales. Münzer’s interests revolved around symbolically comprehended human figure. He created mainly decorative compositions ˗ from boudoir scenes in the Rococo spirit up to monumental idealist and symbolic compositions used as the interior design elements of representative public sites (the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg, the Courtly Theatre in Stuttgart, the States Palace in Düsseldorf, the Upper Silesian House in Gliwice). Easel works of the artist are kept in numerous museum collections. The idyllic painting in the collection of the Szczecin museum, presenting sun-bathed satyrs and maenads, joyfully making music and dancing on the seashore, is most probably a draft for wall decoration. The use of colour and boldness of painter’s gesture ˗ broad strokes of the brush along with richness of textural effects ˗ prove the artist’s skill and also give away his penchant for large-format compositions which should be viewed from a significant distance.

Dariusz Kacprzak