Abstract
This article examines the monumental mosaics, large stained glass windows, and illustrated maps that the German painter Werner Peiner (1897–1984), now best known for his designs for the representative buildings of Hitler’s dictatorship, produced between 1931 and 1935 for Shell Oil and its German subsidiary. The discussion of these commissions, which emerged from Peiner’s social networks of the 1920s and contributed to his career as a state artist after 1933, explains their function as ideological images promoting the interests of a global corporation and affirming modern automotive technology using conservative, mythologizing tropes of paradisical nature, traditional cultural landscapes, and immutable national communities that the painter later employed in his work for Hitler’s state.
About the author
JAMES A. VAN DYKE is Associate Professor of Modern European Art History in the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of a scholarly monograph on the painter Franz Radziwill and numerous articles and essays on German artists, art politics and institutions, and critical debates and discourses in the first half of the twentieth century. He is currently completing a monographic study on critical details in the social production of Otto Dix.
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Photo Credits: 1, 11–12 from: Ernst Adolf Dreyer, Werner Peiner: Vom geistigen Gesetz deutscher Kunst, Hamburg 1936, pls 56, 64, 65. — 2 from: Johannes Sommer, Marksteine deutscher Geschichte: Zu Werner Peiners Entwürfen der Bildteppiche für die Marmorgalerie der Neuen Reichskanzlei, in: Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich 4, 1940, color pl. 3. (foto: bpk / Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin / Art Resource, NY). — 3 from: Das Haus des deutschen Versicherungskonzerns in Berlin : Architekt Emil Fahrenkamp, in: Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau 16, 1932, no. 4, 161. — 4, 6–8, 10 from: Werner Witthaus, Das Shellhaus in Hamburg, in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 68, 1931, no. 7, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108. — 9, 14–16 Author. — 13 Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. — 17 Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin / The Heartfield Community of Heirs / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022. — 18 Alamy Stock Photo.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
