Arnold Balwé

Arnold Balwé

pseudonym: -

birth data

date of birth: 1898

place of birth: Dresden

death data

date of death: 1983

death: Feldwies/Chiemsee

biography

Arnold Balwés landscapes, whether white low-rise buildings in front of a mountain landscape "Auf Rhodos" or "Friesischer Hof", always capture the site-specific atmosphere. The painter was born in Dresden in 1898, the son of a Dutch consul, but grew up in the South African port of Durban. After graduating from a high school in Würzburg, Arnold Balwé met his future wife, the artist Elisabeth Staimmer, in 1918 during an agricultural internship in Lower Bavaria. This was followed by a search phase in which Balwé worked in an architectural firm for only one year, then began studying at the Antwerp Academy, but stopped again and undertook a study trip to Italy. In 1922 Arnold Balwé found a teacher at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the painter Karl Caspar, who strongly influenced his art. While still a student, Balwé received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize. After studying he moved to Lake Chiemsee in 1927. Time and again, however, as a cosmopolitan he moved out into the world and he found a wealth of motifs for his landscape paintings during his travels. He participated in several exhibitions such as the New Secession in the Glaspalast and the Haus der Kunst in Munich as well as in Hannover, Basel and Düsseldorf. In 1981 Balwé was awarded the Upper Bavarian Culture Prize. In 1983, the artist died at the age of 84 years in Feldwies am Chiemsee. Arnold Balwé was honored in 1988 with a retrospective in Prien am Chiemsee. The colours of his post-impressionistic landscapes are of a luminous intensity, which inevitably have a positive effect on the state of mind of the viewer.