Alexander Thiele (born 1924 in Munich) German landscape and genre painter. 'Cafegarten am Starnberger See'. Impressionist style cafe genre pastose painting. Depicting a beer garden on the shoreline overlooking Starnberger See with people shaded by trees. To the background, sail boats drifting on the lake with the Wetterstein Mountains in the distance. Circa 1980. Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. Titled and inscribed verso. Housed in a decorative gilt wood frame. Frame measures 30 1/4" x 26 3/8". Canvas measures 23 3/4" x 19 3/4". In overall good condition.
About Alexander Thiele:
Born on December 24, 1924, in Munich. Trained under the artist Rolf Knobloch in Düsseldorf, Karl Pöhner in Munich, and at the Munich Academy. Alexander Thiele is the cosmopolitan among the contemporary painters presented here. Because the technical possibilities exist to travel in a relatively short time, in a carefree and safe manner, to leave one's immediate homeland, he takes advantage of them.
Long before, but especially in the 19th century, artists undertook long journeys to experience the foreign or the longed-for, thereby literally broadening their artistic horizons. As indicated at the beginning, Alexander Thiele occasionally transcends the traditional framework of absorbing and then reproducing nature only in one's native surroundings. Extensive travels through the African savannah landscape enable him to create wonderfully lifelike images of an exotic world of flora and fauna.
Although Alexander Thiele goes beyond the scope of conventional motif searches, he does not fetch a foreign beauty from anywhere, but enriches it with impressions of nature that are merely elsewhere, quite specifically a place elsewhere.
Thus, Alexander Thiele all too often chooses a jewel of Upper Bavarian culture—the beer garden—as the motif of his artistic depiction.
Alexander Thiele is attuned to the finest observation and perception of every small, changing detail.
The beer garden as a place of momentary social equality, a truly democratic place where nature and people, city and country, find one another. A place under old trees where city dwellers and country folk, tourists and regulars meet. People sit on wooden chairs or benches at long tables—all equally hard and on one level—united in comfort and conviviality. One seems to see that they, whether rich or poor, local or foreign, have completely escaped their everyday lives and entered a new, better reality. The bright light of a beautiful summer day floods through the leaves of the trees, highlighting here and there a particular detail with particular clarity, while the entire group is immersed in partial shadow. Here, the artist demonstrates a masterful use of color and light. The artist evokes the heat of a cloudless Bavarian summer day and simultaneously conveys the relaxed tranquility of all those enjoying it.
His close relationship with nature gives him further inspiration, which is expressed in heightened colorfulness in his depictions of local flora and fauna. He masterfully captures large game, small game, flowers, and ducks in color and form on canvas. Reality, which he allows to become the expression of his work alongside naked realism or pure impressionism, without altering the world of form.
His art serves, so to speak, as a bridge in a world that, in terms of distances, is becoming ever smaller, and in terms of the perception of what is seen, ever more superficial and arbitrary.
Leohard Pelloth