Johannes Matthaeus Koelz (31 March 1895 – 3 July 1971) was a German-British artist, originally from Upper Bavaria. His career peaked during the middle 1930s. Little more was heard of him after he fled to England in 1937, and after he died he was generally forgotten. That changed more than a generation later when a portrait-sketch that he had drawn of Adolf Hitler was found in a private collection. It was known that he had been offered a fabulously fat fee and sufficient access to paint the leader in 1936 or 1937, but it was widely accepted that he had turned down the offer, after casual mention was made that he would be required, as a courtesy, to wear a "brown shirt" party uniform in Hitler's presence. Disagreement persists among experts as to whether he somehow gained the necessary access after all, or whether the painting was produced - in total defiance of the artist's known preferences - from one or more of the many photographs of Hitler that were produced during this period. Apart from the Hitler sketch, Koelz is primarily known for his imposing church art, and in particular for the vast anti-war triptych, "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Immediately before escaping the country, he arranged and oversaw the cutting of the work into sixteen or twenty pieces, at the village sawmill. The pieces were secretly distributed to friends and family members: he hoped thereby to preserve the work from the unsympathetic attentions of the security services. ("Pacifist propaganda" was out of favour with the political class at the time.) Much later, in 1998, four of the pieces were donated by his daughter to the New Walk Art Gallery in Leicester, England. According to some sources two more pieces subsequently turned up. This was enough, with the help of (at that time) modern computer-aided imaging techniques and an old photograph taken while the composition was still not quite finished, for an arresting digitally remastered copy of it to be contrived.
Life Provenance and early years Johannes Matthaeus Koelz was born into a Catholic family, and grew towards adulthood through the confident years of the Wilhelmine pomp, in Mühldorf. Mühldorf was a small ancient manufacturing town set on the north bank of the River Inn in the rich farmland between German Munich (to the west) and Austrian Salzburg (to the south). Relatively little is known of his childhood. There are references to his having become a "committed sportsman" and a "fitness obsessive" with an appetite for the rural outdoor life.Elizabeth Boa, Elizabeth Palfreyman (ed), Heimat: A German Dream (Oxford, 2000), pp. 34, 59 He also showed indications of being a keen and capable artist from an early age. In normal times he would have moved on from school to study at the Fine Arts Academy in Munich; but by 1914 the times were far from normal. A couple of months after his nineteenth birthday war broke out. His enrolment at the prestigious academy was deferred until November 1918. On 23 January 1915 Koelz was conscripted for military service, joining the seventh company of the Bavarian Infantry Regiment. He was sent to fight on the so-called "Western Front" where he served until the war ended. His brother, also sent to fight, was killed in action: Johannes Koelz survived, but lost his religion. It is known that he was awarded the "Iron Cross - second class" in recognition of the courage he displayed in the heat of battle in northern France, after he rescued a wounded soldier from behind enemy line during 1916. However, the more expressive and informative testimony to his three years on the frontline is probably that provided by the art he produced between the wars.
Student policeman Despite his later reputation as an anti-militarist, Koelz continued to serve as an officer in the army for a year or so after the war ended. He joined the police service in 1919, working over the next few years both as a city police officer in Munich and as a member of the Bavarian Mountain Police. At one point he was sent to Berlin-Spandau to work at the Police School there as a trainer in unarmed combat. In parallel to his police career, he was now able to pursue his studies at the Munich Fine Arts Academy. He became a "Meisterschüler" (loosely, "advanced student") of Franz Stuck and of Olaf Gulbransson. This led him away from the fashionable and brutal forms of expressionism associated with Otto Dix and other contemporaries whose work during the 1920s is frequently seen as an angry rejection of the forces that had taken Europe to war in 1914. Koelz's artistic training and, presumably, his own inclinations and upbringing, led him back to the naturalism which, even in Germany, was widely viewed as having fallen out a fashion at least a generation earlier.
In 1922 he met Claire Helen Treu (1890–1957), who already had three children by her first husband. They teamed up together and their son Siegfried (always known to friends and family a 'Fred') was born in 1923, having been conceived, as Fred would later insist, when his mother was still married to her first husband. In 1925 they set up home together on the edge of the village of Hohenbrunn, then just outside Munich (into which, subsequently, it has becoming progressively ever more engulfed). The Koelz family at this time consisted of three daughters from the first marriage and one infant son from the second. Claire had been born into a wealthy family, but the circumstances of the ending of her first marriage had left her cut off financially by her parents, and the couple's new home was a small house which had been built to be used as a "holiday cottage" - albeit with a plot of land large enough to feed the family through most of the year - rather than as a family home. Their second child together, a daughter, would be born in 1936. She would grow up believing that her conception had resulted from "a mistake". The marriage of Johannes and Claire Koelz was, in the assessment of their daughter, an exceptionally loving and close one. Koelz concentrated more and more on his painting, with a focus on still life and portraiture, for which there was a ready market in Germany.
In March 1933 Koelz relocated with his family to Maribor, a traditionally German-speaking town which following the dissolution of the Austrian empire had ended up as a frontier town in the northern edge of Yugoslavia. Here they acquired an agricultural small holding, and Koelz was able to construct a studio. He was already working obsessively on "Du Sollst Nicht Töten", a vast anti-war triptych which he would complete and destroy in 1937. Following the assassination of King Alexander Koelz was able to make a death mask of the deceased former monarch: he sold many copies, giving rise to a useful supplementary revenue stream. The Koelz family returned abruptly to Hohenbrunn in 1935. This "homecoming" may have been in connection with reported threats by the German government to confiscate Koelz's property in Hohenbrunn if he remained any longer in Yugoslavia. On the evidence of his surviving work, the early 1930s were a period of artistic self-discovery and development for Koelz.
Thou Shouldst Not Kill Between approximately 1930 and 1937 Koelz worked on his oil-on-wood triptych "Du Sollst Nicht Töten" ("Thou Shouldst Not Kill"), remarkable in terms both of its size and of its visual impact, measuring approximately 230 × 510 cm (so taller than a man and more than twice as wide as that). Clearly inspired by medieval altarpieces focused on the crucifixion or enthronement in Heaven of Christ the King, the artist moved on to address a more secular and morally conflicted generation. The central panel depicts a crucified soldier, still wearing his gas mask. The side panels depicted not the kneeling saints familiar from medieval altar pieces, but kneeling soldiers in prayer, clearly representing the German armies on one side and the armies of the Anglo-French-Russian armies on the other. Around and in front of the soldiers cluster representative members of the civilian populations in whose names the wartime killing is performed. Traditional religion is represented by figures above the assembled soldiers on the side panels, identified as Christian priests blessing the weapons of war. The work was clearly designed to shock, and after the coming to power of the Hitler government it would certainly have shocked the security services if they had discovered it, with consequences endangering the artist and others involved on producing or displaying it. "Du Sollst Nicht Töten" was undertaken, at least during the later years of its production, in Koelz's home at Hohenbrunn. It is not known whether, at least when he started on it, Koelz had any clear ideas as to where it should be displayed. After 1933 the chances of displaying it anywhere until after the next dramatic change in the political weather became vanishingly small, but the artist was not dissuaded from completing it by Germany's political switch to post-democratic populism.
Régime change In January 1933 the Hitler government took power. This was followed by a rapid transformation from democracy under a republican constitution to tyranny under a one-party dictatorship. Koelz had grown up surrounded by traditionalist nationalism of small-town Germany, and Anglo-Saxon commentators infer that his war-time heroics, which made him a worthy heir of the German military tradition, also made him an unlikely pacifist. But his experiences on the wartime front line had indeed turned him into a committed anti-militarist. It is clear from his experiences during the 1930s that he had little sympathy with the twentieth century populism of a Hitler. It was his interactions with the Hitler government and its agencies that transformed his life, during the later 1930s.
Hitler portrait? It was probably during 1936 that Koelz received a visit from Heinrich Berg, his agent, accompanied by an important-looking man wearing a general's uniform. The important man was Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, a top-level party official and regional government administrator. Wagner was also a personal friend of the leader. He arrived with an offer. Koelz was invited to paint a portrait of Hitler suitable for inclusion at the front of a "Christmas Book" for distribution across the German-speaking world. It was evidently a prestige project. Koelz would later recall that the fee offered was "truly seductive". He would be favoured with no fewer than eight sittings. There was only one obvious downside. He would be expected to "don the little brown [Nazi] shirt". The commission was, according to one source respectfully declined. According to his son there was nothing respectful about Koelz's reaction: "Du kannst mich Götz von Berlichingen", a message as disrespectful as, in today's terms, it is untranslatable. In 1971 it emerged that Koelz had indeed "produced a preliminary drawing for the proposed painting", when the work was discovered among the personal effect of Barbara Demmell in Germany. Barbara Demmell's mother-in-law had been a close friend of Claire Koelz, the artist's wife. Opinions are divided over whether this preliminary portrait was based on a photograph, or whether Koelz had somehow managed to organise at least one sitting with the intended subject of the portrait after all.
Trouble