Hermann Gradl was a Nazi profiteer, but was also celebrated for his pictures in post-war Franconia. In his native town of Marktheidenfeld, violent conflicts were fought over his inheritance. Now the wounds threaten to open up again.
Of
Olaf Przybilla, Marktheidenfeld
The magnificent volume, which ends up in the editorial office without being asked, does not require any introductory words from an editor. To a certain extent, the artist wrote the foreword himself, Hermann Gradl, whom the city council in Marktheidenfeld in Main Franconia attested in 1942 that he was allowed to “the German landscape painter at all”. It was not for nothing, it was murmured in the minutes of the meeting, that “the Führer commissioned Professor Gradl to paint six large German landscape paintings for the New Reich Chancellery”. Exactly where the city council had given the “great son of our town” and Nuremberg “Director of the Academy of Fine Arts” in 1942 as an honorary citizen, in Marktheidenfeld, the volume “Hermann Gradl. My life as a painter”.