Peter Leo Max Scholleck made art because he had to: prolifically, energetically, experimentally.
Stylistically, Scholleck’s output is extraordinarily diverse. From his monumental Last Supper (1964), rich in impasto and dense in figuration; to the delightful and vivacious Beach Scene (1962), to an explosive Untitled (1967), Scholleck bedazzles with his range of approach and resolve. There are influences of Eugene Boudin, Chaim Soutine, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock in some of the works, but the synthesis that Scholleck creates is original.
Scholleck’s aesthetic influences are not known. His daughter does not recall him visiting museums or galleries or having art books, with the exception of a book of Van Gogh’s works and a subscription to ARTnews. Throughout the 26 years that span this collection of approximately 155 works, his subject matter includes still lifes, nudes, religion, portraiture, abstraction, and landscape. He worked in oil, mixed media (essentially sculptures on canvas covered in oil), oil stick, ink, and charcoal that were applied to canvas, canvas board, linen, paper, Masonite, and canvas on Masonite.
Yet there is a common thread in this collection. There is an urgency in each piece, a raw need for expression that is delivered in a rich and methodical process. Scholleck’s technique reveals his deep devotion, passion, and earnestness.
Peter Scholleck from multiple perspectives, c. 1950s.
Subject matter, and to some degree the style of Scholleck’s early works (1940s and 1950s), were likely influenced by American modernists, including the Ashcan School, as well as Matisse and Picasso. A seascape (1947) and a canvas of painted back alleys and brown interiors (1940s) show the grit of some early modernists. That approach also makes appearances in one cubistic or colorfully quasi-abstracted image after another. In these formative years, we see Scholleck assimilating so much. Even in the context of the time, his results reveal an original synthesis.
Around 1962, Scholleck’s work evolves. It increases in scale and his output of these large canvases also increases. Some of the works are now heavily textured and subject matter is unrestrained.
Affinities with artists and movements do not vanish. In fact, they proliferate. It is Scholleck’s synthesis of all those influences in the 1960s that marks these later works. He responded to all of these influences and made them his own. There is not a moment of derivativeness in Scholleck’s art, even as it is viewed today.
Scholleck is an artist without a formal visual arts education. His body of work, which consists of over 155 drawings and paintings, is unmistakably an art of its time. Scholleck drew upon the world around him, and what came out is eruptive.
If there is a single word to define Scholleck’s late work, it would be “layered.” Layers of figuration, abstraction, geometry, and art history and social references; layers of technique, with oils applied and scraped off. Though there is an intense urgency and restlessness in his method, there is an underlying linear architecture. Examples are Bacchanal (1967) and Non-Plus Ultra (1967), that reveal a taut expression of planning and impulse.
Scholleck, brushes in hand, with an Untitled work, (1962, oil on linen, 29 x 27 inches).
Like so many of his generation, Scholleck knew the trauma of World War II. He grew up in Nazi Germany and served as an American soldier in the Pacific. He rarely spoke of those periods of his life or their impact on him. But one is left to wonder how the chaos of those experiences informed both his restrained, orderly and cerebral approach – Scholleck left behind a note with an 18-step process to build a finished work – and his driving need to make art that is dramatic, vivid, and affecting.