Painter Peter Leo Max Scholleck (1923-1969) had no formal art training, but his works exhibit an extraordinary range of subject, medium, theme, color, technique, and size.

Scholleck was born in June 1923, in Munich, Germany, just three months after his father, Leo Max Czollek, died. Czollek was a general manager with equity interest in the luxurious Munich department store Kaufhaus Oberpollinger.

Three years after his father’s death, Scholleck’s mother Irma married Wilhelm Nussbaum, a businessman, who accepted Peter as his son. Despite the rampant inflation in Germany in the 1920s, Nussbaum was able to provide an upper-middle-class life for the family in the same Munich apartment purchased by Czollek before his son was born.

Sometime in 1938, the Episcopal boarding school Scholleck attended refused to continue his education because he was Jewish. In November of that year, he witnessed the horror and destruction of Kristallnacht and his step-father, Wilhelm Nussbaum, was taken by the Nazis to Dachau Concentration Camp. Nussbaum was released from Dachau in mid-December, but he had suffered beatings in the camp and was in ill health when he was released. Months later, in May, 1939, the family fled Germany after obtaining the necessary travel documents. Scholleck celebrated his 16th birthday in America, but his step-father died just 20 months later.

At 18, Scholleck enlisted in the U.S. Army. His ability to speak five languages determined his role as an intelligence interpreter. He served in the Pacific during World War II. After the war he married Charlotte Bosch, became a father, and pursued various paths of employment. But Scholleck’s passion for painting soared during the 1940s.

By his daughter’s recollections, painting for her father was an inner drive, a devotion that could not be ignored. Scholleck’s painting consumed most weekends, day and night, and many weekday nights.

At times, his split-level home’s carport served as the only available space to spread out and work upon fresh canvases; Scholleck literally painted his way out of his home. Years later, he expressed an interest in having his work seen and acknowledged by the public and he participated in several art fairs in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. His early death in 1969 and his wife’s passing in 1975 left sole ownership of the collection to their only child, Eileen. The collection has been professionally photographed and is electronically archived.

Selections from the collection have been viewed by collectors, artists, curators, art historians, the deputy director of the Maryland Historical Society (now named the Maryland Center for History and Culture) and the director of the University of Maryland University College Arts Program (now named the University of Maryland Global Campus Arts Program).