Hanns Diehl

Hanns Diehl
Hanns Diehl at his easel, ca. 1910
Born	Hans Diehl March 13, 1877 (1877-03-13) Pirmasens, Germany
Died	December 22, 1946(1946-12-22) (aged 69) Vienna, Austria
Other names	Hanns Diehl-Wallendorf
Years active	1897-1946

Hanns Diehl (March 13, 1877 - December 22, 1946) was a German-Austrian artist influential as the founder of Vienna's Künstlerbund Segantini (1921-1938).

Hanns Diehl was born Hans Rudolf Diehl in Pirmasens, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, as the second son of August Diehl and Julia (née Herb), a mechanical engineer and factory owner. He spent his earliest childhood years in Pirmasens, until his father’s business sent the family to Moscow. Here Hanns studied Russian and attended his first four years of school at the Petri-Pauli Realgymnasium; he wrote later that his happiest memories as a boy were connected with his Russian life, where he often wandered through the magnificent forests surrounding the city and drew nature studies under the guidance of his mother. He described his mother as "...a not untalented dilettante who possessed a sharp eye and a striking judgment about graphic form".

The family moved back to Germany in the 1890s, to Weimar, where Diehl finished his secondary school education and entered the renowned Weimar Akademie für bildende Künste—the Academy of Fine Arts. He received his diploma from the Akademie in 1896, having studied under the Norwegian genre painter Carl Frithjof Smith (1859-1917) and Max Thedy (1858-1924), then as a master’s student with Professor Theodor Hagen, considered one of the founders of German Impressionism. In 1898, he went to study drawing at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt with Bernhard Mannfeld (1848-1925), who remained a lifelong friend and confidant. During these years of study, he travelled to Paris, Switzerland, the Baltic coast, and Hungary. During his years in Frankfurt he established a lifelong friendship with the German naturalist painter Wilhelm Trübner; the older artist helped Diehl to establish himself as an academic painter. Through Trübner, he gained access to the Kunstsalon Bangel, where he participated in his first group exhibition in 1900. Of his works in this show, one critic praised his "quiet landscapes" as imparting a sense of rumination on life and stillness. At this time he began referring to himself as Hanns Diehl-Wallendorf, apparently as a way to distinguish himself from another artist named Hans Diehl.

In 1905, Diehl volunteered for his obligatory military service by joining a Hessian Infantry Regiment, spending one year in Darmstadt. In the first three years of World War I he served as a translator from Russian for the war ministry in Munich, for which he was awarded the König-Ludwigs-Kreuz. At the beginning of 1918, he applied to become a war painter on the front, and was assigned to the Bavarian Infantry in the field. There he painted troops as well as the commander Franz Ritter von Epp (1868-1946). He was greatly traumatized by what he experienced on the front; he wrote “The unheard of terror of this war I saw and experienced in France and Serbia; an enduring impression of unlimited and completely inhumane barbarity".