The soul painter

Peter reuter – Painter and portraitist

*1 April 1936 in Hagen

†7 November 2002 in Wuppertal

Peter Reuter’s final resting place is at the cemetery in Hagen Altenhagen – near Alleestrasse, where he grew up.

Education

Private art school of Kurt Krüger, Hagen, drawing lessons at the art college (Werkkunstschule) of Wuppertal, class of Prof. Schreiber, state examination

Portraits

Jean Cocteau:

“Peter Reuter is one of the explorers of human spheres, who delves into them and thus conveys an original image. He shows us, so to speak, in the mirror of our metamorphosis. More of us than us.” (Westfäl. Rundschau from 3 March, 1961)

Peter Reuter drew more than 800 prominent people with a charcoal pencil on paper, as a travelling portraitist who was commissioned to do so. This made him internationally renowned. Peter Reuter lived together with Jean Cocteau during their creative period. Jean Couteu was very devoted to him and thought very much of his skills.  

Here are the names of several of the personalities whose portraits were painted by Reuter:

At the age of 15 the first official portrait of the 

His works / jobs

Painter, graphic artist and illustrator, choreographer for ballet, labourer, opera extra, ballet dancer, bar musician, illustrator for fashion magazines, layouts for Dior &Guerlain, decorator and stage designer – he created stages and television sets and design costumes for young ballet.

Places of residence

Hagen, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Lucerne, Paris

Professional encounters with

Miro, for the sake of the foreword to a publication for the photographer Bruno Bernhard (Palma di Mallorca)
Jean Cocteau (Paris)
Charles Wilp

An exhibition with Picasso was planned, but could not take place due to Picasso’s untimely death.

Exhibitions and publications

1958 ballet book – “Ballet Classique” with words by Nika Nilanowa, entire text by Jean Cocteau

1966 Hamburg – in the “island”

Düsseldorf – Gallery Brebaum, with works/new portraits from his last stay in Paris and in Switzerland. Opening speech: Lore Lorentz – head of the Kom(m)mödchen cabaret theatre, music: Klaus Doldinger

1967 Lucerne – international music festival weeks, exhibition with Marc Chagall

1968 Cologne – Galerie Gmurzynska, gouaches and illustrations “Portrait Imaginaire” (according to Reuter)

1968 Hagen – Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum – with dance performances of the prima ballerina Joan Cadzow and her partner Peter Breuer (solo dancer, Düsseldorf)
1970 portfolio with 13 chalk illustrations, among others with a portrait of Charles Wilf

1970 English pop group “Black Sabbath” purchases chalk illustration for its new album cover

This is where all of Peter Reuter’s exhibitions come to an end, as he deliberately withdrew from the public eye in 1972 in order to complete his life’s work – his surrealistic visions that he had.

The life work of the painter Peter Reuter did not become very well-known due to adverse circumstances. I will therefore put in on the internet so that it finally can be seen.

It was Wednesday, 14 July 2021 when the drama befell Peter Reuter’s illustrations. Almost as fast as they finally had found a safe and presumably protected site, almost as fast – no, much too fast, this site also sealed their fate:

The flood catastrophe – that no one had ever expected in our small Hagen region – was not somewhere far away in the big wide world and somewhere to be seen and heard on the news. No, it was above us – indeed it befell us from above. For days it rained incessantly. The dams, which were about to break and could have brought about an even worse disaster with more deaths, were opened without any advance warning, as we learned a few hours later from the media.

I had handed over the second key fort the archive, where the illustrations were stored. I was told that I did not need to come and help. While slowly and almost meditatively climbing each and every one of the 77 steps to my apartment, my gut feeling overcame me – the inside of me was speaking with me and did not want to be ignored. It demanded me to listen and thus to act: “You have to go there! They are your illustrations. You cannot surrender responsibility for them. You will never forgive yourself if you do not act now….. Otherwise your work of more than a decade and all your hardships would have been for absolutely nothing. You owe this to yourself and Peter, and in particular to Helmut.”

Since I do not own a car, I ran through the pouring rain to the taxi stand. One single taxi stood there, as if it had waited just for me.

The water and its immense force and speed also reached Peter Reuter’s illustrations! Although they were carefully placed high above, unfortunately all wonderful works of this great artist succumbed to the element of water and the impurities within it!

Like many other people, we were helplessly at the mercy of the natural catastrophe and everything that it had relentlessly ripped along with it! I almost drowned on the way home, if it had not been for the helping hand of my neighbour, who was quickly able to assist. Only in the following days, while oscillating between a sense of “helplessness” and “having been fortunate after all because we are all still living, thank God!, did the result of the flood catastrophe and what it did with Peter Reuter’s illustrations manifest itself.

Nevertheless, thank heaven that we were able to salvage the largest part of them. And in particular that the most valuable (and I do not mean only the material value, but above all their spiritual value) and exquisite illustrations are not here in this unspeakably sad and destroyed location, rather in Vienna (since 26 April 2018, and have since been moved to Wiener Neustadt in 2020) in the Austrian Centre of Culture (ÖKZ).
It was the honourable Prof. Gerhard Habarta who took the initiative for this. And therefore my deepest gratitude to Prof. Habarta, for wanting to have these works of Reuter in Vienna, in the Vienna Phantasten Museum of the Austrian Center of Culture, Palffy Palace, because they belong there among the surrealists, my psychosymbolic illustrations!
By doing so, he practically salvaged them as well as the artist Peter Reuter, the soul of Reuter.

For Peter Reuter invested everything in precisely these illustrations. They were his life!
His psychosymbolic illustrations for which he gave up everything, truly everything; his glamorous, flaunting, jet-set world surrounded by international VIPs. He had worked his way up the latter to join them and was fully integrated, but he never lost himself as he always remained a modest person. In mid-1972, he gathered the courage to search for a place of solitude and committed himself to complete self-isolation for precisely three decades, up to his death. His works of art in Vienna would never have succeeded without the help and above all the support of his friend patron Helmut Schuster, whom Peter Reuter approached knowing very well that this Hagen-based businessman could be trusted 100 % and who visited him every Wednesday at exactly 3 pm in his attic flat in Wuppertal during these 30 years. Time and time again, Schuster went off with a new shopping list from Reuter for paint, clothing, books, DVDs, music cassettes etc. until the next Wednesday. Peter Reuter devoured a huge number of books on religion and metaphysics, while studying the history of humanity. He was also a great fan and admirer of the fabulous master Rafael and his pictures of the Madonna, precisely in which he found his mission.
Peter Reuter finally found in his absolute isolation the peace and quiet which he needed for the creation of his 28 psychosymbolic colour paintings – knowing very well that he has someone there to reliably take care of him and everything around him so that he could completely devote himself to his calling, the climax of his artistic activities. What a blessing for an artist!
This is how Peter Reuter, who was long presumed to be dead in his home town, created his Vienna paintings and the more than 300 imaginary landscape paintings as well as all the portraits. Peter Reuter worked while kneeling for two and sometimes also for three to four years on one psychosymbolic images. He created the imaginary landscape images in order to relax and to distance himself from the mentally and psychologically strenuous paintings. In the final years before his death, these were followed by the portraits, which always included a cat or an owl, in various different editions.

The psychosymbolic images did not become public until after his death, because the art patron Helmut Schuster (1936) was not able to publish Peter Reuter’s life work earlier due to illness.

– Vernissage on 26 April 2018 in Vienna,
Vienna Phantasten Museum of the Austrian Center of Culture, Palffy Palace,

In autumn 2017, Mr. Schuster was promised by the managing director of the Austrian Centre of Culture, Mr. Erich Peischl, that the illustrations in Hagen would be picked up. This indeed occurred in 2018.
On this occasion dear thanks to Mr. Peischl – also for the special character of the vernissage which would never have taken place without him. He also invited government representatives to the vernissage who honoured Mr. Schuster for his commendable deeds as a patron of the artist Peter Reuter.

Since summer 2020, twenty-five of the psychosymbolic illustrations and twelve of Reuter’s portraits have been located at the Austrian Centre of Culture in Wiener Neustadt.

On Peter Reuter’s images

    Someone is painting his own paradise.
Maybe it is also hell. Peter Reuter painted a “psychosymbolic baroque sky” while kneeling in solitude in his attic flat.
    Whatever was created by the masters of mannerism to rococo as ceiling frescos in churches and magnificent halls broke up the unity and tranquility of art. It teems and swarms with a fantastic disorder of mythical and mythological figures and realistic details. Putti with naked behinds move around in cloudy skies and at the same time knights are slaughtering one another. A shining light radiates above everything and there is the eye of light towards which everything moves towards and away from.
    This is precisely what happens in the pictures of Peter Reuter.

    Peter Reuter was a highly demanded portrait illustrator of jet-set VIPs, musicians, dancers, stage designers and employees of fashion brands such as Dior as well as fashion magazines and painters. And he is all of that, but much differently – in his pictures as well. The shining lights are there, images of women, as beautiful as in perfume advertisements, the small angles and the dead in swirls of colour of various cloud formations. Above them the rigid eyes of the owl. These silent nocturnal animals appear in Reuter’s images time and time again.
    They are characterised by the powerful symbolics, to which a fantastic, and indeed surreal painter is entitled to. But they are also the view that gives rises to Reuter’s images and enables them to see us: the view of an owl who turns 270 degrees, more than three-quarters of a circle. It is a view towards the inside and the visualisation to the outside.

Prof. Gerhard Habarta
16 September 2021