Portrait of Heinrich Knirr
Laser Ink, Paper Fiber, Gel Medium on Acrylic Panel
54x72
My great-grandfather Siegfried Thannhauser had his portrait painted in 1916 by the Munich artist Heinrich Knirr. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Thannhauser family was Knirr's primary patron, and the artist and his son even lived with the family for a time. In 1934, after the Nazis came to power, due to his Jewish heritage, Thannhauser was forced flee to the United States. Knirr, meanwhile, became Hitler's official portrait artist. When Knirr called Thannhauser to tell him that he had been offered this plush appointment in the new regime, he couldn't understand why Thannhauser did not share his enthusiasm.
In this work, I transferred an image of Knirr's portrait of Thannhauser in its gilded frame onto one side of an acrylic panel. On the opposite side, I transferred an image of Knirr's unframed portrait of Hitler from 1937 sized to fit into the frame of Thannhauser's portrait. The subsequent merging of the two paintings forms a third image, which I take to be a portrait of Knirr.