Hans Weingaertner was born in Kraiburg, a small town in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps on the Inn River. His family moved to Munich around the turn of the century, where his teachers soon discovered the boy’s remarkable aptitude for drawing. Munich was a hub of artistic activity, a swirl of impressionism, expressionism, and a loosely organized group of modernist Munich artists who exhibited together as “Die Scholle” (literally, the soil or the homeland). Weingaertner’s family encouraged his talent and arranged private art instruction for him. Beginning when, at age fourteen, he studied with two Munich painters, Moritz Heymann and Ludwig Klein. In 1915, he entered Munich’s prestigious Royal Academy of Art. He studied there and, at the same time, attended classes at the Royal Institute of Anatomy. Weingaertner remained at the Academy for seven years, becoming the assistant and protégé of his teacher, Angelo Jank (1868–1940). This rigorous academic training served him in good stead. Throughout his life, he made full use of his ability to paint any subject in any style he chose. Thus free, Weingaertner created an oeuvre characterized by diversity of subject matter and styles. The artist’s resolute independence from labels, however, has meant that his work, which defies a shorthand categorization or descriptive label, never found the audience it deserves.
Weingaertner came of age in Germany during World War I. The war years were turbulent, but what followed was arguably worse. The economic depression and political upheaval that characterized the Weimar Republic created a hard set of circumstances for the launch of a career in art. In 1922, John H. Kliegl, of Kliegl Brothers lighting in New York, came to Munich to check on advances in theater lighting. Kliegl was a native of Bavaria and had trained as a tinsmith before emigrating to America, where he became a pioneer in theater lighting, devising numerous new lighting techniques. Kliegl himself was Munich-educated, and, in the course of his trip, saw Weingaertner’s work and offered the young man a position in New York.
Though Weingaernter intended to return to his homeland, political events reset his life’s plan. For most of the decade of the 1920s, Weingaertner devoted himself to commercial work, employed both by Kliegl and by a bindery in Brooklyn where he designed book covers. He lived in Brooklyn until about 1930, when he married Elsie Mitchel. Her family lived in Lyndhurst, a small industrial town in the New Jersey meadows about 15 miles west of New York City and 10 miles north of Newark. The Weingaertners settled first in Lyndhurst, and then in nearby Belleville. In 1940, Weingaertner became an American citizen. The couple’s only child, a son, was born in 1942.
Weingaertner took a hiatus from easel painting when he first came to America, needing a period of adjustment to acclimate his artistic vision to his new circumstances. By the end of the 1920s, however, he resumed a regular schedule of exhibitions. From 1929 until 1940, he showed regularly at the Society of Independent Artists and the Salons of America, both annual New York venues favored by modernists. The 1930s was a decade of renewed dedication to his art. In 1932, he was invited to contribute ten works to a show at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1936, he sent a painting to the Art Institute of Chicago, part of an exhibit which toured to San Francisco, Colorado Springs, and Dallas, Texas. In 1937, Weingaertner began an association with a cooperative gallery in Newark that became the Rabin and Krueger Gallery. Bernard Rabin and Nathan Krueger gathered together a group of contemporary American artists including John Sloan, Reginald Marsh, Moses and Rafael Soyer, Weingaertner, and Joseph Stella. Stella, in particular, was very close to Rabin. Stella and Weingaertner became good friends, an unlikely couple, the Italian emigrant, famous for an eccentric and flamboyant personality, paired with the German, a reticent man speaking with a thick German accent. In 1940, Weingaertner had a show of his works at his home, with a catalogue introduction written by his New Jersey neighbor, poet, and physician, Dr. William Carlos Williams.
The Rabin and Krueger Gallery, in downtown Newark, was a gathering place for local artists and patrons. Weingaertner met Arthur Egner there, the president of the Newark Museum, who became a friend and patron. Weingaertner named his son Arthur in Egner’s honor. Another patron invited the family to spend time summers on a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, giving Weingaertner the opportunity to paint country scenes and rural landscapes. In 1947, Weingaertner accepted a teaching position at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, where he remained until he retired in 1969.
