Peter Kinley was born Peter Nikolaus Arthur Eduard Schwarz into a cultured and artistic Viennese family on 16 July 1926 . His Austrian father, Arthur, a company auditor and later, the director of a private bank, had married Lydia Schroeder, who was German, in 1925. Arthur had served in the Austrian army in the First World War and had been a prisoner of the Russians in Siberian labour camp from 1915-20. Peter was the only child of a late marriage – both parents were in their late thirties when he was born.
In the 1920s and 1930s Schwarz senior worked in Germany and the family spent time in Berlin. They holidayed with German relatives in Heidelberg and Interlaken, and at Caputh, a quiet holiday retreat near Potsdam. A photograph taken there in 1932 shows Peter, sitting bolt upright in a pedal car in front of ‘ the Villa of Professor Einstein ‘ – he once also sat on the great man’s knee. In another photograph he poses with his father and uncle, the Austrian painter Fritz Schwarz-Waldegg, who was deported and murdered near Minsk in 1942. Other memories were of a spell in an isolation hospital recovering from scarlet fever, of seeing the great transatlantic liner, the Deutchland , in Hamburg harbour and of summer visits to Gross-Hansdorf , in those days an unspoiled North German village of thatched houses, unmade roads and grazing cows, where his aunt and uncle, an artist named Tonsfeldt, lived.
The race laws after 1933 made it impossible for Arthur Schwarz senior, who was Jewish by birth , to work in Germany and the family returned to Grinzing, a beautiful vinyarded suburb of Vienna, where Peter continued to flourish in what he described as the milieu of a typical middle classes Viennese child. It was, in his memory, a gently feral childhood – punctuated by swimming in the open air baths, scuffling with his friends and the much frequented ice cream shop, his ‘ icelokal’ ; there were also visits to museums with his father and to the well-known toyshop on the Graben, Josef Kober , to window-shop and family excursions into the Wienerwald on Sundays. In the meantime he went to the village school, acquired a local accent to the chagrin of his parents , drew and painted and foot pumped the organ in the village church , where he was expediently baptised in 1934. Raised on the German children’s classics Max und Moritz and Struwwelpeter, about the dreadful consequences of bad behaviour, he and some friends found a very old car and used surgical spirit from his mother’s medicine cabinet to drive it for a few explosive Their punishment is unrecorded . At the barber Peter read Wehrmacht magazines and longed to be a soldier. Meanwhile he took part in local festivals, and later, subversively, bent the bumpers of the tourist’s Horsch motor cars parked in the main square. There was a holiday trip to Hungary and afterwards, with his mother, to the Adriatic, where he loved the sailing boats with their latine sails, It was, he said, ‘ the last holiday.’
The idyll ended when the Germans crossed into Austria in March 1938. Arthur Schwarz was arrested and made to scrub the streets on his hands and knees. Peter remembered his father coming home dishevelled and deeply upset but otherwise the child had little first hand experience of anti-semitism, beyond an unforgiving maths master and a fight with a local boy who came out worst. He also failed his induction into the Hitler Youth ( but attended one rally which he recalled as very boring ). He did not think of himself as a Jew but very suddenly, in December 1938, his parents sent him to England on a Quaker sponsored children’s’ train. They then went quietly to France by way of Switzerland. Arthur was later interned in Vichy France but escaped with false papers as one Joseph Lenoir , cultivateur of Hardinghen. He was subsequently hidden by the Resistance while Lydia lived alone in Nice. Peter would not see his parents again until 1946.
The twelve year old boy , speaking no English, arrived off the boat train in winter, and with other refugee children was moved amongst temporary lodgings on the east coast, including an out of season holiday camp, a girls school and a hotel in Southend. He remembered a huge culture shock and no fear but extreme homesickness. ‘As if in a dream’ , he was sent by train to London with a label round his neck. Here he was met by a bowler -hatted man – German speaking, he afterwards realised – who gave him lunch in a Lyon’s corner house and having taken him to see the Flying Scotsman on Kings Cross station, put him on another train to the North West. In Blackburn Peter was collected by his generous Roman Catholic foster family, the Gaughans. The family duly moved to a large red brick house on the sea front in Lytham-St-Anne’s in Lancashire, where Peter did well at school, quickly leant English and worked and played alongside their three children, later watching the air raids on the Liverpool docks down the coast. Homesick, he also tried to run away on two occasions but was all too aware that older ‘ enemy aliens ‘ were interned. He was at least able to write to his parents early on and several letters, posted via circuitous , neutral routes , and complete with censors marks, survive. Peter joined the army at seventeen in 1944.
.
On 26 March 1945 Private Schwarz recorded in his Collins Gem Diary ‘ cross the Rhine at 8.20pm’ , on the 27 th ‘ o into attack’ and on Sunday 1 st April ‘ ‘Back in [the] Reich. ‘ Although his pay book records that he was a good shot, there was more waiting around than action but in May he was picked out off the ranks to assist in the translation of the final handover of troops and armaments after the German surrender at Flensburg- interpreting between the Generals in schoolboy German. In 1946 we pick him up in press reports, as instrumental in tracking down Joseph Grohe, the gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen, the last Nazi gauleiter at liberty. ‘… a major part was played by Peter Schwarz, a 20 year old Vienna born sergeant serving with the British Intelligence Corps in Germany . Sgt. Schwarz arrested Grohe while he was in bed…Sgt. Schwarz , [who]… speaks fluent German, fought with the 4 th Welch Regiment from the Siegfried Line to Hamburg ‘.
The war over and his parents regained in Nice, during a brief period of leave, Peter spent some months at Düsseldorf Academy . Here he was taught by a German professor who had painted, amongst other things, submarine commanders. The young artist loved the freedom of the atelier set up – welcoming the release from army life and the international atmosphere. Unknowingly, he was a contemporary there of Joseph Beuys whose work he later greatly admired. Remembering the particular look and smell of Germany after the war, to him at the time an excitingly familiar/unfamiliar Europeanness, he later found a familiar texture and atmosphere in the work of Beuys.
On returning to England and eventually to St Martin’s School of Art, Peter took British citizenship in 1947 and changed his name in October 1950, translating the maiden name of his German grandmother, Gottliebin Kienle, into the rather Irish sounding Kinley. The reasons were probably more complex but he said he did this partly to please his father who was anxious for him to fully embrace his new culture and partly to avoid difference and exoticism in the immediate post – war period. He certainly did not want to be associated with, for, example, the Vienna of the The Blue Danube .
The rest is art history but into his new life Peter Kinley took a love of the natural world, inspired by his father’s edition of Alfred Brehm’s great illustrated natural history of animals, the Tierleben, and his early country holidays on farms and in the mountains . He wrote in 1984′ I have frequently painted animals I have seen, to reassert, among other things, their right to respect in a culture which I believe accords them only marginal consideration.’ There was an enduring love of architecture , particularly the scale and uncompromising mass of the great deep- roofed farm buildings and courtyards and the Austrian Baroque architecture of his early years, later reflected in his paintings of Wiltshire houses, four square and unadorned. Kinley also loved fast machinery and continued to draw inspiration from his memories the sporting events of his childhood, the great seaplane race, the Schneider Trophy , and the Auto Union racing car , designed by an Austrian, Ferdinand Porsche. He admired the functionalism of military aircraft and ships, which had ‘a minimal quality which mirrors my attempts to say more with less.’ His fascination went further:.’… don’t forget that I grew up in a re-arming Europe and that such images were familiar to me. I played as a child with highly sophisticated model ships and planes.’ The buff aeroplane he painted several times came from his memory of a civilian khaki Savoia Machetti 573 , of Sabena airlines seen taking off in Vienna before the war. There are also paintings based on the German flagship, the Admiral Graf Spee , scuttled at Montevideo and of various submarines, . ‘ Metaphors perhaps for the artist sailing through difficult and dangerous waters. ‘
Transposed to a northern and less sensuous climate Kinley often thought of the hot summers of his childhood and took Vienna as a cultural model, its museums, its buildings, its light. In his final years he returned visited Historisches Museum in Vienna and afterwards made a number of drawings. At the time of his death he was working on a series called ‘ England ‘ which related to his arrival here as a child. When in the spring of 1988 he returned to Vienna for the last time he was able to say, in German to a radio interviewer ‘ I am Austrian in spite of everything . I love Austria. ‘
Peter Kinley rejected the idea that, as an outsider, without roots, his work was ‘ an attempt to remake the world ….’ Like many forced early on to travel light, he kept the essentials for survival with him , ready to pack and run. He had with him always a pale green cardboard box with the legend Josef Kober Spielwaren Wien 1 Graben 15 . Inside with a sheet of instructions is partially assembled model of a small wood and gauze winged aeroplane.
Catherine Kinley 2006
.
. *In the last eight years of his life Peter Kinley talked privately about his early life. These notes are based on those conversations, on a radio interview he gave in Vienna in 1988, on his notes for various talks and papers, on my own notes , on his archive and on six visits we made to Austria and Germany between 1982 and 1988 .
read less
