Lisel Oppel

Anna Amalie Elisabeth "Lisel" Oppel (14 October 1897 – 11 July 1960) was a German painter. Sixty years after her death, she remains one of the better remembered representatives of the Worpswede Artists' Colony.

Biography Provenance and early years Anna Amalie Elisabeth "Lisel" Oppel was born at Bremen, the youngest of her parents' seven,

Campania Between 1927 and 1937 Oppel took several trips to Italy, sometimes apparently on a whim, and including at least one visit lasting several years. In Italy she produced watercolors and oil paintings. She also undertook work for ceramics businesses locally. The longest of her Italian trips took her to the Bay of Naples and lasted five years, between 1930 and 1935. Sources conflict over the time line of her five years stay, but according to at least one version she lived initially, following her arrival, in Vietri. Then, in 1932/33, she moved to Positano, also living at one stage on the Island of Ischia. The factory had been set up a few years earlier by an expatriate businessman from Hamburg called Max Melamerson. During the years directly preceding the Second World War it provided employment to a succession of footloose painters from northern Germany. Oppel was also by now receiving - and continued to receive throughout her life - a small monthly payment from an unidentified source in Bremen which she herself identifies in her papers simply as her "väterliche Rente" ("paternal pension"). As far as is known, she brought the boy up without support from his father, on whose identity sources are conspicuously silent. Claudio would grow up to become a secondary school teacher in Germany like his grandfather.

Régime change When she returned to Worpswede in 1935 Germany's political context had changed violently. Two years earlier right-wing populists had interpreted the country's parliamentary deadlock as a political opportunity, successfully taking power in January 1933. The Hitler government had lost no time in transforming what had been seen as a robust democracy into a one-party dictatorship. The Artists' Colony had also been transformed. In order to pursue any sort of career as an artist it was now necessary to become a member of the government's National Chamber of Visual Artists. Many had already done just that. Lisel Oppel rejected that approach, however, which meant that from now on she was unable to obtain the tools of her craft except through "unofficial channels". Her rejection of Nazism while living in Nazi Germany displayed self-belief and courage, as she presumably knew, but there will have been many at that time who would have seen it as an unwise choice. Oppel's career as a conscripted technical draftswoman lasted barely a year. In 1940 she collected her son and together they made their way south again, this time heading for the Chiemsee, a reedy lake in the marshy land between Munich and Salzburg. the move appears to have been the result of a characteristically impulsive decision, although a desire to get the child away from the British bombing would have provided an obvious rationale for it. Their destination was the so-called "Fraueninsel", an island in the lake on which she was able to work again as a ceramicist at the island's potters' studio. Neither her move to Bavaria nor – at least till after 1942 - the war appear to have inhibited this.

The other recurring theme of her later work, during a decade when foreign leisure travel was unaffordable for most Germans, was "distant lands". She would return from her travels with stacks of water colours. She liked to paint fisherfolk and farmers in southern Italy. There were street scenes of Madrid and Seville, along with paintings of the harbour at Tangier and life among the bazaars in Marrakesh. Her 1954 solo exhibition "Bremen Artists on the road" at the Kunsthalle was a particular success with the public.

Loppel's sheer productivity, especially during her final decade, enabled her to make a good living from her painting. Her pictures were accessible and reassuring in ways that suited the mood of the times. The life of a freelance artist who had eluded her as a young woman became a reality, and she was no longer driven to offer her services to industrial pottery factories. After her death interest in her work declined, but her reputation has undergone something of a revival following an exhibition of her work presented at the "Queen Christina House" ("Christinenhaus") in Zeven to mark the centenary of her birth. Prices at auctions when one of her works has gone on sale have also risen significantly over the past couple of decades. In 2008 her son Claudio, by this point described in sources as a "retired teacher", gifted a number of her paintings and other elements from her inheritance to the "Worpswede Archive" in the Barkenhoff, a large reassigned farm house in the heart of the artists' town. That means that more of her work turns up in public displays. Most of her output remains in private collections, however.