Munich Secession's First President: Bruno Piglhein

The 1890s were a time of secession movements in German-speaking countries, wherein groups of artists broke away from current exhibition organizations in order to set up their own. The most famous of these from our current perspective was the Vienna Secession.

But the first was the Munich Secession. Like the others, one of the founding issues had to do with artistic style and subject matter. This tended to take the form of increased openness to non-Academic works, though the impact was not nearly so strong as the early-1900s Modernist "isms" that shook the art world and led to today's chaotic scene. (By the way, in my opinion the link above tends to overstate the Munich Secession: its golden years were only from 1892 to around 1912.)

The first president of the Munich Secession organization was Bruno Piglhein (1845-1894), a professor at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts. His Wikipedia entry is brief. But then, Piglhein's life was fairly brief -- he died aged 46. The entry mentions that it took a while for his career to develop. He had to resort to making pastels of attractive women to earn a living before he was given the project of creating a panorama of Christ's crucifixion that was later destroyed in a fire.

That project solidified his career for the next and final seven or eight years of his life, including his appointment to the Academy's faculty. Perhaps due to his short career and his teaching duties, it's likely that Piglhein's production of paintings was fairly small. At any rate, not many can be found via a Google search. Below are some of the images I did find.

Gallery

Girl with Hat and Fan - pastel

Woman from the Alban Hills - pastel
Examples of the pastel depiction of women.

Im Wartezimmer - Frau Piglhein - Mrs. Piglhein in the Waiting Room

Schwerttänzerin - Sword Dancer

Orientalischer Frauenakt - Oriental Female Nude
The same model was used for both images.

Madonna with Child
The title is what I found on the Web.  But the female figure's costume is suggestive of that of a Catholic Sister.  The circular wording appears to be in Cyrillic (also possibly with other alphabets, including Greek) and beyond my ability to translate.

Blinde in Mohnfeld - Blind Woman in Poppy Field - 1889
Perhaps Piglhein's best-known painting.