Reviews

Schnackenberg was a versatile artist who not only focused on genre and portrait painting, but also created lithographs, posters, and decoration and costume designs for theater and ballet. His works combined elements of Art Nouveau and Expressionism and often integrated oriental motifs.

In the last years of his work, he introduced surreal imagery in which he depicted people with animal-like faces to symbolize unfulfilled desires and the addictions of the petty bourgeoisie.

Today, his works can be found in numerous collections and galleries, where they are highly valued for their creative expressiveness and their significant contribution to German art history.

Critical Graphics in the Wilhelm Busch Museum Hannover 22.08.1965 to 31.10.1965
Catalogue of the exhibition Walter Schnackenberg, Friedrich Bohne

"What had once enchanted him now turned out, as he looked at it again and more sharply than ever, to be a rotten magic, the rotten foundation of our self-satisfied existence and nature: a world in which the connection between man and animal haunts around in harpy-like, manifold forms, a symbol of the truly evil, the questionable, a beautiful illusion, as truth is the goal and end."

Friedrich Bohne, 1965

"At times he looked as if he were a bon vivant par excellence. He allowed himself to be carried and inspired - as the hour offered. He soon recognized that the political situation after 1933 was a journey into the abyss. Internal emigration, barely disguised by occasional artistic contributions to social life and to major exhibitions, had become inevitable for him."

Münchener Merkur from 14.10.1949 on the occasion of the Schnackenberg exhibition in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Wolfgang Petzer

"In Schlattan near Partenkirchen, Walter Schnackenberg suffers the nightmares of an elegant city-dweller: beaked human bodies, bloated monsters, half birds, half reptiles, lascivious breasts and legs, the ghosts of plague, hunger, murder and fornication - a long gallery of horror, carefully dashed, dotted, touched with poisonous, morbid, pale colors; not without the charm of the experienced, already somewhat blasé virtuoso, who knows how to extract a little bit of pleasure even from the horrific."

Excerpt from "Monograph of the Poster", 1972
Prof. Dr. Herbert Schindler

"The casually elegant vamp with the languid security of movement is his favorite theme. Parties of the "happy few" in the "Odeon Casino" and in the "Deutsches Theater" have experienced a lasting artistic transfiguration through his posters."

Walter Schnackenberg on his 100th birthday
Munich 1980
Prof. Dr. Herbert Schindler

"In the years after the First World War, Schnackenberg was one of those artists who made the art city of Munich envied. With him, Munich had acquired a cosmopolitan accent that counteracted its lingering rural heaviness and its almost innate bourgeois inability to be elegant in the best sense."

"Today's Munich, which preserves a large part of his works in the city museum on Jakobsplatz, has reason to be grateful to him.
Schnackenberg captured Munich's special atmosphere in his posters and drawings and shaped it with his own elegance of the twenties - into something atmospherically new."

René Grohnert, co-editor of the poster edition, 2013

" Karl Lagerfeld has provided three posters by Walter Schnackenberg for the presentation of his collection and has also had this rare book reproduced from his library.
One can therefore assume that there is a kind of elective affinity, something that fascinates him about Schnackenberg's work.
We can only speculate here, but individual creativity may have played a role in making his work stand out from those of his time. The resulting decorative style ranged between post-Art Nouveau and pre-Art Deco."