Lettl Collection Augsburg, Germany

Approx. 400 surreal paintings by the Augsburg artist Wolfgang Lettl (1919-2008) are the focus of this collection. The collection has been supported since 1992 by the Wolfgang Lettl Association for the Advancement of Surreal Art. It was the wish of Wolfgang Lettl for his paintings not to enter the art market but to stay together and be made accessible to the public free of charge. The Lettl Atrium Museum of Surreal Art thus came into being in Augsburg in 1993. It displayed 168 surreal paintings and attracted about 70 000 visitors annually. In 2013 the contract with the operators of the building ended, and the Lettl Association has since then been searching for a new suitable exhibition space. Currently 57 surreal images are freely accessible to the public in the branch museum in Lindau which opened in 2002.

Wolfgang Lettl (18 December 1919 – 10 February 2008) was a surrealist painter who was born and who died in Augsburg, Germany.

In 1939, at the age of 20, Wolfgang joined the German Army and served as a communications officer in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1943, during which time he worked on his watercolours and first became exposed to surrealism. Later in the war, he became a reconnaissance airman in Norway, where he was captured at the end of the war and held for four months.

He returned to Augsburg in 1945, and worked there as a freelance painter from 1945 to 1948. In 1949, however, the currency reform forced him to turn to construction work to make ends meet. He continued working on his landscapes, portraits and surrealist art while working construction jobs and odd jobs. From 1954 onwards, he was able to concentrate on his art.

Success with his freelance art led him to develop his surrealism, and in 1963 he participated in the Grosse Kunstausstellung München (the "Grand Art Exhibition Munich"), becoming a member of the Neue Münchener Künstlergenossenschaft ("New Munich Artists' Cooperative Society"). One-man shows in Germany and abroad followed. In addition to his surrealist work, the landscapes around his second home in Apulia, Italy, inspired him to sometimes paint in an impressionistic style.
In 1992, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at the Toskan Hall of Columns, he offered his paintings to the city of Augsburg on permanent loan. After the opening of the "Lettl Atrium - Museum for Surreal Art" in Augsburg in 1993, Lettl has concentrated on experiments in other media (including film), as well as continuing with his painting. A major retrospective exhibition was held in Augsburg in 2000.


WOLFGANG LETTL himself writes:
Surrealism attempts to retrieve images from the unconscious; thanks to depth psychology we know that unconscious thought determines who we are to a much greater extent than conscious thought, and that it is not advisable to ignore this. But what does it mean, to retrieve images from the unconscious? How is this supposed to happen? We are all familiar with images from the unconscious, from myths and fairy tales, and from dreams. They are not realistic images but fantasies, strange, unreal, confusing, beyond our grasp. And they rely on symbols: memorable and compelling shapes and objects. Myths and fairy tales tell us about gods, giants, kings, paradise and the underworld. In a dream I once walked with Stalin from Moscow to Paris. The Surrealist uses all of these things as stylistic devices: strong symbols, combinations of objects that don't belong together, strangeness, novel shapes, questioning the familiar by undermining and fracturing it, ignoring spatial reality. Here is the recipe: paint existing and non-existent objects as exactly and with as much plasticity as possible. Combine them as incongruously as possible and put them into a space where they don't belong. It's that simple? In principle, yes. But something is missing there: Don't make it too easy for yourself.
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