Ernest Verner
Werner Scheitlin (he called himself Ernest Verner) was born in 1918 in Znojmo, Moravia, to a Swiss father and a Czechoslovakian mother. After moving to Austria to Salzburg to escape the pressing National Socialist impositions of the time, his parents, to guarantee him a good education, in 1927, at just 9 years old, sent him to St. Gallen under the protection of an uncle in a Jesuit college, a place hostile to him in which he lives as a shy and awkward boy, educated to the strict rules of Puritanism. In these years he attempted a feat on skis which cost him a lifelong limp.
In an adolescence lived in solitude (he saw himself as ugly and different) he decides to pursue his only strong, but thwarted, desire: to become an artist.
At 15, unbeknownst to anyone, he runs away to Brussels, the city where he hopes to start his artistic career. Here he won his first prize in a drawing competition recommended by a newspaper. He then returned to Switzerland where he worked for a short time in a print shop and then attended a decoration school in Vevey, near Lausanne. From there, in 1938, he moved to Florence, where he was directly admitted to the second year at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, directed by the maestro Felice Carena. He returns to Salzburg for the holidays and in this period he is condemned by the Gestapo to be shot for having painted concentration camps, but with the intercession of the daughter of the Italian consul, Berard of Salzburg, he manages to return to Florence
Having graduated cum laude on 22 June 1942, he founded the “Il Ponte” gallery at Lungarno Guicciardini 5 with other artists, which was destroyed immediately afterwards by some bombings. Supported by Rosai, the Minister of Education Bottai awarded him the 3rd Italian Prize for a competition between private galleries (here there will be exhibitions of Emy, Roeder, Scipione, Mafai, Morandi and Marini). Meanwhile, Verner begins to collaborate with his younger brother, Walter, a gallery owner and antiques dealer in Wil, near St. Gallen. From 43 to 46 he lives in Zurich, Les Hauderes, Vevey and Carabieta. In this period he will paint a portrait of Winston Churchill; Alberto Giacometti will buy one of his paintings, another (the Orchestra in red) will be stolen and then returned by a young American amateur Hemphill, together with Daumier’s little Don Quichotte in the Bern museum. Verner introduces his brother in Florence to a Piedmontese artist of noble origins, Perone di Sanmartino, who will soon become his brother’s companion and this relationship will cost Verner for the rest of his life his disinterest in selling and promoting his works together with the thirty-year discord for the destination of an inherited paternal house. (Brother Walter lives in Wil in Switzerland, 93 years old, and on 14 November 2016 he donated 30 of his brother’s paintings to the Municipality of Fasano so that it could dedicate a museum room to him). After three years spent in Switzerland, in which he began to deal with modern art, also with the help of Moilliet (friend of Paul Klee), Verner returned to Tuscany in 1946, to Florence, San Gimignano, Elba and the beautiful villa “The rest of the Bishops” in San Domenico a Fiesole. Here he met and married Alzbeta Schiller, a young Czechoslovakian Jew, scion of a wealthy family, from whom he divorced after a few months and decided to move to Paris, then the capital of art until 1948, where he began making paintings on silk scarves (One of these will be purchased by the famous Swiss art critic Walter Feilchenfeldt). In the summer of ’49 he left for Orgeval, where he lived with Chagall and, after the roof of the house in which they lived collapsed, he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise (place of the last months of Van Gogh’s life) and rented the castle hunting of Maria de’ Medici by the son-in-law of Luigi XIV. Returning shortly afterwards to Paris, he founded the Association “Les amis d’Auvers” in 1954, with the Russian sculptor Osip Zadkin, the writer André Louis Caruel and other Parisian notables, promoting the creation of a statue dedicated to Van Gogh, built then in bronze in Auvers by Zadkin in 1961. In this initiative he was also supported by Paul Gachet, son of the famous dr. Gachet, a friend of Van Gogh, to whom he also sold one of his painting. He also sells one of his painting to Vincente Minnelli in 1952 while he is shooting his film on Van Gogh in Auvers and Verner buys Cezanne’s easel with that money. In 1952 he won first prize at the Grand Prix de la Galerie d’Orsel in Paris as an excellent landscape painter; Chateau de Sceaux, Exhibitions at Lefranc, Galerie Mazarine. He is mentioned 8 times in “Le Figaro” in articles written by Collot, Vrinat and de Cazeneve. On these Parisian years, see the book Ernest Verner. Parisian chronicles of an inconvenient artist (Edizioni Dal Sud, 2018). After a solo exhibition in Munich in 1959, organized by Irmingarda, Princess of Bavaria, in exchange for some unsold paintings and as a sign of her deep friendship with her brother Henry of Bavaria (who died at the age of twenty in a car accident in Argentina), she gives him the “Kerylos” as a gift, an eighteen meter military corvette, anchored in Anzio (Irmingarda and Henry were the children of Rupprecht, one of the twelve sons of the last king of Bavaria, known by Verner in their exile in Florence during the war). Irmingarda maintained continuous correspondence with Verner until his last years of life in Fasano, often urging him to return to his castle in Leutstetten in Bavaria.
From 1959 to 1969 Verner lived on a yacht, moving between the most important tourist ports in Italy, but his privileged home was the Viareggio dock. Here, he met many personalities of culture and art (Gerard Blain, Jean Claude Brialy, Pietro di Grecia, Renato Guerrini, Harry Jackson, Alexander Girard, Mario Luzi etc.) and big names in finance (Krupp and Nestlé) and show business (Kirk Douglas, Romy Schneider and the Minnelli family etc.) who visited him on the boat. In 1967, he found an abandoned lioness cub on the boat of King Constantine II of Greece, moored near his, and decided to take care of it. The feline begins to grow to the point of forcing the artist to change residence. Meanwhile, in 1970, the yacht, sold to a person, unknowingly implicated in the subversive affair “The Rose of the Winds”, catches fire and is completely destroyed, but Verner, as owner, will often be brought before the judges to clear himself of any of his involvement in the affair.
In Versilia he first finds accommodation in Camaiore, then in Calci (Pisa), precisely in the uninhabited 12th century convent of Nicosia. Here, due to the lion’s roars which annoyed the neighbourhood, he was ordered to leave the town. In 1972, Angelo Lombardi, the journalist “friend of animals” proposed to him to put her in the newly opened Fasano Zoosafari, where he also moved the following year, living, with permission from the owner, in a space in the zoo. After eight years, while he was doing an exhibition in Pisa for a few days, he received the phone call that his lioness had died. Furious, the painter accuses the zoo of having poisoned his lioness; he leaves the Zoosafari and begins to wander from one farm to another, in complete solitude and increasingly dedicating himself to painting. He begins to demonstrate a strong environmental and animal rights sensitivity through his paintings; he becomes an honorary member of Enpa, WWF, Greenpeace.
After wandering from one farm to another, in precarious conditions, he was hosted in the “Sacro Cuore” Institute (where he left an enormous painting dedicated to Don Guanella) until 1992. When his health conditions after the age of seventy years begin to falter, some friends from Fasano convince him to rent an apartment in the center of Fasano where he dies on 17 June 1997 following a stroke. He leaves 80 paintings to a trusted friend of his, begging him upon his death to sell them at auction and donate the proceeds to charity. His ashes, again at his own request, will be taken to San Gallo, next to the tomb of his parents.
Verner spoke little but read a lot: the 500 volumes of his personal library were left at the Fasano Civic Library, which range from the best literature, philosophy and science, especially European ones. Verner was generous and jovial, he spoke very little about his past and about himself in general, he was very jealous of his paintings which he reluctantly bartered or sold off (he had insured them with a right of first refusal in the event of a sale by the buyer). Verner was a mild-mannered man, he trusted people a lot but did not like compromises and ignorance which immediately led him to conflict with people and distance himself from them.
Verner was an environmentalist ante litteram: already in the Seventies he foresaw the threat of drilling in the Adriatic and the drift of the world due to man-made pollution; in the last years of his life he often spoke about the dangers of the synchrotron. His desire was to create a municipal kennel in Fasano.