Visual Propaganda #15: Albert Leo Peil
Adam Lehrer on a mid-20th Century German outsider artist who worked menial labor while stockpiling hundreds of weird as hell drawings
Albert Leo Peil, born in Germany in 1947, was a genuinely strange fag. Strange in the sense that the life that he lived was peculiar and unique; not in the sense of a pre-packaged art world constructed homo eccentricity. Though he briefly studied under the tutelage of abstract painter Ernest Weil, he dropped out after two semesters and instead studied to become a decorator. It seems that stable work in the decorative arts too eluded him, however, and he made a living working an assortment of menial shit labor jobs. One of those jobs was as a foreman at a sewage plant.
This is important to point out because it emphasizes the extreme psychological disposition of this artist. This was not a debonair gay man living the bohemian life surrounded by his like-mindeds. This was a strange, isolated man living as a true social outcast amongst people that didn’t understand him at all. While not working his back breaking blue collar jobs, Peil enjoyed constructing bizarre garments, such as a suit tailored from faux wolf’s fur. Many of the outfits were fetishistic and obviously alluding to sexual perversions. Peil waltzed around his small town in Bavaria, sporting the outfits to the pleasure of no one and the horror and disgust of many. He experimented with his own perfume scents and wore them to work. He did this without fanfare or any art world audience or art critics writing about him in magazines and celebrating his bold vision. He did this merely for kicks, getting a rise out of the normies. There’s something very cool about that.