German Impressionist painter and winner of the German Academy of Rome Villa Massimo (Rome Prize Winner) in 1935.
After World War I he studied architecture and painting at the State (Royal) Art School in Berlin with Professor Philipp Franck, and art history at the University of Berlin. Here he met his future wife, the painter Gerda von Freymann, whom he married in 1934. Their son Alexander was born in 1937.
After completing his studies, Alfred Knispel was a teacher of the arts in Berlin, headed the seminar for trainee lawyers and was a specialist advisor for art classes in the province of Saxony. Numerous study trips took him to Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, France and North Africa. He studied the old masters, found his role models in Monet, Manet, Courbet and Pissarro and finally immersed himself in the work of Cézanne. He lived for a long time in Paris, Algiers and Tunis. At the end of the 1920s he took part in a large collective exhibition in Tunis, and in 1930 he probably had his first solo exhibition at the Martin Wasservogel Gallery, Berlin. From 1929 to 1932 he exhibited regularly at the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin and was a member of the Berlin Artists’ Association.
In 1935 he received the prize of the Deutsche Akademie Rome Villa Massimo, a one-year scholarship to study there. His works received general attention in numerous exhibitions during his lifetime, for example in 1940 in the Graphisches Kabinett at the Association of Berlin Artists, in 1941 in the National Museum Stockholm Modern Tysk Graphics and in the Künstlerhaus Berlin Italienbilder Deutscher Künstler, 1943 solo exhibition in the Kunst-Dienst-Stuben, Berlin. His pictures were in the possession of the Prussian state, in the museums in Breslau, Nuremberg and the district home museum of Schwiebus/ Swiebodzin. On 18 January 1945 he was drafted into the Volkssturm, three days later he was killed near Deutscheneck in the district of Warthbrücken.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)