 |
|
|
Koelz was reunited with his family in July 1941, on the condition he joined the Pioneer Corps.
Throughout his service years in the Pioneer Corps and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps he continued to paint.
In 1945 the Second World War ended. Approximately 55 million people across the world had lost their lives. The survivors began the long process of rebuilding theirs, in many cases attempting to revive
shattered hopes and dreams. After a spell of service in Germany in 1946 as a translator, Koelz returned to civilian life in Britain.
 In the aftermath of war he had time to reflect; for more than thirty years the clash of his personal life with world events had resulted in endless injustices, turmoil and pain.
A life divided and a family uprooted for one man's deeply held beliefs.
The loss of his masterpiece, "the centre of his beliefs, his life's work", the painting into which he had poured all his passionate convictions, must have seemed bad enough, but its means of destruction must have symbolised the dismemberment of his life.
He continued to work. In 1949 he was, briefly, an art teacher but for the next few years Koelz had to look for work wherever it could
be found. In 1952 he held a solo exhibition at Stafford Art Gallery under the name "John Matthew Koelz". It included the triptych
fragment brought out of Germany, and work created in Australia and England. Many of his later works contain echoes of earlier paintings, almost as by repeating them as he was preserving the images against loss.
In 1957 Claire died and Koelz grieved deeply, but a move to Stoke-On-Trent brought him the companionship of Albine Newland, the widow of an old friend from the Pioneer Corps. With Albine he spent his summers in peace and happiness at a secluded cottage at County Cork, Ireland. He sculpted and painted. In his last years he seemed to have found, as Ava Farrington recalled in 1996, "another Hohenbrunn. He won't have forgotten that, or Claire".
In 1971 Koelz lost a long battlewith cancer and died on July 3rd.
"Always a painter, whatever else happened to him"
© Koelz Estate ©
DACS 2001
|
