Filled With Art by Her Father Who Fled Nazi Germany, Eileen Koenigsberg’s Towson Home is Part Museum

Eileen Koenigsberg sits on a recliner in her living room in what would otherwise be a typical suburban home in Towson were it not for the gigantic abstract paintings surrounding her, taking up entire walls.

Over the past five decades and through several moves and life changes, Koenigsberg, 75, has lived with these large-scale paintings by her father, the late Peter Scholleck. In every room, his oil paintings, some of which are nearly sculptural in their thickness, hang on walls, making this house part home, part museum. Her Towson house is a showcase that ranges across spectrum of styles—abstract, figurative, still lifes, landscapes, even religious.

The paintings have a particular poignancy because Scholleck survived Nazi Germany in 1939, when he was just a teenager. Before he left, he witnessed untold horrors. And for Koenigsberg, it was more about the connection to her father who died at only 45.

“When I went through the home, it was like an installation of this artist’s life and work—a site-specific installation,” says George Ciscle, whom Koenigsberg had hired to help organize the body of work. “Of the 157 pieces, all except 20 or 30 of them were in storage. I was just completely overwhelmed by the environment. Back then, her children were still living at home, so even the two girls had [his work] in their bedrooms. And she didn’t [formally] curate herself; these were just works she chose to live with. That was interesting to me, to see that personal relationship to the work she and her children had.”

Ciscle, a well-respected arts educator and curator based in Baltimore, says he gets asked “all the time” to look at family collections of artworks. He never agrees to work with clients until he’s seen the work, and usually, he passes. He says he’s never seen anything quite like Koenigsberg’s collection.

“I was like, wait a minute. This work has never been seen outside the home?” Ciscle recalls. “Here I was invited into this world—and it was a very private experience and very special—and my first impression was this work needs to be seen. It needs to be shared and shown.”

Koenigsberg remembers a recurring scene of her early childhood vividly. She would jump into the front seat of her dad’s convertible, along with their dog, Tango, and head to the Mar-Sue Gallery art supply store in Pikesville. On the way home they would ride down the streets with huge canvases poking out of the back of the car.

At their home in Mount Washington, Koenigsberg would help her father stretch smaller canvases in his basement studio—a space large enough to create his sculptural paintings, which grew in size in the 1960s. 

If he needed more space, her father would move his work to the carport and paint out there. He’d stay up late into the night making art. From 1946 to 1967, he was painting.

“He had this creative restlessness,” Koenigsberg recalls. “He was compelled to paint. Our childhood home was decorated with his work from wall to wall.” Regardless of his various day jobs (including factory manager, tavern owner, and land title examiner), it was his artwork that brought him the most joy. “I think work was secondary. The art was his passion.” But despite that, he rarely showed his art publicly.  

Scholleck was born in Germany in 1923, just three months after his father died. His mother remarried three years later, and his stepfather, Wilhelm Nussbaum, raised Scholleck as his own son in Munich.

By 1938, Scholleck was attending an Episcopal boarding school when he was suddenly told he could no longer continue his education there because he was Jewish. That same year, he witnessed the violent destruction of Kristallnacht by the Nazi regime, and his stepfather was taken to a concentration camp.

In 1939, shortly after his badly beaten stepfather was released from the camp, his family fled to the U.S. His stepfather died just 20 months after they arrived in America, likely due to injuries sustained in the camp, Koenigsberg says.

It’s hard to imagine his childhood did not influence his work, but Scholleck rarely talked about it.

“I’ve wondered how that childhood informed all this [artwork],” Koenigsberg says. “He was so grateful to be in this country. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army. He was not confused about where he’d been and where he was. I can’t separate that from the tension in the work.”

Koenigsberg also notes her father was not particularly religious, but he was an intellectual with “an enormous laugh” who would invite friends over on Sunday mornings for “these very cerebral conversations,” she says. Christ’s crucifixion, a simulacrum of “The Last Supper,” rabbis, and priests show up in his paintings, though nothing directly relating to Germany, she added.

Scholleck died at 45 with little to no recognition for his work, other than showing a few pieces in regional shows, and his wife followed six years later. So, Koenigsberg, an only child, was just 25 when she inherited the collection, which comprises of both large-scale and small works. In the 50 years that followed, she has cared for the work through six homes, displaying different pieces on the walls with each move.

She has managed to find homes that could accommodate storing the work (mostly ones with large, finished basements) and only needed to rent a climate-controlled commercial storage unit once in the past five decades. When she went that route, she visited the unit every two weeks to replace moisture-absorbing material left in buckets to control the humidity.

“I became a bit of a student on how to maintain the art,” she says. “It drives where you live—and how you live.”

Keeping the pieces in her home has meant keeping windows closed year-round to avoid any dust or pollen from entering the house and adding UV-blocking film to each pane. It has meant keeping the temperature and humidity at steady, specific levels. Caretaking the collection has meant hiring professionals to clean or restore pieces as needed. Koenigsberg has also gone so far as to install museum-quality lighting in her home.

While she has enjoyed living with the artwork over the years and has always wanted to honor her father by caring for his work, she also admits the collection has become a true labor of love.

“I’ve had this responsibility for this legacy,” Koenigsberg says. But she was reluctant to sell his work that was so personal and meaningful to her. It took her a while to “embrace the idea that I [need to] distribute the work.” Not just because it deserved to be seen by the public but because, “I know what it’s taken to care for it, and I am not going to pass that down to my children.”

Around 2001, Koenigsberg began the slow process of letting go.

At that time, she hired Ciscle, who recommended a professional photographer to shoot each piece and then taught Koenigsberg how to document them by creating a digital archive. Koenigsberg made a spreadsheet that details any and all information she has on each piece—title, history, whether or not it was exhibited, if it had won any awards—and numbered each of them, including some smaller works like a sketch he drew on the back of an envelope.

Together they eventually created a website, designed by a graphic designer, to highlight the work and ultimately found a gallery in Baltimore where it could be shown publicly. Over those twenty-some years, she and Ciscle also became friends.

“I think of him as my champion,” Koenigsberg says. “There have been a lot of stops and starts with the work—because of life—but it was the friendship that stuck.”

For the first time in September 2024, Koenigsberg showed 12 pieces publicly at Arting Gallery in Baltimore—a vignette of his work, chosen by Ciscle, to give the public a first taste. “The Unknown Paintings of Peter Scholleck” was on view for a month in the space, complete with weekly art talks and salons hosted by Koenigsberg and Ciscle.

“We could have rented a space,” Ciscle says, “but I wanted it to be seen as a professional exhibition.” In an unusual move for a commercial gallery, none of the works were for sale.

“My first impression of Peter’s work was..they were hidden treasure,” says Arting Gallery director Xiaoming Liu. He adds that Arting, which has been open for two years, “is truly experimental. We don’t select the artworks by money and fame…we judge by the artist and his or her works—to some extent, by the sixth sense.”

“The process of letting go of these paintings is almost like grief. It’s not linear. It’s slow, and it’s only sometimes by choice,” Koenigsberg says. “But I want them to have a life beyond this.”