The exhibition From Monet to Picasso. Jewish Art Collectors in Germany brings their biographies and collections back into focus. In this interview, curators Dr. Kathrin Baumstark and Stefan Koldehoff explain how dispersed collections can be reconstructed today and which questions provenance research still needs to address.
How did the idea for the exhibition come about?
Since the Washington Principles of 1998 at the latest, the issue of Nazi-looted art has been widely discussed. For many years now, institutions and private individuals have – finally – been addressing those works of art that were stolen or extorted from people in Germany, primarily Jews, after 1933. This is a good thing, even though it came far too late: many of those affected had already died and did not live to see public recognition of what they and their families had suffered.
But the people behind these collections have often been forgotten. Along with their lives, the memory of them and of their social and cultural engagement in the society in which they lived as Germans was also profoundly destroyed. We want to bring at least some of these people and their remarkable cultural contributions back into public memory.
What role did Jewish collectors play in modern art, and what would be missing from art history without their contribution?
Here, I would like to quote from a text by the expert Inka Bertz in our catalogue:
“At the beginning of the ‘Jewish project of modernity’ (Shulamit Volkov) stands a journal published in 1783 entitled Der Sammler (The Collector). Even though the term was used there in a different sense from the one in which we understand it today, this coincidence is more than merely anecdotal. In any case, it raises the question of a Jewish perspective on the cultural phenomenon of collecting and its significance within German-Jewish cultural memory before the catastrophe, at the time when the collections presented in this exhibition were assembled.
Creating and collecting art outside a religious context formed part of Jewish participation in the emergence of a universal concept of culture and education within the broader process of secularisation. The opposition to these developments by antisemitic ideologues of the nineteenth century was directed against Jewish demands for legal equality and religious self-determination. From the outset, however, it also went hand in hand with the identification of ‘Judaism’ with ‘modernity’, as well as with the disparagement and delegitimisation of Jews within the sphere of culture and education.
Within the antisemitic worldview, Jewish art collectors became associated with fantasies of wealth and resentment towards educated Jews. The looting organised and legitimised by the Nazi regime was therefore directed not only at the material value of the collections, but also at their symbolic significance as expressions of cultural participation; not only at possessions themselves, but at the very right to own them.”
Many collections were broken up as a result of Nazi persecution, and the works were dispersed among museums and private collections around the world. How do you reconstruct a collection today that has not existed for around 90 years, and which traces were particularly important for your research?
Many collectors before 1933 were proud of their art collections. Some of them, such as the Nathan couple in Frankfurt, were therefore featured extensively in major art journals during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Exhibition and auction catalogues also played an important role.
Through his decades of work on the subject, Stefan Koldehoff has also established contacts with many descendants and heirs of affected families, as well as with their provenance researchers and legal representatives. In recent years, scholars have also researched and published work on some of these families. That was extremely helpful to us.
And sometimes chance played a role as well. Stefan Koldehoff came across the virtually unknown collection of Clothilde and Paul Schüler in Bochum – which included two outstanding paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period – while researching a book on Van Gogh and the Thannhauser Gallery. He discovered it through an entry on a card in the gallery’s surviving customer records.
You are bringing together works that were once part of the same private collection for the first time in many years. How does our view of an individual artwork change when we know who collected it, why it was chosen and under what circumstances it left the collection?
An artwork’s provenance does not change the artwork itself at all. Van Gogh’s 1888 Portrait of a Girl remains a portrait of a girl, regardless of what happened to it in the decades that followed.
But artworks, as well as the timing and circumstances of their acquisition, can sharpen our understanding of their owners. Who were these people who championed French Impressionism during the German Empire, at a time when the official art establishment dismissed it as “gutter art” from the supposed “hereditary enemy”? Of course, it can be fascinating to examine the different strategies persecuted people used after 1933 in an attempt to safeguard their possessions. But we must never forget that the background to these stories was disenfranchisement, expropriation and murder.
Nazi-looted art is not an aesthetic category, but a political one. Labelling an artwork in this way can therefore never fully do justice to the work itself. When Monet painted the sea at Honfleur in 1864, he could not know what would happen in Germany in 1933.
During your research, you also encountered museums that were unwilling to lend requested works. What does this experience tell us about where museums stand today in addressing cultural property lost as a result of Nazi persecution, and which questions remain unresolved?
In the almost 30 years since public museums in Germany committed themselves, out of a sense of moral responsibility, to revisiting the issue of Nazi-looted art despite legal deadlines having expired as early as the 1960s, a great deal has changed – at least in many institutions, and to some extent in the art trade as well.
In fact, however, we were unable to obtain a number of works we had requested. Some museums merely muttered that the matter was “politically sensitive”; others told us, with alarming candour, that they did not want to “wake sleeping dogs”.
This reflects entrenched efforts to preserve existing ownership. It also reflects fears that lost artistic quality may never be replaced. These fears are heightened by the financial situation of museums, which in many places are increasingly regarded by federal, state and local authorities not as educational institutions but as commercial profit centres.
All of this shows that there is an urgent need to depoliticise museums structurally. Austria provides a good example when it comes to provenance research. And even 30 years after Washington, we still have no solution for Nazi-looted art in private ownership. According to experts, a law on looted art that has been announced for years is unlikely to provide one either.
Is there one work that, in your view, tells the story of persecution, loss and restitution – or failed restitution – particularly powerfully? Which story impressed or moved you most personally?
Every fate we recall in this exhibition stands for thousands of others. Establishing a hierarchy among them would be just as inappropriate as the recurring attempt to cite survival of the Holocaust or the receipt of a paltry compensation payment in the 1950s or 1960s as an argument against restitution.
What is intolerable, however, is that Jewish families – as in the case of a prominent Picasso painting that was deliberately not loaned for this exhibition – have once again had to appear as petitioners before German authorities for decades, while consent to refer the case to a mediation body has still not been granted.
The exhibition combines art history with biographies, provenance research and the history of Nazi persecution. How did you bring these different levels together in the curatorial concept?
Each collection is given its own room. The works are presented there alongside the story of the collectors. Historical photographs and documents help bring their lives and cultural contributions back into public memory.
The exhibition is being presented at a time when antisemitism has once again become increasingly visible. What can an exhibition about Jewish collectors of modern art contribute to contemporary debates? What do you hope visitors will take away from it?
Alongside remembering cultural achievements and courageous engagement, one aim of our project was to seek an answer to the question of whether Jewish Germans collected differently from non-Jewish Germans. This is repeatedly assumed and asserted in scholarly essays.
It is true that many of the early supporters of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, for example, were Jewish – although some of them had previously collected rather conservative, representative works of nineteenth-century German art. For many of them, however, being Jewish was not a defining feature of their identity as collectors. What they wanted to live with in their own homes, what they made accessible to the public through exhibition loans or gifts to museums, had nothing to do with their faith, but rather with their individual preferences and tastes. Sometimes, certainly, social expectations also played a role.
For us, therefore, a statement by the Vienna-born art historian Ernst Gombrich, which we quote in the foreword to the catalogue, is central. Speaking about his own identity in 1999, he said that he had never regarded himself primarily as Jewish: “I am what Hitler called a Jew.”