Exhibition about Jewish art collectors: reconstruction of a mosaic

They were destroyed so quickly and so coldly - and so difficult to put back together again: it took the curators of the Hamburg Bucerius Art Forum several years to reconstruct the collections of those families before 1945 who were excluded, expropriated and robbed by the Nazi regime.

For the show "From Monet to Picasso. Jewish art collectors in Germany", Bucerius director Katrin Baumstark and journalist Stefan Koldehoff located and brought in paintings, graphics and sculptures from 15 relatively unknown collecting families.

Since there were hundreds of collections, a neutral geographical criterion was chosen and a biographical route was created from Hamburg via Berlin, Cologne, Stuttgart to Breslau, Germany at the time. Not all, but many members of these banking and business families were able to finance their escape by selling pictures and survived the Shoah in exile.

"From Monet to Picasso. Jewish art collectors in Germany." Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, until March 29, 2027. Catalog (Hirmer Verlag): 45 euros

However, due to financial and political pressure, they had to sell significantly short of their value. Other works were confiscated by the Nazi regime, for example for the private collections of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi grandees. This partly happened at the last minute from sea crates known as lift vans, which were supposed to follow the refugees into exile.

Anyone who sold and bought back then knew: “Non-Aryan property” had to be in the auction catalogs since 1934; So everyone involved knew the origin of the works. They scattered around the world. When survivors and descendants returned or inquired from exile, they often found nothing or were fobbed off with excuses.

From this dispersal, the Bucerius Kunst Forum brought around 100 artifacts to Hamburg. Works have come from German collections, but also from Japan, the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Sweden and Switzerland, as if they reflected the escape and temporary return of their owners.

Since these families mostly collected progressively in the 1920s, a show of exquisite, rarely shown works was created in Hamburg. They range from Vincent van Gogh's “Girl with Tousled Hair” to Ferdinand Hodler's sensual blue landscapes to Paula Modersohn-Becker's only self-portrait with a brush. Edvard Munch's “Old Fisherman with Daughter” seems painfully close; George Braque's “Dieppe Beach” literally gets to the bottom of the screen.

A separate room is dedicated to each collecting family, supplemented by detailed biographies. This is important because this show also serves to reconnect the images with their owners. She attempts to reconstruct a mosaic that was destroyed by the Nazi regime. Because collecting art means living with images and finding home in them. Making them part of your own biography, making them companions from whom you are reluctant to part.

The families were grateful when their consent was asked, says Koldehoff. “They were happy that someone remembered their ancestors.” In fact, Maeva Emden, great-granddaughter of the Hamburg department store chain owner, art collector and patron Max Emden, is very moved to see her great-grandfather's pictures now reunited in his hometown of Hamburg.

Max Emden emigrated to Switzerland in 1933. In the years that followed, the Nazi regime confiscated properties and assets and forced them to sell them. Under financial pressure, Emden then sold some of the works of art that had been saved in exile. After his death in 1940, his son was stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazi regime. In order to finance his escape to South America, he was forced to sell other properties.

Max Emden's great-granddaughter Maeva Emden, who grew up in Chile, came to Germany to study in the 1990s. She has lived in Hamburg for 15 years. Like other collecting families, the Emdens have been fighting for restitution for decades, with partial success. In Emden's case, it was argued for a long time that he was not a Jew because he had converted to Protestantism.

It was known that the Nazi regime had harassed him as a Jew. It was also said that the pictures were sold from “safe Switzerland”. “So we have to prove that it was an emergency caused by the Nazi regime,” says Maeva Emden. “Plus, my grandfather was threatened by the Gestapo in Switzerland – so it wasn’t that safe.” She is always aware that "it was a privilege to be able to finance the escape and survive in this way. Six million other Shoah victims did not have this chance."

For the Emdens, the film “Life is also an art” about Max Emden's life in 2018 brought movement to the demand for the restitution of two paintings by the Venetian Bernardo Bellotto, better known as Canaletto. “We fought for this for 15 years, but the federal government refused to join the responsible advisory commission,” says Maeva Emden. The pictures were only restituted in 2019.

The collection of the Swiss arms manufacturer and Nazi profiteer Emil Georg Bührle, which has been based in the publicly financed Kunsthaus Zurich since 2021, refuses to return Claude Monet's “Field of Poppies near Vétheuil”. The argument goes that they weren't a Nazi state back then and weren't responsible.

Switzerland also signed the “Washington Declaration” in 1998 and committed itself to “identifying works of art confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution and finding just and fair solutions with the owners or their heirs.” Hamburg's Senate is similarly hesitant in dealing with the Emdens' stolen real estate assets.

The First Mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD) justified the refusal to even negotiate the return of the properties with reference to a reparation process from the 1950s. This is finally finished. “As a family, we never stopped the process,” says Maeva Emden.

What happened to many families happened to her, as there are still unexplained works from the Hirschland Collection hanging in the Folkwang Museum in Essen; Provenance research has only recently begun here. Frankfurt's Städelsches Kunstinstitut, in turn, initially declared six loaned pictures from the Nathan collection to the heirs as a “donation”. In the meantime there was a comparison.

The Lessing collecting family's claim for restitution for Lovis Corinth's still life “Colorful Sweet Peas and Roses” is still pending. The Sprengel Museum Hanover doubts the ownership structure despite an affidavit from the descendants. Nevertheless, the picture was borrowed for the Hamburg show.

By the way, not all collectors were able to continue living prosperously in exile. Rosa Schapire, who was one of the first women to receive a doctorate in art history in 1904, played a key role as a reviewer in supporting the “Brücke” and in particular Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Penniless, she fled to London in 1939 and - no one knows how - took a number of works with her. She died in London in 1954, in the first Schmidt-Rottluff exhibition in Great Britain that she organized. Their central portrait is currently on loan elsewhere, but will enrich the Hamburg show from November.

Not all museums and collectors were willing to provide pictures for an exhibition on this topic. “Some said they didn’t want to wake sleeping dogs,” says curator Baumstark. People probably feared demands for return.

This is not an exhibition about restitution at all. She does not accuse, but rather shows, without denying the tragedy, the cultural achievements of these collectors and the gap they left behind. And turning the spotlight on these works and their former owners in an exhibition is a first and new thing. Standing in the middle of all these pictures and biographies, it touches you very directly.