Mapping Art Collecting in Europe, 1860-1940 9783506795434, 9783657795437, 3506795430

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Mapping Art Collecting in Europe, 1860–1940

FOKUS Neue Studien zur Geschichte Polens und Osteuropas New Studies in Polish and Eastern European History Publikationsserie des Zentrums für Historische Forschung Berlin der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften/Series of the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin

Herausgegeben von/Series Editors Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Dietlind Hüchtker, Maciej Górny, Igor Kąkolewski, Yvonne Kleinmann, Markus Krzoska Wissenschaftlicher Beirat/Advisory Board Hans Henning Hahn Dieter Bingen Eva Hahn Joanna Jabłkowska Kerstin Jobst Beata Halicka Jerzy Kochanowski Magdalena Marszałek Michael G. Müller Jan M. Piskorski Miloš Řezník Isabel Röskau-Rydel Izabella Surynt

VOLUME 10

Mapping Art Collecting in Europe, 1860–1940 Eastern and Western Sociocultural Perspectives Edited by

Milena Woźniak-Koch

Editor: Milena Woźniak-Koch, art historian; PhD (2020) University of Warsaw. Her research and publications focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art collecting in Poland and Europe, as well as on the history of culture in its social context. Currently, Woźniak-Koch is a fellow researcher at the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Proofreading: Barry Keane. Cover image: Photographic Archive of the National Museum in Kraków, Collector Feliks JASIEŃSKI preparing a temporary exhibition at the Sukiennice Gallery in Kraków, [1902], bromine-silver (toning), height 8.0 [14.1] cm, width 10.8 [16.6] cm, Inv. No. MNK XX-f-35398; in the collection of the National Museum in Kraków. All essays published in this book have been subject to a blind peer review.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de Brill Schöningh reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Brill Schöningh. © 2023 Brill Schöningh, Wollmarktstraße 115, D-33098 Paderborn, an imprint of the Brill Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland; Brill Österreich GmbH, Wien, Österreich) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. www.schoeningh.de Cover design: Evelyn Ziegler, Munich Production: Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn ISSN 2698-5020 ISBN 978-3-506-79543-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-3-657-79543-7 (e-book)

Contents

Series Acknowledgement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Milena Woźniak-Koch 1.

Introduction: The Fall and Rise of the Psychology of Collecting: Historiographical Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas Stammers

1

Part I Aristocracy: Art Collecting in the Twilight Era 2.

Aristocracy and Contemporary Art: Count Edward Aleksander Raczyński and the Question of Aristocratic Collections at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Kamila Kłudkiewicz

3.

An Enlightened Amateur: Prince Wladimir ArgoutinskyDolgoroukoff (1874–1941): A Private Collector in St. Petersburg at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Maria Ponomarenko

4.

Collecting and Recollecting: Recuperating Family Memory in the House of Alba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Whitney Dennis

Part II Modern Reinterpretations 5.

Feliks Jasieński: A Collector and ‘Artistic Activist’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik

6.

Paul Gallimard (1850–1929): A ‘Dandy Collector’ in Paris at the Fin de Siècle  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Léo Rivaud Chevaillier

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7.

She “Who Does Only What She Wants and Wants Only What She Must”: Adèle Caussin, Marquise de Landolfo-Carcano (1831–1921), Demimondaine and Collector  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Pauline Guyot

8.

A Museum Curator, Art Collector and ‘Guardian’ of the National Heritage: Camille Gronkowski’s Donations to the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Agnieszka Wiatrzyk

9.

A Modern Collector of Traditional Art: The Bourgeois Art Collection of Max Bram and its Role in the National Socialist Art World  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Felix Steffan

10. Old vs. New Middle Class: Collecting Identity in Interwar Central Europe as a Study Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Marcela Rusinko

Part III Art and the Art of Collecting 11.

Auguste Rodin, a Pivotal Collector: in Search of Recognition and Filiation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Bénédicte Garnier

12. Collectible Object, Collecting Media: The Print Portfolio as Marker of Evolving Art Collecting Practices in Germany and Austria, 1880–1930 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Fiona Piccolo 13. A Passion for Dessins: Reputation and Rivalry in the 1879 L’École des Beaux-Arts’ Exhibition of Drawings from Private Collectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Debra DeWitte

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Part IV Art and Acculturation: Jewish Collectors 14. Between Art Dealing and a Collector’s Passion: Abe and Bernard Gutnajer’s Activity in Interwar Warsaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz 15. Seeking a Sense of Belonging: Warsaw Collectors of Jewish Origin and their Collections of Polish Art, 1880–1939 . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Milena Woźniak-Koch 16. Inventing a Secular Jewish Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century: Collections of Jewish Ritual Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Shir Gal Kochavi 17. ‘The Finished Song’ of Róża Aleksandrowicz: Emancipation Through Art Collecting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Tomasz Dziewicki

Part V Museums and Institutionalised Collections 18. Ancient Roots of Europe: Heinrich Dohrn Jr. and His Antique Collection for the City Museum in Stettin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Dariusz Kacprzak 19. Displaying Nation and Region: Bourgeois Foundations of Museums in Nineteenth-Century Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Marina Beck 20. Reforms and Contradictions: New Museums of Modern Art in the Netherlands, 1908–1946 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Laurie Kalb Cosmo

Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309



List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

Index  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

Publication Series of the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin FOKUS. New Studies on the History of Poland and Eastern Europe This book series aims to gather scientific monographs and anthologies dedicated to the latest research on the history of Poland and Eastern Europe. The works published in the series link different disciplines from cultural and social history. Even though the emphasis of the series is on Poland and Eastern Europe, there shall be works published that cover the scope of a wider research perspective and thereby inspire research on similar topics in other regions of Europe. The book series FOKUS: New Studies on the History of Poland and Eastern Europe will, inter alia, also publish distinguished academic qualification works, such as dissertations that have been handed in for the Scholar Prize of the Polish Ambassador to Berlin.

Preface Milena Woźniak-Koch Collecting has for long occupied a particular place in cultural history and reflections on the significance of material culture within the humanities. Crossing the disciplinary boundaries, research on collecting is situated at the intersection of the history of art and taste, knowledge and connoisseurship; as well as of studies on historic socio-economic determinants, often touching upon some aspects of cultural anthropology or psychology. These studies, definitely more established in Western discourse, with their origins in structuralism and post-structuralism, have gone through various phases and, to some extent, correlated with the currents of postmodern studies on consumerism or the ‘material turn’ and theory of the agency of objects. From an initial interest in mere factuality and the anecdotally framed biographies of collectors, the study of collecting has become an important part of postmodern reflection on key concepts of culture: one of which is identity and the way it has been shaped. Due to the political and historical conditions after 1945, this reflection took a very different course in the Western and Eastern areas. The demolished art market, the radical social restructuring and the degradation of the role of the hitherto elites in the Eastern Bloc countries, significantly influenced the development of collections research. Although adopted by many communistic states in a non-orthodox and even critical manner, the Marxist optics with its reluctance towards the ‘possessing class’, as well as the vast post-war losses in archival resources at the institutional and private ego-documents level, made it difficult or even impossible to reconstruct knowledge about former collections in Eastern Europe. The circumstances mentioned above also impacted the development of methodological discourse, which under Western conditions could naturally evolve as a part of studies on consumerism and the past of the still existing elite and upper middle class. The central question posed in this volume about the relationship between collection and identity echoes classical semiotic thinking about culture understood as a network of meanings (Max Weber). Is this question still relevant and worth reflecting on in the age of fundamental redefinitions; among other, the emergence of posthumanism and the non-anthropocentric paradigm? Certainly, to face the challenges posed by contemporary humanities with all its ideological entanglements, it is necessary to constantly define the condition of the human being as a producer of culture and signifiers, also in the

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non-distant historical perspective. The need for this type of research is also evidenced by the multitude and diversity of cases assembled in the following volume, as well as the importance of the social problems analysed within them. They create a pan-European panorama of the collecting phenomenon in its various facets. The detailed analysis of the individual cases proves that the phenomenon of collecting focused, as in a lens, all the socially and culturally essential problems of the modern era. This book addresses issues such as the culture-creating meaning of ethnic minorities, women’s art collecting as a tool in emancipating, colonialism or the instrumentalisation of museums in the imperial age. Analysed in the context of private collections, these problems gain clarity, revealing at the same time the complexity of the cultural processes that have underpinned many of the social issues that remain under discussion to this day. The biographical micro-perspective is inevitable in posing questions about the past; but also in framing the contemporary paradigm of cultural history studies, and as such, constitutes the main axis of the reflection proposed in this book. This volume is the outcome of the international conference Collection, Modernism and Social Identity. Art Collecting in Europe Between 1880–1940, which took place in September 2021 (online) and was organised by the editor of this book. Researchers from Poland, Germany, France, Portugal, Russia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Czech Republik and the United States took part. The main aim of the conference was to initiate an exchange between researchers representing diverse scholarly approaches (defined by the differing historical and cultural experience of the country of origin); and to indirectly bridge the distance between Western and Central-Eastern European collecting studies. The conference was thought to be not only an opportunity for an exchange in terms of historiography, but most of all as platform for sharing concerns of a methodological nature. At the same time, academics from various countries endeavoured to create frames of a transnational discourse and a critical overview of the paradigm of collecting studies in Europe between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book presents a selection of texts chosen from almost thirty conference presentations. Most of the texts have been significantly expanded and modified from the original papers. The content of this volume has been divided into five overlapping and intertwining sections and was designed to serve as a coherent synthesis, focused on the main socio-cultural aspects of collecting. The essays cover a broad scope of issues relating to individual identity strategies in the late modern era, encompassing history of museums, exhibition policy, art market history, history of taste shaping and provenance research. In the historical dimension, this post-conference volume is devoted to art collecting in Europe from approximately 1860 to 1940, with sporadic references

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to the Second World War and the post-war period. It was a special chapter in both general history and the historiography of collecting itself. For centuries, collecting had been mainly perceived as the privilege of the aristocracy and landed gentry. The era of industrialization, followed by significant social changes, led to shifts in power, both in politics and culture. As a result, a new class arose in Europe – the bourgeoisie. Collecting enabled members of the bourgeoisie to gain access to the circles of art lovers who hailed from the upper echelons of society (Eva Rovers). This practice had, in general, an imitative character and paradoxically, at the same time, each collection was unique and personalised; therefore, often used to distinguish the collector. Indeed, many of the collections were instrumentally used by merchants and bankers who manifested their status and created a distinctive group identity to differentiate themselves from the traditional aristocratic collectors. This sort of collecting – appealing to collecting traditions and at the same time trying to break with them – could be seen as a subversive strategy on the part of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, which simultaneously gave art collecting a modern character. Their interest in mainly contemporary art supported new art movements, whereas legacies provided the core collections of many of today’s most significant museums. Also importantly, some collections focused specifically on non-European cultural artefacts, contributing to the establishment of an expert knowledge that emerged in public universities and museums in close interaction with those object collections. The rise of this new and extensive collecting scene in Europe at the end of the long nineteenth century took shape in various ways. Thanks to a comparative approach applied in this book, we can retrace similarities that make it more possible to define some of the essential and common aspects of European collecting. We can also observe differences and local endemic variations and analyse the reason for this differentiation. For the most part, however, there are clear patterns proving that collectors were driven by similar cultural and social motives. Moreover, each case presented in this volume reveals also the complexity of the mechanisms of art amassing on the individual level; which represents a significant contribution to a better understanding of collecting as a universal phenomenon framed within cultural anthropology. The book opens with a methodological introduction by Thomas Stammers, a valuable analysis of the influence of psychological concepts on the previous and current collecting studies. Stammers looks critically at classic publications by, among others, Krzysztof Pomian, Jean Baudrillard, Werner Muensterberger, James Clifford and analyses the process of a gradual shift away from the psychoanalytic concept to its revival in new research on material culture. In this study field, a redefined psychoanalytic approach opens new perspectives and enables an exploring of the relationship between collecting and consumption,

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the gendered relationship to objects and the form of sentimental attachment to collected objects. By undertaking this brilliant, critical literature overview, Stammers has provided a theoretical framework for an in-depth analysis of the cases discussed in this collection. The first section of the book, Aristocracy: Collecting in the Twilight Era consists of texts referring to the assembling and preserving of aristocratic collections in the context of maintaining the social and historical role of the magnates. This problem is thoroughly analysed by Kamila Kłudkiewicz, whose article looks at the collection of the Polish count, Edward Raczyński. Kłudkiewicz analyses why art collecting among aristocrats was characterized by a mainly conservative artistic taste; and how such preferences served a preseration of the social status of this stratum. Maria Ponomarenko, in her paper about Prince Wladimir ArgoutinskyDorgoloukov, offers an insightful look at the collecting scene of St. Petersburg’s aristocracy, a much more conservative collecting milieu than Moscow, which boasted famous Modern French art collectors like Siergiei Shchukin or Ivan Morozov. As Ponomarenko states, the prince’s Armenian origin was a reason for his partial exclusion from the higher sphere, whereas his European art collection gained a compensatory meaning and helped to bring the outsider Afgoutinsky-Dorgoloukov in from the cold. Whitney Dennis writes about the collection of the Spanish Alba family and its matriarch Countess María del Rosario Falcó y Osorio, thanks to whom her son Jacobo, the 17th Duke of Alba, would inherit her passion for the archive and the art collection itself, thus preserving the collection for posterity, and protecting the legacy of the Alba family. The second and the largest section of the book, Collecting’s Modern Reinterpretations, features a number of essays on various aspects of the collecting of newly arisen social elites. Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik describes the practices of Feliks Jasieński, a prominent Polish collector active in Warsaw and Kraków. Jasieński’s multifaceted activities, including the acquisition of Japanese prints, the popularisation of Far Eastern art through independently organised exhibitions, and finally, his numerous publications, made him an advocate of Japanese and modern art in Poland and Europe. Léo Rivaud Chevaillier describes the collecting practices of Paul Gallimard, a great Parisian figure, and a culture entrepreneur. Rivaud Chevalier categorises Gallimard as a dandy collector, who acted in the manner of Charles Baudelair, and was associated with the elite and artistic bohemia of the French capital at the time, including the bibliophilic milieu of Paris. Gallimard exemplifies the modern, metropolitan collecting that was part of late nineteenth-century Parisian culture.

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Pauline Guyot presents the life and activities of Adele Caussin, a demimondaine collector. Guyot touches on the extremely interesting gender aspect of collecting, where art became an essential element of social advancement and the emancipation of women in the nineteenth-century Paris. In her paper on Camille Gronkowski, the descendant of a Polish noble family, Agnieszka Wiatrzyk analyses the collector’s activities in the Parisian fields art and culture, as well as his donation to the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris. Wiatrzyk stresses that the bequest represented Gronkowski’s concern about Poland’s condition in the new geopolitical situation after 1945, and ultimately contributed to a restoring of the prestige of the Polish Society in Paris. The essay by Felix Steffan aims to describe the reasons for the revitalisation of Max Bram’s traditional and figurative art collection under Nazism. The elevation of Bram’s bourgeois amassing by the regime, originally created for educational purposes, reveals the mechanisms of culture’s instrumentalisation in the era of National Socialism in Germany. Marcela Rusinko proposes a theoretical approach and a study concept which involves analysing old and new middle-class collecting identities. Based on categories drawn from sociology (including classical Marxian definitions of classes), particularly studies pertaining to the development of the Western middle stratum, Rusinko examines collecting patterns in the grand and petit bourgeoisie in Central Europe and the Czech Republic in order to define sociological regularities. Section three, entitled Art and the Art of Collecting, focuses on tracing the relationship between collecting and art, as well as on the question to what extent collecting influenced the development of modern art. Bénédicte Garnier, while analysing the collecting practice of Auguste Rodin, makes recourse to the classification category of artist-collector. Garnier demonstrates how Rodin’s collection inspired him and how the antiquities he possessed were incorporated and used in art creation. Garnier notes that collecting sculpture is combined with a peculiar sensual pleasure, also present in the case of Rodin. Fiona Piccolo examines the market development of print portfolios and their influence on collecting practices in Germany and Austria between 1880 and 1930. Piccolo argues that portfolios, as a popular art form in the German middle-class culture (Bürgerkultur), revealed a bourgeoisie relationship to art and the art object. As a result, portfolios became a representation of collectors’ artistic education, serving as a symbolic and material marker of social identity and status. Debra DeWitte, in her essay on the Exhibition of Drawings from Private Collectors, which took place in L’École des Beaux-Arts in 1879, describes a

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particular sort of culture rivalry between France and England in the late nineteenth century. Art collections and exhibitions became instruments not only for building personal prestige but also for imperial politics; and demonstrating cultural superiority. The fourth section, Art and Acculturation: Jewish Collectors concerns Jewish collecting as an element of establishing a socio-national identity within an acculturation process. It begins with Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz’s text, in which she describes the Gutnajer brothers’ art collecting and trading in Warsaw before 1939. The article looks to show, by way of analysing the cases of Abe and Bernard, that although each of them amassed art in a different manner and with a varying business approach, they could both be characterised by their genuine passion for collecting Polish art. Milena Woźniak-Koch presents Warsaw art collecting between 1880 and 1939 basing on three study cases: Edward Reicher, Gustaw Wertheim and Bronisław Krystall. The article explores the relationship between acculturation and visual culture while reconstructing the variety of strategies for creating Jewish-Polish identity. Woźniak-Koch’s text highlights the immense role of Polish, as well as Jewish art, as means in defining the new position of Jews within Polish society. Shir Gal Kochavi proposes an analysis of three collections: Isaac Strauss, Reuben David Sassoon and Hadji Ephraim Benguiat. These collections, studied in the context of the secularisation and urbanisation of European Jews in the nineteenth century, demonstrate how material objects representing Jewish tradition became collectors’ objects. As Gal Kochavi argues, by exhibiting and researching Jewish themes, these collectors paradoxically used ritual art objects to shape secular Jewish identity and foster the view of the educated, ‘assimilated’ Jew. In the conclusion of this section, Tomasz Dziewicki describes the collecting activities of Róża Aleksandrowicz, the owner of a stationery and art shop in Kraków. While running her business, Róża had the opportunity to interact with the artistic milieu of Kraków and became a muse and patroness who amassed a substantial collection of modern Polish art. The last part of the book is dedicated to the broadly understood relationship between collecting and museology. In his essay, Dariusz Kacprzak recalls the story of Heinrich Dohrn’s antique sculpture collection in Stettin (the former German name for today’s Polish Szczecin). Its donation to the Museum der Stadt Stettin was a reminder of the ancient roots and humanistic values of European culture and symbolically inscribed the region of Pomerania in the area of this ancient heritage.

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Marina Beck’s article aims to juxtapose the history of Kunsthalle in Hamburg with that of Städel Museum in Frankfurt. As Beck puts it, by the foundation of those museums, the bourgeoisie contributed to creating a national and local identity while simultaneously emphasising its importance as the new leading social group. In the final article, Laurie Kalb Cosmo presents the history of three Dutch museums: the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. The author analyses whether and if yes to what extent institutions established with the great support of the bourgeoisie influenced the development of new art movements and museum reforms. Cosmo examines the period of the Second World War and the institutions’ policies towards the Nazis. The materials in this collection present various examples of art collecting at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The authors have established their attitudes to analysed cases and referred to events through the prisms of their own interpretations of cultural texts (including the collections themselves), taking into account epistemological and ontological approaches. Particular essays tend to represent a variety of methodological attitudes that have been developed within the interdisciplinary field of collecting studies, museology, sociology and culture studies. An element common to all the cases included in this book is the biographical perspective, which makes it possible to analyse collections in a post-semiotic spirit as aforementioned cultural texts. As Mieke Bal puts it, collecting is an inalienable human trait, derived from the need to tell stories, for which it is impossible to find a suitable form in words or any other conventional narrative model. Collecting is, therefore, storytelling; everyone has a need for such storytelling, which, at the same time, does not mean that every person is or can become a collector.1

According to Mieke Bal, amassing things begins to mean collecting when a series of random acquisitions or gifts suddenly becomes a meaningful sequence. It is from this point that the collector begins to consciously ‘telling his/her story’ and becomes a narrator, creating a personal and ephemeral kind of semiotics for a narrative dedicated to identity, history, passing etc. At the same time, Ball emphasises that there is a huge difference between the discourse of language and material culture because, unlike words, objects have 1 M.  Bal, Telling Objects. A Narrative Perspective on Collecting, in The Cultures of Collecting, J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds.), London: Reaktion Books, 1994, p. 103.

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an inalienable physical form, occupying their own place in space-time. This means that objects (for instance non-European artefacts), unlike words always retain and contain a connection to the original context from which they come, they are a content in themselves no matter how many times and how they are reinterpreted. A microbiographical perspective is necessary not only to gain an intimate insight into the collector’s psychological constraction and detect his or her motivation for collecting, which compensated for any social mismatch. It allows us to perceive the dynamic of the sociocultural procesesses which are mediated by art and artefacts. Regardless of whether we view collections in terms of history and the development of taste or the production of knowledge, they are an intrinsic part of the cultural landscape of modern Europe. The aim of this book, as a whole, is to show the complexity of collecting and, indirectly, to reveal the infinite dimension of the dependencies and entanglements of culture and social contexts. These relations, specified in the postmodern era, are not only of historical significance. Touching on essential issues to the definition of culture in general, they remain relevant, generating current questions and becoming subject to new reinterpretations within contemporary discourses in material culture studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Fall and Rise of the Psychology of Collecting: Historiographical Reflections Thomas Stammers The post-war genesis of the history of collecting still awaits its historian. While it emerged out of very disparate disciplines, the new topic was orientated towards biography from the outset. In Britain and the United States, there was a boom in lives of the great collectors, stuffed with anecdote and eccentricity. Occasionally these lives were arranged into a ‘gallery’ of contrasts, in the manner of Aline Saarinen’s study of the Gilded Age, Proud Possessors (1958).1 According to Kirkus Reviews, the book had succeeded in “reveal[ing] the personal idiosyncrasies of some of the most powerful and affluent Americans of the last one hundred years”.2 If American studies of this stripe tended towards the journalistic, in Britain, the tone of early studies was deferential and class-conscious, as seen in the opulent itinerary afforded by The Great Private Collections and The Great Family Collections (1965), edited by Douglas Cooper.3 In France the treatment was more literary, such as the impressionistic writings of Philippe Julian, author of Les Collectionneurs (1966), or the novelistic portraits sketched by art historian Pierre Cabanne.4 No-one was perhaps more influential at mid-century in Paris than the celebrity auctioneer Maurice Rheims, whose observations of his clients’ quirks were interspersed with quotations from the pages of Jean de La Bruyère and Honoré de Balzac.5 From a twenty-first century perspective, this interest in biography, and in the psychology of collecting, can seem intellectually passé. In the past four decades, the emphasis placed on the intentions or mentality of the collector has been abandoned as too speculative- especially when dealing with collectors in the past- or as too simplistic, exaggerating the role of individual subjectivity 1 A. Saarinen, The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times and Tastes of some Famous American Art Collectors, New York: Hurlingham Books, 1958. 2 Kirkus Reviews, 1 November 1958. 3 D. Cooper (ed.), Great Private Collections, New York: Macmillan, 1963; D. Cooper (ed.), Great Family Collections, New York: Macmillan, 1965. 4 P. Jullian, Les Collectionneurs, Paris: Flammarion, 1966; P. Cabanne, Le roman des grands collectionneurs, Paris: Plon, 1961. 5 M. Rheims, La vie étrange des objets. L’histoire de la curiosité, Paris: Plon, 1959.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_002

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over the social significance of collecting practices. On multiple fronts, we have seen a marked swing away from privileging the individual mind. On the one hand, the surge of new research into the art market has allowed for quantitative and statistical answers to seemingly imponderable questions about taste and emulation.6 On the other hand, methodologies imported from the history of science and Actor-Network-Theory tend to situate individual collectors within a broader web of social relations. A new critical vocabulary, based around circulations and transfers, has suggested that the perspective of any one node matters far less than the interplay and functioning of the total array.7 The gains, in terms of extending the geography of collecting, and highlighting the role of many overlooked (often non-European) actors, have been tremendous.8 But the net result has nonetheless been to urge scholars to think about how collecting happens, via what mechanisms, rather than dwell on why. The origins of this shift might be traced back to Krzysztof Pomian’s landmark volume Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux (translated into English in 1990). The essays inside were largely written at different points across the 1970s, and resonated with contemporary debates in semiotics and post-structuralism. As Stephen Bann noted in a perceptive review, if the name Foucault is tantalisingly absent, the thrust of Pomian’s book nonetheless offered its own riff on the productive use of discontinuity.9 In the theoretically inflected opening essay, Pomian offered a sketch of the history of collecting over many centuries, stretching back to antiquity and even prehistory. He accented how this seemingly familiar activity had assumed a bewildering succession of guises. The generic answers offered by scholars as to why a person collects- for pleasure, prestige or knowledge- failed to account for the diversity of its manifestations. “Aesthetic pleasure is left undefined”, Pomian complained, “the urge to acquire historical and scientific knowledge is not explored and we never

6 Since the 1980s the contribution of the Getty Provenance Index has been pivotal; new work on cultural economics is showcased in the Journal Art Market Studies, founded in 2016. 7 The work at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford, around the concept of the ‘relational museum’ has been influential in this regard. See C. Gosden and F. Larson, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, esp. pp. 1–13. 8 Among many possible examples, see N. Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991; T.  Bennett, B. Dibley and R. Harrison, ‘Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities’, History and Anthropology, 25.2 (2014), pp. 137–49. 9 S. Bann, Review, The Art Bulletin, 73.4 (1991), p. 689.

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learn precisely how the possession of certain objects confers prestige”.10 The answer to what holds collecting together as a trans-historical practice lay not in commonality of motive on the part of collectors, but rather in commonality of functions: whether medieval or modern, Pomian reasoned, all collections mediate between the visible and the invisible realms.11 What matters for our purpose is less Pomian’s famous thesis, however, than his determination to move the field away from the focus on individuals, their tastes and their acquisitions. Only by forsaking the ‘anecdotal’ focus on the collector’s psychology could the subject cease to be regarded as “a narcissistic and slightly frivolous pastime”.12 It was a fundamental error to approach taste purely in terms of one individual’s aesthetic preferences, since these preferences could only be accounted for through wider political, ideological, religious and cultural conditions. “When collections are treated solely as the guardians of works of art, or as testaments to taste, even if they seem initially to be the object of study, they will actually only be used to solve puzzles concerning an entirely different field”.13 Pomian’s call to go beyond individual motives, and towards a more holistic or anthropological strand of cultural history, went hand in hand with his call to do proper justice to the collection itself, as something distinct from the collector. His fears that collecting would be written off as intellectually ‘frivolous’ have proved unfounded. The academic pedigree of the subject has been hugely boosted not just by the success of the Journal of the History of Collections, founded in 1989, but also by the incorporation of collecting methodologies into the analysis of crucial historical periods, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, from the East India Company to the French Revolution.14 At the same time, Pomian’s plea for a collective or comparative approach has had more partial success. The stubborn attachment to, and resilience of, the individual case-study is quite remarkable (and this edited volume is no exception). Despite conceptual fashions, most scholars continue to find biography an important, indeed indispensible, framework for describing the evolution 10

K.  Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux: Paris, Venise, XVI–XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 1987, p. 11. 11 Pomian, Collectionneurs, pp. 15–59. 12 Pomian, Collectionneurs, p. 1. 13 Pomian, Collectionneurs, p. 4. 14 To cite just a few classic books: P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; A. Macgregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007; M. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, London and New York: Vintage, 2006; D. Poulot, Musée, Nation, Patrimoine (1789–1815), Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

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and significance of the collections of works of art. And with biography, some concession towards questions of personality or motive is unavoidable. This biographical optic should not be deplored; rather, one might argue that to grasp collecting in the modern period, it is indispensable. In earlier centuries, collections were admired as repositories of knowledge about nature- think of the Wunderkammer, as a microcosm of the universe- or participated in the conferral of political or intellectual authority. After the French Revolution, collections, freed of these epistemological or political functions, came to express nothing so much as the passions and character of their creators. As Pomian put it in an essay from 2001: Ce n’est pas sur leur conformité avec un tel classement qu’on les juge. Chaque collection particulière peut donc devenir, sans résèrve, une expression de la personnalité du collectionneur. Elle peut traduire non seulement son savoir et son goût mais aussi ses nostalgies, ses rêves, ses fantasmes. Elle peut être son oeuvre, ce qu’il laissera à la posterité.15

This familiar claim about the early nineteenth century has come to structure how subsequent scholarship has been written, so that collecting is seen to march in step with new regimes of selfhood.16 The problem is not biographical approaches per se, but the failure to recognise that this biographical or psychologising approach is not neutral, or something universally applicable to all periods, but rather has a history of its own. The aim of this short chapter is to revisit some old and more recent trends in exploring collectors’ psychology in the modern era. It has no pretence to be comprehensive, but instead draws out different themes within scholarship published in English and French. The leitmotiv of this edited volume is collectors’ ‘identity’, and this notoriously slippery term- which itself needs to be historicized- remains clustered with a host of cognate terms related to subjectivity, selfhood and individualism.17 At present, the collector’s psychology is a default approach in most articles on the topic, but it is rarely explicitly addressed or thematised. The sin is by no means unique to scholars of collecting. Peter Gay memorably took all historians to task for falling back on weakly theorized models of human motivation, thereby assuming that ‘common sense’ psychology was a sufficient tool to analyse the minds of actors in the 15 16 17

K. Pomian, ‘Collection: une typologie historique’, Romantisme, 112 (2001), p. 18. In such grand narratives, the influence of Foucault has been notable. See E.  HoooperGreenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, New York and London: Routledge, 1992. P. Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History, 69.4 (1983), pp. 910–931.

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past.18 But such is the power of stereotypes about how collectors behave, and why different types of collector ultimately collect, that historians of collecting have an extra incentive in confronting such presuppositions in order to escape from their grip. This essay falls into three parts. First, it explores the early attempts made by scholars to read collecting through the lens of psychoanalysis, revealing how ideas derived from Freud and Lacan came to structure some of the key conceptual accounts published between the 1960s and 1990s, and the distortions this produced. Second, it considers how the psychoanalytic framework has been overtaken by new research into material culture, which has generated new lenses onto classic questions- such as the relation between collecting and (excessive) consumption, the gendered relation to objects, and forms of sentimental attachment. A short final coda explores the value of thinking more about the collector and his or her collection through some experiments in biography and autobiography. However prone to myth-making, these texts help us historicize the changing place of things in the construction and performance of identity in modern times.

The Psychoanalytic Paradigm

Sigmund Freud, as is well known, was a devoted collector. Statues of ancient pagan divinities were displayed in his professional workspace, his office, and not the rooms he shared with his family; his relationship with these objects shaped his insights into the ego and its needs (Fig. 1.1).19 In an 1895 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, he drew an analogy between the old maid who keeps a dog and the old bachelor who collects snuffboxes based on the fact that both of them were searching for a “substitute”, whether for a spouse in her case, or a “multitude of conquests” in his.20 Freud was only one thinker in the fin de siècle who viewed the growing craze for collecting as symptomatic of tensions within modern civilisation: think of Richard von Kraft-Ebbing’s study of the links between criminality and fetish objects, or Giovanni Mingazzini’s investigation of the overlap between bibliomania and kleptomania.21 Scientific investigation was shadowed by the gloomy warnings of moralists, alarmed by the signs 18 19 20 21

P. Gay, Freud for Historians, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. J. Forrester, ‘Mille e tre. Freud and Collecting’, in J. Elsner, R. Cardinal (eds.), Cultures of Collecting, London: Reaktion Books, 1994, pp. 224–51. Freud to Fliess, 24 January 1895. Cited in P. Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, London and New York: Allen Lane, 2002, p. 217. E. Pierrat, La Collectionnite, Paris: Le Passage, 2011, p. 136.

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Fig. 1.1

A selection of antiquities from Freud’s personal collection, transferred from Vienna to London, Freud Museum London © Freud Museum London.

of rampant materialism that threatened to overwhelm distinctions of rank, gender and propriety.22 Max Nordau thundered that “the present rage of collecting, the piling up of dwellings, of aimless bric-a-brac…. has established an irresistible desire among degenerates to accumulate useless trifles”.23 If the roots of this pathological discourse on collecting reach back into the sciences of the fin de siècle, it was connected most explicitly with the issues of post-war society in the writings of Jean Baudrillard. The System of Objects (1968) remains a seminal study of the insatiable and vertiginous possibilities opened up by mass consumption in the 1950s and 1960s.24 For Baudrillard, collecting embodies all of the frustrations and delusions of regular consumption, but now pushed to a higher pitch of pathos and folly. Broadly Lacanian in inspiration, Baudrillard’s text insisted that all collecting, like consumption, was driven by, and predicated on, desire, and therefore on a fundamental lack. “Its dynamism derives from the ever-disappointed project now implicit 22 23 24

On this context see R. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984. M. Nordau, Degeneration, New York: Appleton and Company, 1905, p. 27. K.  Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994.

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in objects”.25 The failure of attainment is as inevitable as it is crippling. The pleasures enjoyed by collectors can never “get beyond a certain poverty and infantilism  … collectors, invariably have something impoverished and inhuman about them”.26 Baudrillard insists that collecting is essentially a regressive activity, “a discourse addressed to oneself”.27 Narcissism is the most common charge he lays at collectors, accusing them of trying to ward off processes of change and decay by constructing an imaginary realm of order (“the organization of the collection itself replaces time”). However comprehensible in an era of growing secularization, this flight into the imaginary consolation of things, or “refuge­ seeking procedure” has to be labelled “neurotic”.28 Antiques in particular offer their buyers a reassuring sense of lineage and origin (“the return journey to the mother’s breast”); unambiguous examples of “fetish” objects, they allow the subject to feel that the material world is organised around their own interests and needs (thereby nourishing the “phantasy of a centre-point”).29 Baudrillard not only routinely connects collecting with vestiges of the sacred (such as the continuous analogies he draws to relics or to talismans) but also with sexual malformation (as a perversion, or “regression to the anal stage”).30 As the title makes clear, Baudrillard conceived his book under the influence of structuralism, with an eye to uncovering the grammar that might underpin social and cultural practices. Collections distilled his deeper interest in seriality, in which the individual element only acquired significance through its relation to the whole (or what he calls “the set”). The scope for indefinite multiplication allows Baudrillard to compare the collector, in his search for concubines, to “the master of a secret seraglio”.31 Such observations were offered in an unapologetically totalizing spirit, indifferent to variations of place, sex or class, and giving scant regard to the very particular French milieu in which such thinking arose.32 That said, beneath the universalist pretentions of the System of Objects, the evidence deployed is scant and telling. Alongside the predictable literary allusions- including to La Bruyère’s manic print collectorhe made substantial use of Maurice Rheims, whose impressions provided a 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

J. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, London: Verso, 1996, p. 223. Baudrillard, The System, p. 114. Baudrillard, The System, p. 113. Baudrillard, The System, pp. 102–03, 96. Baudrillard, The System, pp. 81, 84. Baudrillard, The System, p. 93. Baudrillard, The System, p. 94. On the intellectual milieu, see M.  Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 273–280.

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cue for Baudrillard’s wilder elaborations and amplifications (such as the comparison Rheims drew between owners’ relations with their dogs and collectors’ relations to their things, since both dogs and cherished possessions represent “an intermediate category between human beings and objects”).33 This quick gloss of The System of Objects is a reminder that the text was highly normative, recycling much older notions about collecting as pathological, culled from late nineteenth-century literature, but also conceptually anarchic, piling one perceived deviance or misdemeanour upon another. In the spirit of ’68, the cumulative effect is iconoclastic, seeking to expose a practice branded as a form of “cultural neo-imperialism”.34 More than this political flourish, Baudrillard’s emphasis on collecting as an inward-focussed, narcissistic activity- a kind of partner of the mirror-stage- has proved astonishingly influential, especially among his American admirers. Susan Stewart’s On Longing insists that by decontextualising objects, collectors dissolved the external world in order to create a private refuge: “In its search for a perfect hermeticism, the collection must destroy both labour and history”.35 James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture continues the theme, drawing on Baudrillard and Stewart to contend that “collections embody hierarchies of value, exclusions, rule-governed territories of the self”. In this influential formulation, colleting should be understood as a Western fantasy to domesticate the Other, predicated on “a rescue of phenomena from inevitable historical decay or loss”.36 Stewart is a literary critic, whilst Clifford is an anthropologist, writing particularly about ethnographic collections. Coming to the topic from a quite different intellectual tradition was the clinical psychologist Werner Muensterberger. Steeped in the study of ethnology and mythology, Muensterberger was also an avid collector of ‘primitive’ art (Fig. 1.2).37 His influential study Collecting: An Unruly Passion (1994) merged the theories of Freud and Donald Winnicott with historical vignettes and insights gleaned from first-hand observation of his patients and acquaintances (including Georg Tillmann, an enthusiast for Oceanic sculpture). Muensterberger framed collecting essentially as a mode

33 Baudrillard, The System, pp. 95, 98. 34 Baudrillard, The System, p. 90. 35 S. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 161. 36 J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 218, 231. 37 L.  Zeitz, Der Mann mit den Masken: Das Jahrhundertsleben des Werner Muensterberger, Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2013.

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Fig. 1.2

Antelope with male young on its back (Bambara, French Sudan): from the Werner Muensterberger Collection. Reproduced in Warner and Wendy Muensterberger, Sculpture of Primitive Man, London: Thames and Hudson, 1955 © Author Photograph.

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of “magical compensation”, rooted in painful childhood experiences.38 In this scheme, artefacts or artworks are always proxies. Whatever the collector acquired, the effect was the same: a shallow exhibitionism, in keeping with the needs of the phallic-narcissistic personality. “We see them as show-offs of all kinds. They like to pose or make a spectacle of their possessions. But one soon realizes that these possessions, regardless of their value or significance, are but stand-ins for themselves”.39 The chosen exhibitionists represent, either famously insatiable collectors (like nineteenthcentury bibliophile Thomas Phillipps), those who documented their passion in fiction (like Balzac), or even more exotic examples (like head-hunters in New Guinea). In his review John Fowles, a noted novelist of collecting, relished the anecdotes in the book, but felt the thesis could be summarised concisely: “However odd, however rich or humble, its deep aim will always be to reassure the frightened ego on its perilous, naked journey through life”.40 Collecting: An Unruly Passion made for gripping, gossipy reading. For his critics, however, Muensterberger’s pathological approach to the subject was “a relentlesssly one dimensional analysis” of “very limited usefulness”.41 Of course collecting can be viewed as a form of substitution or compensation- but then how does it differ from other comforting pursuits, like eating, physical exercise or sex? According to philosopher Kevin Melchionne, at the heart of the problem was the author’s refusal to make any distinction between the “measured acquisitions of a purposive collector and the mindless hoarding of your average packrat”. By reducing collecting to compulsive forms of accumulation, Muensterberger fails to engage with the attempt to construct meaning through “the way the pieces in the collection call attention to each other”. It only by “understanding the dialogue between members of a collection, [that] we discover what the collector wants to show us about the objects and the world”.42 Muensterberger in some ways represents the climax and eclipse of the older psychoanalytical approach to collecting. Such an approach promises to give a richer account of interior motivation, and its private satisfactions, but this often comes at the expense of thinking through how these behaviours are shaped by external, socio-cultural pressures, or how these assemblages seek to communicate with external audiences. The search for an over-arching logic makes psychoanalytic accounts insensitive to the properties of specific objects, 38

W. Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion. Psychological Perspectives, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 3. 39 Muensterberger, Collecting, p. 13. 40 J. Fowles, ‘Objects of Desire’, Sunday Times, 6 February 1994. 41 T. Chang, ‘Models of Collecting’, Oxford Art Journal, 19.2 (1996), p. 96. 42 K. Melchionne, review, Philosophy and Literature, 20.2 (1996), pp. 524–26.

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and traps collectors into doomed patterns. In an amusing review in Artforum, Louise Bourgeois mocked the name-dropping snobbery, cynicism and stasis at the core of Muensterberger’s account. “Collecting’s only saving grace is its transitional value over the years- the way our need and our energy to collect may remain the same, but the object changes”, she countered. “The transitional shows us that collectors do not have to be arrested characters”.43 Archaeologist Susan Pearce acknowledges that the Freudian paradigm is “difficult to challenge because it is so broad and all-embracing”, and is further limited because it “leaves much actual collecting process out of the account”.44 After Baudrillard and Muensterberger, universal theories of why individuals collect have fallen out of favour (although some researchers hope that neuroscience or evolutionary biology may provide the big picture once offered by psychoanalysis).45 However, there have been new and more dynamic ways of conceptualising the emotional relationship between people and their possessions from another quarter: namely the study of material culture.

Material Culture and the Return of Psychology

Historically, the study of collecting has had an awkward relationship to the all-encompassing term of material culture. Collecting has been studied most intensely in relation to the “taste of the angels”, in the phrase of Metropolitan Museum curator Francis Henry Taylor in the 1940s, acquisitions that often entailed considerable amounts of knowledge, capital or connoisseurial skill, and participated in cultural hierarchies.46 The perpetuation of such “rare art traditions” across the centuries has been interpreted as a gauge of civilisation.47 By contrast, the concept of material culture is the great leveller, cutting across canonical or privileged artefacts to instead think about the human interaction with the world of things in all its multiplicity, including quotidian items, commodities and junk.48 43 44

L. Bourgeois, ‘Collecting: An Unruly Passion’, ArtForum International, 22 June 1994. S. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, New York and London: Routledge, 1995, p. 10. 45 See E. Kreuter, The Collector Mentality: Modernization of the Hunter-Gatherer, New York: Nova Science, 2017. 46 F. H. Taylor, The Taste of the Angels: A History of Art Collecting from Rameses to Napoleon, New York: Little Brown, 1948. 47 J. Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and its Linked Phenomena, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. 48 For an introduction, see K.  Harvey, History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Material Sources, New York and London: Routledge, 2017.

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The study of material culture has deep roots, stretching back into Victorian anthropology, archaeology and the antiquarian tradition.49 Its intellectual inclusiveness is combined with scepticism towards the special status conventionally attached to ‘art’ objects. A more disenchanted, materialist approach to works of art informed early studies of the art market in the 1960s, such as the mining of Christie’s auction catalogues undertaken by Gerald Reitlinger, or the sociology of the art market developed by Raymonde Moulin.50 But whilst such studies recognised that money was integral to the formation of collections, they nonetheless tended to respect each genre of collecting as an ecosystem with its own rules and patterns. A more expansive notion of material culture, however, cuts across these closed systems, and urged scholars to set the taste for sculpture or for paintings in dialogue with the buying and selling of other luxury goods. With categories increasingly porous, research is growing into what one important anthology calls “a liminal object which moves first between the rarefied world of fine art and the mundane existence of everyday life, and second between the fine arts and the non-arts”.51 Recognising collecting as a mode of consumption was hastened by the research of social scientists into contemporary practice. This approach was pioneered in Britain by the Leicester Museums Group and their famous 1993 questionnaire.52 Their focus was on acquisitions previously disdained by scholarship, such as dolls, advertisements and packaging, memorabilia or china figurines, in order to study what the purchase of such things revealed about the construction of national, class and gender identities. Many of the findings were couched in psychological terms: for Russell Belk, collections double up as extended selves, intimately tied to the owner’s physical and moral integrity.53 At the same time, similar studies in the United States profiled not just the real and virtual environments in which such goods were traded- from eBay to yard-sales- but also some of the darker, obsessional sides of collecting in 49 50 51 52 53

P.  Miller, History & its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. G.  Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, 3 Vols, London: Barrie and Rockcliffe, 1961–70; R. Moulin, Le marché de la peinture en France, Paris: Minuit, 1967. J. Potvin, A. Myzelev, ‘Introduction: The Material of Visual Cultures’, in Material Cultures 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, J. Potvin, A. Myzelev (eds.), Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, p. 1. The Leicester questionnaire, and relevant essays, are gathered in: S.  Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects and Collections, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. R.  Belk, M.  Wallendorf, J.  Sherry, M.  Holbrook, S.  Roberts, ‘Collectors and Collecting’, Advances in Consumer Research, 15 (1988), pp. 548–53; R. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society: A Critical Analysis, London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

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contemporary pop culture.54 Present-day concerns have provided new lenses onto the past, most obviously the study of recycling and the second-hand trades.55 Written with a deep awareness of globalisation and environmental debates, the resurgent study of consumerism also has implications for how the colleting bug has been situated too. In his grand survey Empire of Things(2016), Frank Trentmann offers a genealogy of our changing relationship to possessions, identifying the years 1890–1920 as pivotal to “a renaissance of the material self”: The language of the passions, of sociability, refinement and sympathy gave way to a more hands-on, private relationship with things. Mr Pooter, colleting, crafts and home furnishing, these were all elements of a renewed appreciation of the role of things in the development of the self. The self was not sealed off from the material world. It was touched and formed by things, while things in their turn carried the imprint of an individual’s character and culture. Artefacts came to be seen as passageways into the self.56

Whether works of art, or consumer comforts, around 1900, European homes became ever more crammed with things (“Everyone could be a collector”).57 In his important work on the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie, Manuel Charpy has also insisted on the interplay between the multiplication of domestic objects (knick-knacks, ornaments, souvenirs), individual self-fashioning and the production of new collective identities, rooted in class and gender.58 The collector’s pursuit of exceptional art objects occurred within an expanded marketplace of material things, raising vexed issues about discernment, disposal and control. In Possessed (2021), literary critic Rebecca Falkoff offered a more charitable interpretation of those indiscriminate hoarders or ‘pack-rats’ excluded from the ranks of true collectors. From the early nineteenth century, she argues, the boundary between appropriate and excessive consumption 54

L.  Dilworth (ed.), Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 55 J.  Stobart, I.Van Damme (eds.), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 56 F. Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty First, New York and London: Allen Lane, 2016, p. 231. 57 Trentmann, Empire, p. 227. 58 M. Charpy, ‘How Things Shape Us: Material Culture and Identity in the Industrial Age’, in A. Gerritsen, and G. Riello (eds.), Writing Material Culture History (2nd ed.), London: Bloomsbury, 2021; M. Charpy, ‘Matière et mémoires: usages des traces de soi et des siens dans une grande famille bourgeoise de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’, Revue du Nord, 390 (2011), pp. 395–432.

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becomes fundamentally unstable, reflecting deeper contradictions in modern conceptions of value. Whether classified as collecting, consumption, or hoarding, modernity has witnessed a proliferation of closely related “objectorientated manias”.59 Studies of consumption can prompt us to think about the relationship between the closed circle of prized objects demarcated as a collection, through which the owner is often still remembered, and the diverse or eclectic set of hobbies he or she pursued in their lifetimes, such as coins, stamps and autographs, which are often marginalised in scholarship. The contrasts between the esteemed and overlooked parts of the same collection do not just complicate hasty generalisations about individual taste; they also speak volumes about what was seen worthy of record by subsequent interpreters. Only recently, for instance, have collections of ephemera begun to receive their due.60 In contrast to the psychoanalytic model discussed above, scholars of consumption have also underlined the significance of materiality. Material culture features prominently within the “affective turn” currently sweeping through the humanities, since it shows how emotional states are generated and expressed through the transmission of tangible props and tokens.61 Precisely because of the psychological investment in things, the attributes of physical objects- such as softness, smoothness, lustre, coldness, texture- were integral to the way they were apprehended, not just by the eye but also by the hand. To flatten out these material differences is to miss a central dimension of the collectors’ sensory experience, even if the analytic tools for trying to reconstruct such experiences are still in their infancy. As Jaś Elsner has remarked, the cultural history of the material world “is a great experimental adventure in which few rules have yet been written, and many pitfalls and heffalump traps remain to be fallen into”.62 There exist at least two other ways in which the psychoanalytic frameworks of an earlier generation can be finessed. The first relates to what we might call the erotics of collecting, rooted in new approaches to gender and sexuality.63 For Freud, Baudrillard and Muensterberger, the collector was envisioned as the jealous patriarch in the harem of his own devising. But what happens to 59 60 61 62 63

R. Falkoff, Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. R. Iskin, B. Salsbury, (eds.), Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World, London: Bloomsbury, 2021. This is a booming field for all historical periods; for some modern examples see A. Moran, S. O’Brien (eds.), Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture, London: Bloomsbury, 2014. J. Elsner, ‘Objects and History’, in P. N. Miller (ed.), Cultural Histories of the Material World, New York: Bard Graduate Centre, 2019, p. 168. For an overview see T. Stammers, ‘Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, c. 1850– 1920’ in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2020): https://19. bbk.ac.uk/article/id/3347/.

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these power dynamics when we substitute the male for a female proprietor? In Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects (2009), Diane Sachko-Macleod gives a new reading of female collectors and philanthropists of Gilded Age America. Theoretically, she borrows from Winnicott to offer her own version of the compensation thesis, claiming that art objects acted as “soothers” to women whose social horizons were otherwise circumscribed: “art collecting as practised by women should be redefined as a process of gathering objects that console the psyche and contribute to the articulation of self”.64 However, she also develops a rival notion from Winnicott, that of creative play, to argue that touching, striking and fantasizing over objects was a spur to female self-understanding. This ludic dimension of women’s collecting is quite different from the dynamics of mastery associated with men, and underscores its performative appeal: the bohemian heiress from Buffalo, Mabel Dodge, surround herself with works of art to stage and externalise her otherwise fragmented subjectivity.65 Sachko-Macleod’s idea of collecting-as-play also opens the door to recognising collecting as a kind of joyful, sensory collaboration within two halves of a married couple.66 In contrast to the older model of male collector as miser, determined to preserve exclusive enjoyment, queer scholars have stressed how collecting represented a vital avenue of homosociability. It was precisely through sharing their delight in rare and curious objects from the Far East, for instance that a non-conformist subculture of “Bachelor Japanists” emerged in early twentiethcentury France and the United States.67 John Potvin has explored the place of collecting in the construction of masculine homosexual identities in modern Britain, seeking to draw out “subversive and alternative relationships to space, materiality and time”.68 Potvin shows how the interiors and furnishings created by male same sex couples- such as the famous partnership of painters and aesthetes in late Victorian Britain, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon (Fig. 1.3) – were carefully calibrated to elicit sensations and memories from their many visitors, and represent “queer intimacy materialized”.69

64

D. Sachko-Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 15. 65 Sachko-Macleod, Enchanted Lives, p. 189. 66 Sachko-Macleod, Enchanted Lives, p.  14. See also D.  Sachko-Macleod, ‘Art Collecting as Play: Lady Charlotte Schreiber’, Visual Resources, 27 (2011), pp. 18–31. 67 C.  Reed, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 68 J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, p. 9. 69 Potvin, Bachelors, p. 85.

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Fig. 1.3

Thomas Stammers

William Rothenstein, Charles de Sousy Ricketts; Charles Haslewood Shannon lithograph, 37.6 × 25.4, 1897, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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The second way in which the psychoanalytic model has been revised is to think more about the endings of collections- to switch the attention, as it were, from narratives of possession and accumulation to dispossession. Here the fieldwork by anthropologist Daniel Miller is highly influential. In The Comfort of Things (2008), Miller and his co-researcher Fiona Parrot provide a portrait of thirty households on a random street in south London, starting with an account of the things lying around, the clutter and the décor, before linking these objects to events in their owners’ lives.70 The aim is partly philosophical, tallying with Miller’s long-standing agenda to unpick “our common sense opposition between the person and thing, the animate and the inanimate, the subject and the object”.71 But these engaging vignettes also underscore the way that possessions come to commemorate and mediate fundamental life-stage transitions, such as bereavement: the process of grieving is played out through the way that the belongings of loved ones are conserved, relocated, sifted through or given away. This insight underpins Leanne Shapton’s brilliantly imaginative 2009 book, Important Artifacts…., presented in the guise of an illustrated auction catalogue. It documents the origins and demise of a romantic relationship through a painfully captioned inventory of the gifts, clothes, photographs and books that once constituted the couple’s lives together, prior to them being sold off.72 The earlier psychoanalytic literature was correct to note the strong thematic links between collecting and mortality, although more empirical and comparative work is needed on collectors’ posthumous calculations regarding the fate of their things, whether through wills, bequests, donations or gifts. It is clear that many modern collectors take comfort from thinking about themselves as only temporary custodians of objects that have a made many journeys to reach them, and that will pass into other hands after their death. In his much-cited essay ‘Unpacking my library’ (1931), Walter Benjamin claimed the true collector felt a heavy sense of responsibility about this succession. “Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility”.73 This is an alternative to purely narcissistic impulses, or enjoyment in the here-and-now; as Martin Jay has mused of the objects in his collection, “their likely survival through a posterity that 70 71 72 73

D. Miller, The Comfort of Things, Cambridge: Polity, 2008. D. Miller, Stuff, Cambridge: Polity, 2009, p. 5. L. Shapton, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, London: Bloomsbury, 2009. W.  Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 66.

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will continue to preserve them somehow makes my passage less final, my disappearance less complete”. Like Benjamin before him, he expresses hope that his treasures will find constructive new purposes, even remember him: “they are given a new life by the departure of their collector”.74

Narratives of Interiory

Psychological accounts of collecting are therefore making a quiet comeback. Whilst the rigidity of the older psychoanalytic literature has clearly lost traction, the study of modern collecting -as one dimension of modern material culture- remains entangled with issues of identity, affect, intimacy and subjectivity. The way each of these issues is conceptualised has certainly changed over the past generation, with a marked shift away from the totalizing and often pathologising character portrait, towards recognition of the contingent, performative and inter-personal dimensions of human-object relations. Rather than see collecting as a secondary symptom of some underlying personality trait (or mania), many today would deny any neat separation of cause-andeffect, and counter that the act of collecting is also highly generative of subjectivities, which it serves to sustain. In these instances, the material properties of the collection are not incidental, but integral, to the interest and pleasures these things afford their owner. Of course the popular genre of eccentric collector biography shows no sign of disappearing- and it certainly has its place when making sense of extraordinary twentieth-century figures like Robert de Montesquiou or Alfred Barnes.75 But there have been recent efforts to recast the biographical form to better reflect our unstable relations with the material world. In her 2009 account of the omnivorous scientific and medical collector Henry Wellcome- appropriately entitled An Infinity of Things- Frances Larsson subtly probes Wellcome’s inability to create an ordered narrative of his life, just as he failed to ‘complete’ or impose unified meaning on his collection. She intends her book to be a dual biography, of a man and also of his stuff. It is not a heroic, linear life, but one in which the engagement with the material world came to overwhelm its

74 75

M.  Jay, ‘Mementoes Post-Mori: Thoughts on the Collector’s Mania’, Salmagundi, 180–81 (2013–14), p. 57. H.  Greenfield, The Devil and Dr Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector, London: Viking Press, 1987; E. Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat, Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995.

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would-be master: “both collector and collection were mutually constitutive: one did not exist beyond the other”.76 Innovative biographies like Larsson’s suggest that whilst questions of psychology remain valid and vital, they need to be carefully historicised. Wellcome’s obsessions are inseparable from the era of capitalist and imperial expansion in which he lived. If, as so often alleged, collections are a critical tool of self-fashioning, we need to clarify what the material supports for fashioning selfhood were in distinct periods of time. In a brilliant recent study, Sean Silver has explored how notions of mind and cognition in early eighteenthcentury Britain were developed through analogy with collecting apparatuses (like cabinets) or collecting processes (like classification and cataloguing).77 In its combination of epistemology, collecting and personhood, Silver’s approach might act as a prompt for greater reflection among scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about how material resources continued to condition the understanding of self in their own period. Beyond the impact of new technologies, such as photography or the cinema, one clear trend is the reciprocity between the domestic interior, and notions of psychological interiority. In this blurring of physical and imaginary space, the furnishing and exhibition of a room became a mode of self-portraiture.78 This is a well-known observation to readers of modern literature, since it acts as a leitmotif running through the novels of major authors of the fin de siècle, such as Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust and Gabriele D’Annunzio.79 But it also informs the autobiographical writing of many notable twentieth-century collectors. In light of the canonical status attached to every sentence in the writings on collecting of Benjamin, it is surprising that this corpus of texts is not better known or studied, for it is distinctive to the modern period to have such a wealth of ego documents on hand. Rather than having to infer evidence of motive from the sometimes dry catalogues, bills or inventories, there is a substantial body of writing by nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century collectors in which they reflect on and rationalise their 76 77 78 79

F.  Larsson, An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 287. S. Silver, The Mind is a Collection: Case-Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. For a classic discussion of the psychologised interior, see D. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, Style, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. J.  Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; M.  David, ‘L’éthos collectionneur de D’Annunzio, d’après Il Piacere’, in J.  Guillerme (ed.), Les Collections: fables et programmes, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993, pp. 63–77.

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desires. Naturally, these texts do not offer unmediated access to the collector’s innermost thoughts and feelings: they are often highly calculated textual performances.80 However, it is by studying the elements out of which they are constructed that the psychological stakes of collecting become clear. To illustrate this point, let me close by mentioning the writings of Italian literary critic Mario Praz about his apartment-museum in Rome (Fig. 1.4). Curiously, Praz appears in Muensterberger’s book as a classic case of collecting as a consolation for earlier traumas, including the consequences of a clubfoot and failed marriage: “early sensitivity, largely prompted by the consequences of his own congenital impairment, encouraged compensatory gratification: since his body was imperfect, he chose to acquire and surround himself with impeccable objects”.81 However, Praz’s 1958 autobiography, The House of Life, does not confirm this diagnosis. Childhood might have launched his ‘manias’, including dolls, stamps and Russian literature, but he did not want to get bogged down in “the psychology of the collector, a matter which has already been studied by others”, usually in unflattering terms (“there is something positively egotistical and limited in him, something positively avaricious”).82 For Praz, his own psychology is not a topic separable from his itinerary through the collection itself: it is something to show, not just tell. The House of Life is structured by the journey through the contents of the apartment in the Palazzo Ricci, one room at a time. This is not a linear progression; rather, the story of the different objects in the house acts as a trigger to recall different episodes not just in the author’s personal life, but also how it was shaped by his celebrated acquaintances, and the often threatening environment of Rome outside (during the Fascist and wartime years Praz gave sanctuary to an Austrian-Jewish critic, whilst the collections assembled by his stepfather were looted).83 Through the evocative description of his possessions, Praz moves seamlessly between real and imagined architectures. In his study, he dwelled on the watercolour interiors of Caroline Murat’s palace in Naples during the Napoleonic Empire: These two small pictures representing rooms in the Royal Palace at Naples in the time of Murat, now hanging in my house, seem, as it were, a magically prolonged extension of the house itself, so that these rooms in miniature, into which I can 80

For some distinguished recent examples see W.  David  King, Collections of Nothing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008; S. Turkle (ed.), Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2011. 81 Muensterberger, Collecting, pp. 42, 232. 82 M. Praz, The House of Life, trans. A. Davidson, London: Methuen, 1964, p. 26. 83 Praz, The House, pp. 30, 155.

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Fig. 1.4

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Studio and Picture Gallery, Mario Praz Museum House, Rome © Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.

only penetrate in imagination, end by being no less real to me than rooms that actually exist. It is as if I were to open a secret door in the room in which I live, and then penetrate into the wing of a deserted palace, into a second home of my own, as it were, with shadowy coffered ceilings that no longer echo to the sound of human voices.84

In this mise en abyme, the watercolour views allow Praz to access a myriad of hidden, long lost places, which become a second home. The collection sets the boundaries of his imaginative excursions, just as the list of mirrors, drawers and secret doors in his apartment captures the recesses of the self and its search for an elusive ideal. In the remarkable closing sentences, having reached the end of the tour, Praz pictures himself in retrospect as a collectible, his life identical with the inventory of things:

84 Praz, The House, p. 287.

22

Thomas Stammers …. I see myself as having become an object and an image, a museum piece among museum pieces, already detached and remote, and that, like Adam in the graffito on the marble floor of the church of San Domenico at Siena, I have looked at myself in a convex mirror, and have seen myself as no bigger than a handful of dust.85

He gestures towards the time after his death, when the house and its contents, although deprived of their strange vitality, will endure as a public museum. Their persistence affords some hope of his own survival. Praz here echoes Benjamin’s insight that it is not his objects that “come alive in him; it is he who lives in them”.86 List of References Alsop, Joseph. The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and its Linked Phenomena, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1982. Bann, Stephen. Review, The Art Bulletin, 73.4 (1991). Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, London: Verso, 1996. Bell, Russell. Wallendorf, Melanie. Sherry, John. Holbrook, Morris. Roberts, Scott. ‘Collectors and Collecting’, Advances in Consumer Research, 15 (1988), pp. 548–53. Belk, Russel. Collecting in a Consumer Society: A Critical Analysis, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Bennett, Tony. Dibley, Ben. Harrison, Rodney. ‘Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities’, in History and Anthropology, 25.2 (2014), pp. 137–49. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Unpacking My Library’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Blom, Philip. To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, London and New York: Allen Lane, 2002. Boscagli, Maurizia. Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism, London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Bourgeois, Louise. ‘Collecting: An Unruly Passion’, in ArtForum International, 22 June 1994. Cabanne, Pierre. Le roman des grands collectionneurs, Paris: Plon, 1961. Chang, Ting. ‘Models of Collecting’, Oxford Art Journal, 19.2 (1996).

85 Praz, The House, p. 350. 86 Benjamin, ‘Unpacking’, p. 67.

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Charpy, Manuel. ‘Matière et mémoires: usages des traces de soi et des siens dans une grande famille bourgeoise de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’, Revue du Nord, 390 (2011), p. 395–432. Charpy, Manuel. ‘How Things Shape Us: Material Culture and Identity in the Industrial Age’, in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Writing Material Culture History (2nd ed.), London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Cooper, Douglas (ed.). Great Private Collections, New York: Macmillan, 1963. Cooper, Douglas (ed.). Great Family Collections, New York: Macmillan, 1965. David, Michel. ‘L’éthos collectionneur de D’Annunzio, d’après Il Piacere’, in Jacques Guillerme (ed.), Les Collections: fables et programmes, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993, pp. 63–77. Dilworth, Leah (ed.). Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Elsner, Jaś. Cardinal, Roger (eds.). The Cultures of Collecting, London: Reaktion Books, 1994. Elsner, Jaś. ‘Objects and History’, in Peter  N.  Miller (ed.), Cultural Histories of the Material World, New York: Bard Graduate Centre, 2019. Falkoff, Rebecca. Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Forrester, John. ‘Mille e tre. Freud and Collecting’, in Jaś Elsner, Roger Cardinal (eds.), Cultures of Collecting, London: Reaktion Books, 1994, pp. 224–51. Fowles, John. ‘Objects of Desire’, Sunday Times, 6 February 1994. Gay, Peter. Freud for Hisyorians, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Gleason, Philip. ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History, 69.4 (1983), pp. 910–931. Gosden, Chris. Larson, Frances. Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Greenfield, Howard. The Devil and Dr Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector, London: Viking Press, 1987. Harvey, Karen. History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Material Sources, Routledge: New York and London, 2017. Hooper-Greenhill, Elaine. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Iskin, Ruth. Salsbury, Britany (eds.). Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World, London: Bloomsbury, 2021.

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Jasanoff, Maya. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, London and New York: Vintage, 2006. Jay, Martin. ‘Mementoes Post-Mori: Thoughts on the Collector’s Mania’, Salmagundi, 180–81 (2013–14), pp. 49–59. Jullian, Philippe. Les Collectionneurs, Paris: Flammarion, 1966. Kirkus Reviews, 1 November 1958. Kreuter, Eric. The Collector Mentality: Modernization of the Hunter-Gatherer, New York: Nova Science, 2017. Larsson, Frances. An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Macgregor, Arthur. Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Melchionne, Kevin. Review, Philosophy and Literature, 20.2 (1996), pp. 524–26. Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things, Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Miller, Daniel. Stuff, Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Miller, Peter. History & its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. Moran, Anna. O’Brien, Sorcha (eds.). Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Moulin, Raymonde. Le marché de la peinture en France, Paris: Minuit, 1967. Muensterberger, Werner. Collecting: An Unruly Passion. Psychological Perspectives, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Munhall, Edgar. Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat, Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995. Nordau, Max. Degeneration, New York: Appleton and Company, 1905. Pearce, Susan (ed.). Interpreting Objects and Collections, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pearce, Susan. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Pierrat, Emmanuel. La Collectionnite, Paris: Le Passage, 2011. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux: Paris, Venise, XVI–XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Pomian, Krzysztof. ‘Collections: une typologie historique’, Romantisme, 112 (2001), pp. 9–22. Potvin, John. Myzelev, Alla. ‘Introduction: The Material of Visual Cultures’, in John Potvin, and Alla Myzelev (eds.), Material Cultures 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Potvin, John. Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

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Poulot, Dominique. Musée, Nation, Patrimoine (1789–1815), Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Praz, Mario. The House of Life, trans. Angus Davidson, Methuen: London, 1964. Reed, Christopher. Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Reitlinger, Gerald. The Economics of Taste, 3 vols, London: Barrie and Rockcliffe, 1961–70. Rheims, Maurice. La vie étrange des objets. L’histoire de la curiosité, Paris: Plon, 1959. Ross, Kirstin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994. Saarinen, Aline. The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times and Tastes of some Famous American Art Collectors, New York: Hurlingham Books, 1958. Sachko-Macleod, Diane. Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Sachko-Macleod, Diane. ‘Art Collecting as Play: Lady Charlotte Schreiber’, Visual Resources, 27 (2011), pp. 18–31. Saisselin, Remy. The Bourgeois and the Bibelot, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Shapton, Leanne, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Silver, Sean. The Mind is a Collection: Case-Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Silverman, Deborah. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, Style, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Silverman, Deborah, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, Style, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Stammers, Tom. ‘Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, c. 1850–1920’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2021): https://19.bbk. ac.uk/article/id/3347/. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Stobart, Jon. Damme, Ilja Van (eds.). Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Taylor, Francis Henry. The Taste of the Angels: A History of Art Collecting from Rameses to Napoleon, New York: Little Brown, 1948. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

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Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty First, New York and London: Allen Lane, 2016. King, William David. Collections of Nothing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Turkle, Sherry (ed.). Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2011. Watson, Janell. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Zeitz, Lisa. Der Mann mit den Masken: Das Jahrhundertsleben des Werner Muensterberger, Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2013.

Part I Aristocracy: Art Collecting in the Twilight Era

Fig. 2.1

Jacek Malczewski, Portrait of Edward Aleksander Raczyński, 1903, oil on canvas, 75 × 100, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation.

Chapter 2

Aristocracy and Contemporary Art: Count Edward Aleksander Raczyński and the Question of Aristocratic Collections at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Kamila Kłudkiewicz Contemporary art occupied an important place in the preferences and interests of collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is in the interest in contemporary art that the most significant differences between aristocrats and the bourgeoisie or other groups of collectors can be seen. Of course, in each case examined, the collector’s individual preferences, environment, education and various external circumstances must be taken into account. In this text, starting from the collecting of the Polish aristocrat Count Edward Aleksander Raczyński (Fig. 2.1), I intend to make a number of generalisations. This approach is motivated by the fact that despite their nationality, members of the aristocracy shared the same beliefs and ideas. European aristocrats adhered to similar principles, had similar lifestyles and pastimes, were linked by kinship or marriage and by ideals of a transnational scope. Even if they differed in wealth, access to power or connections, the relative homogeneity of this social group allows us to formulate general conclusions about their attitude to art. Research into the collecting activities of the aristocracy in Europe conducted to date has most often ascribed to nineteenth-century collectors the categories of the Modern age – building up the prestige of the family and emphasising its high social position. So far, no extensive research has been undertaken into the collecting activities of the European aristocracy as a social group, which over the course of the century slowly lost its political influence, high economic position and role as the main patron of culture. In recent years, however, the

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_003

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analysis of aristocratic collections has become the subject of research projects,1 texts and academic conferences.2

Edward Aleksander Raczyński: Polish Aristocrat and his Collection of European Contemporary Paintings

Before 1918, members of the aristocracy are not to be found among collectors interested in new artistic currents, new movements, new trends. Why was that so? The answer lies in the attitude of aristocrats toward the past and present, in their need to emphasize continuity in art, and also in the general perception of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and avant-garde before the First World War. What aristocrats sought in contemporary art were first and foremost its historical roots; consequently, they purchased those works that, according to the critics of the time, could be placed on the timeline of art development. Accordingly, they avoided artists and artworks that at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represented ‘art without history’. The attitudes of aristocrats towards contemporary art were shaped by their world view and conviction that the past was the value on which the present was founded. The rights and responsibilities formed in the past were seen as the basis for the functioning of society. This belief, stemming from the ideology of nineteenth-century conservatism, relied on two key notions: history and 1 See Spanish project: PoLeNo – políticas en tránsito para la legitimación nobiliaria: narrativas de memoria y estética en la gestión del patrimonio artístico de la nobleza española (1750–1850) (PoLeNo – politics in transit for nobiliary legitimation: narratives of memory and aesthetics in the management of the artistic heritage of the Spanish nobility 1750–1850): https://poleno.hypotheses.org/ (accessed 24 November 2021). 2 On the collections of the Polish aristocracy, see K. Kłudkiewicz, Wybór i konieczność. Kolekcje arystokracji polskiej w Wielkopolsce na przełomie XIX i XX wieku (Choice and Necessity. Collections of the Polish Aristocracy in Wielkopolska at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries), Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza (Adam Mickiewicz University Press), 2016. On the collections of the Spanish aristocracy, see A. Urquízar-Herrera, ‘Memory and taste in the collections and households of the Spanish nobility (nineteenth and early twentieth centuries): an introduction to the topic with some notes on the house of Osuna and the origins of the period room’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 25.2 (2019), pp. 181–209: DOI: 10.1080/14701847.2019.1632028. On the collections of the Lithuanian aristocracy, see A. Bimbirytė-Mackevičienė, Vakarų Europos Dailė Lietuvos Kolekcijose XIX Amžiuje Ir Grafas Vladislovas Tiškevičius (Western European fine Arts in Lithuanian Collections in the 19th century and Count Władysław Tyszkiewicz), PhD diss., Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2019: https://vb.vda.lt/object/elaba:40978759/40978759.pdf (accessed 24  November  2021). See also recent International Conference “Artistic and Architectural Heritage of the Nobility Between Old and New Regimes: Transformations, Reinterpretations and New Uses”, Ljubljana, 22–24 June 2022.

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tradition. The conservative view of aristocrats assumed that respect for the past guarantees the continuity and durability of future existence. Their understanding of history was closely related to the values they cherished. These values, as listed by Ellis Wasson, were: name, ancestry cult, glorification of family memory, honour, and a strong sense of group identity and patriotism (at first understood as loyalty and obedience to the ruler, then, with the ongoing political reforms and democratisation, as serving the country).3 These assumptions were also reflected in aristocratic collecting. An example of an aristocrat and collector deeply interested in contemporary art was Count Edward Aleksander Raczyński from Rogalin near Poznań. The bulk of his collection consisted of 279 works by artists representing Polish realism and symbolism, and paintings by European artists: mainly French (124 works), German (22), and several examples of Belgian, Italian, Swiss, Spanish, Norwegian and Dutch art.4 Raczyński purchased the works of European artists during his annual visits to Paris, a special place, where new trends were born, and collections of works representing the new art movements were created by French, American, Russian and German collectors. The majority of Raczyński’s paintings were bought in the years 1892–1914, i.e. at a time when significant collections of new French painting emerged. In his choices, the Polish count focused on three significant artistic phenomena present in Paris at the end of the century: the exhibitions of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, a group known as la Bande noire, and the Société Nouvelle association. Generally speaking, he was interested in art which attracted the interest of official entities: the organizers of the Paris World Exhibition held in 1900, officials of the state cultural administration, and above all, Léonce Bénedite, director of the Parisian museum of living artists – the Luxembourg Museum. It was an art based on the paintings of previous generations. It was considered to have continued the transformations that had been occurring in French painting for a hundred years, with its roots traced in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1898, Bénedite gave the name la Bande noir to a group of several artists who differed considerably in style: Charles Cottet, Lucien Simon, Edouard Aman-Jean, René Ménard, René Prinet. What their works had in common was the background, namely Brittany, and, according to 3 E. Wasson, Aristocracy and the modern Word, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 8–17. On the culture of the 19th century aristocracy, see also B. Köpeczi, E. H. Balázs (ed.), Noblesse française, noblesse hongroise XVIe–XIXe siècles, Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1981; G. Delille (ed.), Les noblesses européennes au XIXe siècle. Actes du colloque. Rome 21–23 novembre 1985, Rome: École Française de Rome, 1988; J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986; H. Reif, Adel im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012. 4 For details on the collection, see Kłudkiewicz, Wybór i konieczność, pp. 143–172.

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Fig. 2.2

Kamila Kłudkiewicz

Eugègene Carrière, Reading (La Lecture), c. 1890–1895, oil on canvas, 54 × 65, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation.

Bénedite, they were also distinguished by their use of a dark range of colours and compositions with a clearly delineated contour (Fig. 2.2).5 Other commentators wrote that while la Bande noir was influenced by Impressionism, it also stood in opposition to it. One art historian later described la Bande noir as “the avant-garde of traditional art” (l’avant-garde de l’art traditionnel).6 In 1900, the artists belonging to la Bande noir founded Société Nouvelle, creating space for joint exhibitions.7 Bénedite, as the director of the Luxembourg Museum, systematically purchased the works of painters associated with these groups. 5 See  A.  Cariou, Lucien Simon, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts de Quimper, Quimper: Éditions Palantines, 2006. p. 37. 6 A.-F. Ponthus, Autour de la Société Nouvelle: un reseau artistique et amical à Paris au debut du vingtième siècle (1900–1914), PhD diss., Paris: Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne University, 2006, p. 13. 7 Detailed on the history and position of the association in turn-of-the-century Paris, see Ponthus, Autour de la Société Nouvelle.

Aristocracy and Contemporary Art: Count E. A. Raczyński

Fig. 2.3

33

Charles Cottet, A Serene Evening in Brittany, before 1900, oil on cardboard, 55,8 × 70, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation.

Raczyński’s interest in the group of painters supported by Bénedite went beyond their official position (Fig. 2.3). On the basis of critical texts and expositions he saw in major Parisian galleries, he assumed that the Société Nouvelle artwork was considered the final phase in the development of nineteenthcentury French painting.8 Straightening the position of contemporary art in the history of art was of great importance to Raczyński. He was also the president of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków, an association supporting Polish art and artistic education. He supported the idea of organizing an exhibition of reproductions of the old masters in Kraków with the following 8 The position of artists from the Société Nouvelle group was consolidated by the exhibition of French art at the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition. See above all A.  Michel, ‘Les arts à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. L’exposition centennale. La peinture française (cinquième et dernier article)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 10 (521), 1900, pp. 463–482; A. Michel, ‘Les arts à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. L’Exposition decennale. La peinture française’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 12.522 (1900), pp. 527–536.

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words: “[The exhibition] will broaden views, kindle respect for sincere will and diligent work, explain many angles unknown to the general public of today – it will connect the present and the past and bring them closer to each other – it will teach respect and the worship of many things that today are met with mockery devoid of understanding, and will deprive plenty of dross of the acclaim and admiration it does not deserve”.9 It would be too easy to assume that by dross Raczyński meant the Post-Impressionists. It is important to note what role he assigned to the old art (Fig. 2.4). He believed that it was to “connect the present and the past and bring them closer to each other”. This phrase is crucial in understanding aristocratic attitude to contemporary art. Aristocrats were not interested in works representing revolutionary tendencies, directions ‘without history’. When Raczyński came to Paris, he visited Salon Champ-de-Mars, an exhibition of the Société Nationale des Baux-Arts, an association founded in 1890 in opposition to the traditional, academic Salon, offering the largest selection of contemporary works in the capital of France.10 This display skilfully combined the old, time-tested salon system (awards and medals) with a new, open approach to the market (exhibitions of female artists, foreigners, exhibitions of artistic craftsmanship, artists’ freedom in the selection and number of exhibited works). However, when Raczyński spent time at the Champ-de-Mars Salon, other collectors, French, German, Dutch, Russian, and later American, visited Parisian galleries, such as Vollard, Durand-Ruel, Bernheim-Jeune. Specialized in selling works of the new art movements, these places were the starting points when it came to creating collections of the new art.

Paris, Moscow, Berlin: Centres of Innovative Art Collecting Before 1918

If we were to identify places on a map of Europe with the largest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, it would turn out that the Old Continent was quite densely covered with them. The works of innovative 9

E.  A.  Raczyński, Count Edward Aleksander Raczyński’s letter to Stanisław Witkiewicz, 1901, Kraków, Uniwersytet Jagielloński – Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Inv. No. 6829 II, p. 111. 10 See  O.  Tolède-Léon, ‘Le Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts comme lieu d’épanouissement du mécènat privé dans les années 1890’, in J. Kearns, P. Vaisse (eds.), “Ce Salon à quoi tout se ramène”, Le Salon de peinture et de sculpture, 1791–1890, Oxford: Pater Lang, 2010, p.  101–116; B.  Gaudichon, Des amitiés modernes De Rodin à Matisse. Carolus-Duran et la Société nationale des beaux-arts 1890–1905, exhibition catalogue, La Piscine, Musée d’art et d’industrie de Roubaix (Roubaix), Paris: Somogy, 2003.

Aristocracy and Contemporary Art: Count E. A. Raczyński

Fig. 2.4

35

Lucien Simon, Music (La musique), c. 1895, oil on canvas, 178 × 216, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation.

groups attracted the attention of individuals who created collections – to use Krzysztof Pomian’s term – “focused on the future” (collections tournées vers l’avenir).11 Such collections were created by people who made change, innovation, progress, and the future their life goals. Another important fact worth considering is that the collections of works of new art movements were accumulated in three major cities: Paris, Moscow, and Berlin. Importantly, the number of aristocratic collections in these cities decreased at the end of the nineteenth century.12 Culturally, the dominant class was the ­bourgeoisie, 11 K. Pomian, ‘Collections: une typologie historique’, Romantisme, 112 (2001), pp. 9–22. 12 An interesting overview of the Parisian collections is provided by such period publications as: P.  Eudel, Collections et collectionneurs, Paris: G.  Charpentier, 1885; P.  F.  Defer, Catalogue général des ventes publiques depuis 1737 jusqu’à nos jours, Paris: Chez Aubry, 1865 (and its subsequent updated renewals); P. Eudel, Hôtel Drouot en 1881, Vol. 1, Paris: G. Charpentier, 1882 (and subsequent volumes). The withdrawal of the aristocracy from Berlin after 1870 has been pointed out by a researcher dealing with private collections in

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interested in art, purchasing artwork, and sometimes even co-creating the policy of local museums. According to Eva Rovers, some representatives of the wealthy bourgeoisie wanted to distinguish themselves from the aristocracy and develop their own identity, closely related to the spirit of modernity and the Zeitgeist at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thus to emphasize their autonomy.13 In Paris, the city of artistic breakthroughs, new art was initially purchased by people closely related to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist circles – fellow-artists, the intelligentsia, townspeople (e.g. painters Gustave Caillebotte and Edgar Degas, the physician Victor Chocquet, and the publisher Georges Charpentier).14 The second group who subsequently became interested in the new art were Parisian industrialists (Charles Comiot, Auguste Pellerin), merchants (Nicolas Hazard) and bankers (Alphonse Kann, Jules Strauss, Isaac de Camondo).15 Moscow at that time was a city of emerging commercial fortunes, located far away from St. Petersburg, where aristocratic families resided.16 It hosted the collections brought from Paris by Siergei Ivanovich Shchukin and Ivan Abramovich Morozov, representatives of the new Russian middle class and supporters of native Russian capitalism.17

13 14 15

16 17

that city during the German Empire: S. Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich. Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsamllerkultur, Kiel: Ludwig, 2005, p. 47. The book includes an appendix of private collectors in Berlin from 1870 until the outbreak of the First World War, from which one can read a clear increase in the collections of the bourgeoisie (pp. 268–289). E.  Rovers, ‘Introduction: The art collector-between philantropy and self-glorification’, Journal of the History of Collections, 21.2 (2009), pp. 157–161. A.  Distel, Les collectionneurs des impressionists. Amateurs et marchands, Paris, La Bibliothèque des arts, 1989. V.  Long, Mécènes des deux mondes. Les collectionneurs donateurs du Louvre et de l’Art Institute de Chicago, 1879–1940, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de  Rennes, 2007, p.  157; A.  Boime, ‘Les hommes d’affaires et les arts en France au XIXeme siècle’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 28 (1979), pp. 66–70; M.-N. de Gary (ed.), Musée Nissim de Camondo. La demeure d’un collectionneur, Paris: Les Arts Décoratifs – UCAD, 2007. B. W. Kean, All the empty Palaces. The merchant patrons of Modern Art in Pre-revolutionary Russia, London: Barrie & Jenkins,1993, p. 189. N. Semionova, A. Kostenevitch, Matisse et la Russie, Paris: Editions Flammarion, 1993. See also I. Bodesohn-Voggel, Morozov and Shchukin – the Russian collectors. Monet to Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Museum Folkwang (Essen), Cologne: DuMont, 1993; R.  P.  Gray, ‘Muscovite patrons of European painting. The collections of Vasily Kokorev, Dmitry Botkin and Sergei Tretyakow’, Journal of the History of Collections, 10.2 (1998), p. 189–198; A. Cohen, ‘Making modern art Russian. Artists, Moscow politics and the Tretiakov Gallery during the First World War’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14.2 (2002), pp. 271–281.

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The third city, Berlin, was the capital of the young German Empire, with a thriving economy. Among German collectors interested in new tendencies, two groups may be distinguished: art experts, often associated with the artistic world (e.g. Emil Heilbut, the Cassirer brothers)18 and wealthy German industrialists and bankers, often of Jewish origin (e.g. the Mendelssohns, the Sterns, the Wolffs, Edouard Arnhold, Otto Gerstenberg, Bernard Koehler, Walter Levinstein).19 Researchers have identified various reasons for the interest of German collectors in the art of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Andrea Pophanken and Felix Billeter believe that the social advancement and fortunes of some collectors have been driven by technological and medical innovations.20 Veronica Grodzinski, who focuses on Jewish collectors, also emphasized their openness to taking risks in business and the need to construct their own social identity, based on notions such as modernism and liberalism.21

The Significant Position of the Aristocracy in Polish Collecting Before 1918

Of course, innovation, modernity, and progress were not the tenets of aristocracy. In those European cities where aristocrats maintained a strong position and were engaged in cultural activities, collections of works representing new tendencies were very scarce, almost non-existent. An illustrative example of this tendency is Kraków, a place of social engagement for titled Polish families.22 18

H. Ziegler, ‘Emil Heilbut, ein früher Apologet Claude Monets’, in A. Pophanken, F. Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler. Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001, pp. 41–65. 19 See articles in Pophanken, Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler. 20 On collections in other German cities H.  Biedermann, ‘Die Sammlungen Adolf Rothermundt und Oscar Schmitz in Dresden’, in Pophanken, Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler, p.  209–234; A.  Pophanken, ‘Auf der Ersten Kennerblick hin. Die Sammlung Carl und Thea Sternheim in München’, in Pophanken, Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler, pp. 114–134; M. Palica, Od Delacroix do Van Gogha. Żydowskie kolekcje sztuki w dawnym Wrocławiu, Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT, 2010. 21 V.  Grodzinski, ‘Collecting against the grain’, Jewish Quarterly, 53.2 (2006), p.  38–42; V. Grodzinski, ‘The art dealer and collector as visionary. Discovering Vincent van Gogh in Wilhelmine Germany 1900–1914’, Journal of the History of Collections, 21.2 (2009), p. 221– 228; V. Grodzinski, ‘Longing and Belonging. French Impressionism and Jewish patronage’, in G. Reuveni, N. H. Roemer (eds.), Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010, pp. 91–112. 22 The domination of the aristocracy in the economic, cultural and political life of Krakow and Galicia was described by Jacek Purchla, see J.  Purchla, Matecznik Polski.

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Representatives of many of them moved artistic and historical collections to their Kraków palaces, where Polish art developed most dynamically at the turn of the centuries, while aristocrats played a key role in the cultural and social life of the city. The numerous aristocratic collections found in Kraków, the participation of aristocrats in funding public collections, and, above all, the activity in the aforementioned Society (Edward Aleksander Raczyński was the president of the Kraków Society of Friends of Fine Arts), point to the conclusion that aristocrats set the direction of social tastes in the city. Their taste shaped the position of Polish artists on the market – primarily the symbolists of the “Young Poland” movement – and determined their popularity, eventually exceeding Kraków and spreading all over Poland. Considering the management of art institutions, the situation in other cities was similar. Apart from artists, the first board of directors of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw included the so-called art lovers: Baron Edward Rastawiecki, Count Stanisław Zamoyski, and Count Aleksander Przezdziecki.23 The first president of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Poznań, established rather late, was Count Ignacy Bniński of Pietronki,24 and in Lviv, Count Leszek Dunin-Borkowski,25 It should be noted, however, that in other cities in the Polish lands the dominance of the aristocracy in the political, economic and cultural sphere was not as strong and clear as in Kraków. Presentations of European Post-Impressionist paintings held in Polish cities, e.g. at Krywult’s Salon in Warsaw at the beginning of the twentieth century, passed unnoticed, while two canvases by Paul Gauguin shown at an exhibition of Władysław Ślewiński’s works in 1905 were met with “protest and malicious

23 24 25

Pozaekonomiczne czynniki rozwoju Krakowa w okresie autonomii galicyjskiej, Kraków: Znak, 1992. The author argues that aristocratic families in Galicia had a privileged economic position until the outbreak of the First World War. Not only did they own huge estates, but also invested in mines and steel mills, financed the construction of railway lines, controlled banks and credit societies, maintained conservative magazines and sponsored many other ventures. During the period of Galician autonomy, aristocrats moved to Krakow not only from Galicia, but also from the lands of the other partitions. It is estimated that around 1880 there were over 200 landed gentry families permanently residing in Kraków. See J. M. Małecki, ‘Elity majątkowe w dawnym Krakowie’, in Jan M. Małecki (ed.) Pałace miejskie Krakowa. Materiały sesji naukowej odbytej 18 maja 2002 roku, Kraków: Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa, 2003, pp., 20. J. Wiercińska, ‘Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie’, in A. Wojciechowski (ed.), Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1890–1914, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1967, p. 170. I. Moderska, ‘Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Poznaniu’, in A. Wojciechowski (ed.), Polskie życie artystyczne, pp. 175–177. Z. Baranowicz, ‘Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych we Lwowie’, in: A. Wojciechowski (ed.), Polskie życie artystyczne, p. 177.

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remarks”.26 The only Polish collectors of Impressionist or Post-Impressionist works were individuals living abroad; and very often directly connected with the Parisian art world, such as publishers Adam and Aleksander Natanson,27 writer Gabriela Zapolska,28 and painter Władysław Ślewiński.29 To conclude, aristocrats were interested in contemporary art, but only in the art that carried the notions they regarded as key ones at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: durability and continuity, and stemming from artistic tradition. At that time, art considered as innovative – at first the art of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and later of the avant-garde, symbolised novelty, change and progress. The new art attracted the interest of the new bourgeoisie, which grew in strength and wealth and which began to dominate in some European cities. List of References Baranowicz, Zofia. ‘Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych we Lwowie (Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Lviv)’, in Aleksander Wojciechowski (ed.), Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1890–1914, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1967, pp. 177–179. Beckett, John Vincent. The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Berbelska, Dorota. Kacprzak, Dariusz (eds.). Ze zbiorów Henryka Grohmana. Grafika i rzemiosło artystyczne, exhibition catalogue, Muzeum Sztuki (Łódź), Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 1997. 26

M.  Płażewska, ‘Warszawski Salon Aleksandra Krywulta (1880–1906), Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, 10 (1966), pp. 332–333; S. Bołdok, Smak artystyczny Polaków w kontekście rynku sztuki, in J. Poklewski, T. F. de Rosset (eds.), Rozważania o smaku artystycznym, Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2002, p. 301. 27 T. F. de Rosset, Polskie kolekcje i zbiory artystyczne we Francji w latach 1795–1919. Między “skarbnicą narodową” a galerią sztuki, Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2005, pp. 257 – 260. 28 I.  Danielewicz, ‘Kolekcja Gabrieli Zapolskiej’, in M.  Poprzęcka (ed.), Ars longa. Prace dedykowane pamięci profesora Jana Białostockiego, Warszawa: Arx Regia, 1999, pp. 421–439. 29 Interest in European art of the new directions on Polish lands manifested itself only in graphic arts collections (i.e. financially less expensive, more intimate and less accessible to the public), among others in the collection of the Łódź industrialist Henryk Grohman. See ‘Henryk Grohman i jego kolekcja grafiki europejskiej i polskiej przełomu XIX i XX wieku’, in E. Frąckowiak, A. Grochala (eds.), Polskie kolekcjonerstwo grafiki. Ludzie i instytucje, Warszawa: Neriton, 2008, pp. 128–137; D. Berbelska, D. Kacprzak (eds.), Ze zbiorów Henryka Grohmana. Grafika i rzemiosło artystyczne, exhibition catalogue, Muzeum Sztuki (Łódź), Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 1997.

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Biedermann, Heike. ‘Die Sammlungen Adolf Rothermundt und Oscar Schmitz in Dresden’, in Aandrea Pophanken, Felix Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler. Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2001, pp. 209–234. Bimbirytė-Mackevičienė, Aistė. Vakarų Europos Dailė Lietuvos Kolekcijose XIX Amžiuje Ir Grafas Vladislovas Tiškevičius (Western European Fine Arts in Lithuanian. Collections in the 19th Century and Count Władysław Tyszkiewicz), PhD diss., Vilnius, Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2019: https://vb.vda.lt/object/elaba:40978759/40978759. pdf (accessed 20 May 2020). Bodesohn-Voggel, Inge. Morozov and Shchukin – the Russian collectors. Monet to Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Museum Folkwang (Essen), Cologne: DuMont, 1993. Boime, Albert. ‘Les hommes d’affaires et les arts en France au XIXeme siècle’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 28 (1979), pp. 66–70. Bołdok, Sławomir. Smak artystyczny Polaków w kontekście rynku sztuki, in Józef Poklewski, Tomasz Feliks de Rosset (eds.), Rozważania o smaku artystycznym, Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2002. Cariou, André. Lucien Simon, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts de Quimper, Quimper: Éditions Palantines, 2006. Cohen, Aaron J. ‘Making modern art Russian. Artists, Moscow politics and the Tretiakov Gallery during the First World War’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14.2 (2002), pp. 271–281. Danielewicz, Iwona. ‘Kolekcja Gabrieli Zapolskiej’, in Maria Poprzęcka (ed.), Ars longa. Prace dedykowane pamięci profesora Jana Białostockiego. Warszawa: Arx Regia, 1999, pp. 421–439. Defer, Pierre-Francois. Catalogue général des ventes publiques depuis 1737 jusqu’à nos jours, Paris: Chez Aubry, 1865 (and its subsequent updated renewals). Delille, Gérard (ed.). Les noblesses européennes au XIXe siècle. Actes du colloque. Rome 21–23 novembre 1985, Rome: École Française de Rome, 1988. Distel, Anne. Les collectionneurs des impressionists. Amateurs et marchands, Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1989. Eudel, Paul. Collections et collectionneurs, Paris: G. Charpentier, 1885. Eudel, Paul. Hôtel Drouot en 1881, vol. 1, Paris: G.  Charpentier, 1882 (and subsequent volumes). Gary, Marie-Noël de (ed.). Musée Nissim de Camondo. La demeure d’un collectionneur, Paris: Les Arts Décoratifs – UCAD, 2007. Gaudichon, Bruno. Des amitiés modernes De Rodin à Matisse. Carolus-Duran et la Société nationale des beaux-arts 1890–1905, exhibition catalogue, La Piscine, Musée d’art et d’industrie de Roubaix (Roubaix), Paris: Somogy, 2003.

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Gray, Rosalind Polly. ‘Muscovite patrons of European painting. The collections of Vasily Kokorev, Dmitry Botkin and Sergei Tretyakow’, Journal of the History of Collections, 10. 2 (1998), pp. 189–198. Grodzinski, Veronica. ‘Collecting against the grain’, Jewish Quarterly, 53.2 (2006), pp. 38–42. Grodzinski, Veronica. ‘The art dealer and collector as visionary. Discovering Vincent van Gogh in Wilhelmine Germany 1900–1914’, Journal of the History of Collections, 21.2 (2009), pp. 221–228. Grodzinski, Veronica. ‘Longing and Belonging. French Impressionism and Jewish Patronage’, in Gideon Reuveni, Nills H. Roemer (eds.), Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010, pp. 91–112. Kean, Beverly Whitney. All the empty Palaces. The merchant patrons of Modern Art in Pre-revolutionary Russia, London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1993. Kłudkiewicz, Kamila. Wybór i konieczność. Kolekcje arystokracji polskiej w Wielkopolsce na przełomie XIX i XX wieku (Choice and Necessity. Collections of the Polish Aristocracy in Wielkopolska at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries), Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza (Adam Mickiewicz University Press), 2016. Köpeczi, Bela. Balázs, Eva  H. (ed.), Noblesse française, noblesse hongroise XVIe–XIXe siècles, Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1981. Kuhrau, Sven. Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich. Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsamllerkultur, Kiel: Ludwig, 2005. Long, Véronique. Mécènes des deux mondes. Les collectionneurs donateurs du Louvre et de l’Art Institute de Chicago, 1879–1940, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007. Małecki, Jan M. ‘Elity majątkowe w dawnym Krakowie’, in Jan M. Małecki (ed.) Pałace miejskie Krakowa. Materiały sesji naukowej odbytej 18 maja 2002 roku, Kraków: Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa, 2003, pp. 7–22. Michel, André. ‘Les arts à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. L’exposition centennale. La peinture française (cinquième et dernier article)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 10. 521 (1900), pp. 463–482. Michel, André. ‘Les arts à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. L’Exposition decennale. La peinture française’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 12.522 (1900), pp. 527–536. Moderska, Irena. ‘Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Poznaniu’, in Aleksander Wojciechowski (ed.), Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1890–1914, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1967, pp. 175–177. Palica, Magdalena. Od Delacroix do Van Gogha. Żydowskie kolekcje sztuki w dawnym Wrocławiu, Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT, 2010.

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Płażewska, Magdalena. ‘Warszawski Salon Aleksandra Krywulta (1880–1906)’, Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, 10 (1966), pp. 332–333. Pomian, Krzysztof. ‘Collections: une typologie historique’, Romantisme, 112 (2001), pp. 9–22. Ponthus, Anne-Franҫoise. Autour de la Société Nouvelle: un reseau artistique et amical à Paris au debut du vingtième siècle (1900–1914), PhD diss., Paris: Paris  I Pantheon-Sorbonne University, 2006. Pophanken, Andrea. ‘Auf der Ersten Kennerblick hin. Die Sammlung Carl und Thea Sternheim in München’, in Andrea Pophanken, Felix Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler. Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2001, pp. 114–134. Purchla, Jacek. Matecznik Polski. Pozaekonomiczne czynniki rozwoju Krakowa w okresie autonomii galicyjskiej, Kraków: Znak, 1992. Raczyński, Edward Aleksander. Count Edward Aleksander Raczyński’s letter to Stanisław Witkiewicz, 1901, Kraków, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Inv. No. 6829 II, p. 111. Reif, Heinz. Adel im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012. Rosset, Tomasz Feliks de. Polskie kolekcje i zbiory artystyczne we Francji w latach 1795– 1919. Między “skarbnicą narodową” a galerią sztuki, Toruń: Wydawnictwo Nukowe Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 2005. Rovers, Eva. ‘Introduction: The art collector-between philantropy and self-glorification’, Journal of the History of Collections, 21.2 (2009), pp. 157–161. Rudzińska, Wanda Maria. ‘Henryk Grohman i jego kolekcja grafiki europejskiej i polskiej przełomu XIX i XX wieku (Henryk Grohman and his Collection of European and Polish Prints from the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries)’, in Ewa Frąckowiak, Anna Grochala (eds.), Polskie kolekcjonerstwo grafiki. Ludzie i instytucje, Warszawa: Neriton, 2008, pp. 128–137. Semionova, Natalya. Kostenevitch, Aalbert. Matisse et la Russie, Paris: Editions Flammarion, 1993. Tolède-Léon, Olivia. ‘Le Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts comme lieu d’épanouissement du mécènat privé dans les années 1890’, in James Kearns, Pierre Vaisse, (eds.), ‘Ce Salon à quoi tout se ramène’, Le Salon de peinture et de sculpture, 1791–1890, Oxford: Pater Lang, 2010, pp. 101–116. Urquízar-Herrera, Antonio. ‘Memory and taste in the collections and households of the Spanish nobility (nineteenth and early twentieth centuries): an introduction to the topic with some notes on the house of Osuna and the origins of the period room’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 25.2 (2019), pp. 181–209: DOI: 10.1080/14701847.2019.1632028. Wasson, Ellis. Aristocracy and the modern Word, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

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Wiercińska, Janina. ‘Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie’, in Aleksander Wojciechowski (ed.), Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1890–1914, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1967, pp. 170–175. Ziegler, Hendrik. ‘Emil Heilbut, ein früher Apologet Claude Monets’, in Andrea Pophanken, Felix Billeter (eds.), Die Moderne und Ihre Sammler. Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001, pp. 41–65.

Fig. 3.1

Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Wladimir Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Nikolay Konradi, 1890, Photo Studio of V. V. Barkanov (Tiflis), Russian National Museum of Music, Moscow © Russian National Museum of Music, Moscow.

Chapter 3

An Enlightened Amateur: Prince Wladimir Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff (1874–1941): A Private Collector in St. Petersburg at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Maria Ponomarenko December 9th, 2021 marked the eightieth anniversary of the death of Prince Wladimir Nikolayevich Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, who assembled in his St. Petersburg apartment a large collection of Old Masters’ drawings, Russian paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as porcelain. After the Russian Revolution, he emigrated to France and became a notable figure in the Paris collecting world. Born in Georgia into an Armenian family, Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff had a Russified name.1 He belonged to many cultural contexts, and yet to none. His place in the cultural life of St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century can be identified through his art collecting practice – a diversion that became the central concern of his life. Although before his emigration to the West around 1920 Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff was already well known as an art collector, and the lives of others in his circle – not least Alexandre Benois and Serge Diaghilev – have been studied in depth, he himself has drawn relatively little attention. This paper sheds light on some aspects of his biography and considers how the collecting of art may have helped Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff to construct a new identity and negotiate his position as one of St. Petersburg’s most respected connoisseurs and collectors; and this despite being an outsider in terms of his ethnicity and peripheral origins.

Сonstructing a Collector’s Identity

The role of collecting in shaping identity has been addressed in an increasing number of interdisciplinary studies over the past thirty years; having said that, 1 He is thus most widely known by the French spelling of his Russian surname. Alternative spellings include Vladimir Nikolaevich Argutinsky-Dolgorukov.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_004

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there has been a clear shift in the research focus away from psychoanalytic studies of collectors’ motives to the empirical study of objects in identity presentation and group membership. In one such study, Andrew Dillon describes the desire to be “accepted by a group of others” as one of the motivations for collecting;2 the acquisition and possession of artefacts allowing the collector to shape their identity in order to fit in. In addition, Dillon (quoting Helga Dittmar’s book on the social psychology of material possessions, 1992) mentions the significance of collecting “as a means of social location (the placement of self within a network of groups in society)”.3 Within the framework of this theoretical approach, analysis of Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff’s collecting practices proves to be particularly rewarding. Wladimir Nikolayevich was born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) on March 24, 1874, to City Mayor and State Councillor, Prince Nikolay ArgoutinskyDolgoroukoff and his wife Princess Maria Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff (née Mirzoyan), heiress to a large oil company. He had four siblings: two brothers and two sisters. The origin of their family name has deep roots in Armenian history while their Princely title was granted by Russian Emperor Paul  I in 1800, as commemorated in the first letter of the name of Paul I, placed in the center of the Maltese cross in the middle of the family coat of arms. As a wealthy and aristocratic Armenian, Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff belonged to a layer of society that was separate from the life of the local Georgian population in Tiflis. From childhood, the young Prince was exposed to a culture of philanthropy and charitable works. His parents were avid donors to and supporters of different social initiatives. In 1900, for example, his father donated 300 rubles for the construction of the ‘People’s House’ in Tiflis and founded a school for children with disabilities. Such practice was common among the Armenian bourgeoisie at the turn of the twentieth century. It was also through his father that Argoutinsky first encountered the practice of collecting, for Prince Nikolay was a great bibliophile; he had a rich library of nearly 10,000 volumes, dominated by Caucasian studies. Today the library has been almost completely moved to Yerevan, where it forms a major part of the National Library of Armenia.4 2 A.  Dillon, ‘Collecting as Routine Human Behavior: Personal Identity and Control in the Material and Digital World’, Information & Culture, 54.3 (2019), pp.  255–280: https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/336587786_Collecting_as_routine_human_behavior_ motivations_for_identity_and_control_in_the_material_and_digital_world (accessed 23 September 2021); H. Dittmar, The Social Psychology Of Material Possessions: To Have Is To Be, New York, St. Martin’s Press, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. 3 Dillon, ‘Collecting as Routine’, p. 267. 4 In 1920 the heirs of Prince Nikolay Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff sold the collection of manuscripts and books to the government of Armenia to raise money to emigrate to Paris.

An Enlightened Amateur: Prince W. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff

Fig. 3.2

47

Ivan Argunov, Portrait of an Unknown Woman in a Dark Blue Dress, 1760, oil on canvas, 60 × 45, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Previously owned by W. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff.

As the son of the mayor of Tiflis, Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff came into contact with some of the most prominent members of the artistic world, not only local residents but visitors from the capital, St.  Petersburg. Composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky was one of them. A photograph dating from 1890, taken during the composer’s last visit to Tiflis, shows the young Prince alongside Tchaikovsky and Nikolay Konradi, the adopted son of the composer’s brother, Modest.

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I am not going to embark on unfounded speculation regarding ArgoutinskyDolgoroukoff’s relationship with Tchaikovsky, as there is no evidence for anything other than a warm friendship,5 but I must state here that there has been considerable discussion around the Prince’s sexuality. In the complete absence of any evidence regarding sexual preference (his case might productively be compared with that of Henry James), the question must remain an open one. But his acquaintance with the famous composer certainly played an important role in shaping the young Argoutinsky’s identity. For the 18-yearold student interested in art, who had moved from a distant province of the Russian Empire to the capital to study law at the Imperial University, the association with the Tchaikovsky brothers and their circle was certainly important in enabling him to assimilate into the artistic environment of St. Petersburg. On his arrival there in 1892, the Prince rented a room in Modest Tchaikovsky’s apartment; and the composer’s biographer Nina Berberova listed Argoutinsky as one of those who had been with Pyotr Tchaikovsky in the last days of his life (he died of cholera in 1893). It was while he was a student that the Prince met Serge Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois; and we can tell that he was perceived as an outsider from Benois’ surprise that there was “nothing typically oriental” in the manners and appearance of a young man so newly arrived from Georgia.6 It is clear that in order to be accepted in artistic circles and to overcome latent prejudice, Argoutinsky needed to stress his Europeanness. He constructed his image as a European intellectual using different tactics: firstly, his style (he ordered clothes in England and France during his travels in the late 1890s and early 1900s); secondly, his education (he studied art history in Paris, attending lectures by historian Salomon Reinach at the École du Louvre)7; thirdly, his hobbies (he attended drawing classes at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St. Petersburg).8 5 Their relationships could be illustrated, for instance, by an affectionate letter from Tchaikovsky to Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff dated 27  October / 8  November  1890. See  P.  Tchaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, Pis’ma, Vol. 14, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Muzikalnoye Izdatelstvo, 1974, p.  502: http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Letter_4242 (accessed 28 October 2021). 6 A. Benois, Moi vospominanija, Vol. 4–5, Moscow: Nauka, 1980, p. 334. 7 ‘Delo o sluzhbe khranitelya Wladimira Nikolayevicha Argutinskogo-Dolgorukova’ (File On The Service Of Curator W. N. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff), n.d., Department of Manuscripts and Documentary Fund of the State Hermitage Museum, Fund 1, Inventory 13, Delo 43, p. 1. 8 ‘Prosheniye kn. W.  N.  Argutinskogo-Dolgorukova razreshit’ yemu postupit’ v risoval’nuyu shkolu pri IOPKH’ (Petition from W. N. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff to Allow him to Enter the Drawing School at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Arts), 1893, Central State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg, Fund 14, Inventory 3, Delo 28804, p. 46.

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Despite such efforts, Argoutinsky still found himself on the margins of the creative world of St. Petersburg. The situation changed when the Prince entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, moving to 11 Millionnaya Street in the very centre of the city at the beginning of 1900s in order to be closer to the General Staff building, where the Ministry was located. It was at this time that he began to seriously engage in collecting, initially with the aim of decorating his new accommodation “in the spirit of the old days”.9 While in fin de siècle Moscow the wealthy merchant class was developing a taste for the modern art of Matisse and Picasso, in St. Petersburg artists and collectors concentrated on the past – whether eighteenth-century France or the Dutch Golden Age. The “World of Art”, a group of artists and art historians who published a magazine of the same name (Mir iskusstva), established in 1898, at the centre of which were Benois and Diaghilev, were driven by the same retrospective, nostalgic tastes. They not only collected and organized exhibitions of the art of the past, but their own works of art often featured scenes from life in previous centuries. The Prince’s new hobby contributed to his rapprochement with members of the “World of Art”, many of whom were also collectors, not least the artists Konstantin Somov and Stepan Yaremich, Dr. Sergey S. Botkin and Alexandre Benois himself. They were united by a passion for the Old Masters’ drawings, porcelain figurines, miniatures and Russian art of the eighteenthth and first half of the nineteenth century. Benois recalled that in the early 1900s, Argoutinsky had gradually transformed into a true collector, one who was possessed by an all-consuming passion: “He wanted to collect everything that was possible, from pictures, drawings and all kinds of decorative trifles”.10 It is important to note that even once he was accepted in such circles, Argoutinsky stood out. He was an aristocrat and collector who joined not aristocratic court circles in the Russian capital, but the circle of middle-class creative intellectuals. He was one of very few aristocrats who found themselves a part of this dynamic world.

Becoming An Enlightened Amateur

Artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky was much impressed by this circle of enlightened amateurs, who met in the Prince’s apartment, where the latter created an atmosphere specifically intended to enhance the enjoyment of art: “I loved to be in his small apartment on Millionnaya st. […] The apartment was the height 9 Benois, Moi vospominanija, p. 337. 10 Benois, Moi vospominanija, p. 337.

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Fig. 3.3

Maria Ponomarenko

Edmé Bouchardon, Lantern Dealer, 1737–1746, sanguine on paper, 25 × 20, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Previously drawing was owned by Pierre-Jean Mariette, later acquired by W. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff.

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of grace, with excellent paintings, portraits and still lifes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hung on the walls, there was a mantelpiece with his famous porcelain in the corner, candles were burning in old candelabra and sconces. There was incredible chaos, with books, prints and folders in heaps everywhere; and it was a great pleasure to rummage through all of this”.11 New acquisitions by members of the circle were accompanied by discussions, advice and admiration. Collectors consulted and informed each other about new arrivals and finds in antique stores. Benois noted around 1910 that the Prince’s collection now consisted of some 1,895 items.12 On the eve of the First World War, Benois announced his plan to describe Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff’s extensive collection in the illustrated magazine Staryye gody (Days of Yore), which regularly published articles on private collections.13 Although this plan was not realized, it indicates the widespread recognition of the value of the Prince’s collection among his peers. It is Benois, again, who provides us with evidence of how Argoutinsky changed, how his engagement with the world of collecting made him ‘belong’. Constant communication with like-minded people shaped and polished his identity and, Benois tells us that his taste was thus refined; he lost his shyness and the remnants of his ‘provincialism’: “At first I personally only tolerated the presence of this nice, quiet, harmless, but, it seemed, not particularly interesting young man. But we became closer when I discovered in him something that might eventually turn him into a true lover of art, someone of benefit to Russian culture in general”.14 Argoutinsky’s service in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs clearly enhanced his reputation and advanced his position in St. Petersburg artistic society. As second secretary in the embassy in Paris, Prince helped to promote Serge Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons abroad. An example of such patronage is a story told by ballet dancer Serge Lifar. In 1909 Prince “saved the Diaghilev case”: when the impresario suddenly found himself without funding, the collector stood as guarantor for a large loan which helped Diaghilev to go abroad.15 11 12

M. Dobuzhinskiĭ, Vospominaniya, Moscow: Nauka, 1987, p. 209. A. Benois, Khudozhestvennyye Pis’ma 1908–1917, Rech, Vol. 1 (1908–1910), St. Petersburg: Sad Iskusstv, 2006, p. 309. 13 Staryye gody is a Russian magazine published in 1907–1916 in St. Petersburg. In his article about the collection of Stepan Yaremich Benois writes: ‘In the future we expect to acquaint the readers of the Staryye gody with the collection of Prince W. N. ArgoutinskyDolgoroukoff  …’. Cited  A.  Benois, ‘Sobraniye Risunkov  S.  P.  Yaremicha’, Staryye gody, (November, 1913), p. 6. 14 Benois, Moi vospominanija, p. 336. 15 In 1909 Serge Diaghilev was working on a new ballet production. With the assistance of prima-ballerina, Mathilde Kschessinska, the Government promised him a subsidy of 25,000 rubles and the opportunity to hold rehearsals in the Hermitage Theatre. However, the State withdrew its support on the death of Diaghilev’s patron, Grand Duke Vladimir

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Argoutinsky and Diaghilev had long been united by mutual respect and considerable trust in business matters16 and allegedly it was in conversation with Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff that Diaghilev had come up with the idea to create in Russia “something similar to the English ‘Studio’ i.e. the ‘World of Art’”.17 In the magazine’s editorial office Argoutinsky was always in the background, rarely taking part in discussions, but his taste and judgment were recognised by all. In 1908, Argoutinsky became a member of the unofficial ‘committee’ – made up of Diaghilev’s close friends – organizing the celebrated Ballets Russes.18 Perhaps influenced by his upbringing in Tbilisi, by his family’s charitable activities and a sense of a wider responsibility to society, Argoutinsky’s collecting went beyond purely personal significance. He became an important figure of the Russian cultural scene, a true connoisseur of Old Masters’ drawings, and indeed one of the most active collectors in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the twentieth century. But he also set himself another goal, which was to use his collection to enrich St. Petersburg’s museums. In one of his letters from 1912 he wrote: “I will never sell any of those things that belong in my mind to the Museum of Old Petersburg, the Museum of Alexander III [now the Russian Museum – M.P.] or the Hermitage.19 Never!”.20 He donated to or specifically Alexandrovich in February  1909, and in the wake of a quarrel between Diaghilev and Kschessinska. 16 An example’s contained in a letter to the Prince dated 13 January 1906. In it, Diaghilev writes that he couldn’t in any way get to Argoutinsky and therefore he requested a list of what the Prince thought should be exhibited at the upcoming Russian art exhibition, due to take place at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. In the catalog of the exhibition, the Prince is listed as a member of the organizing committee. He provided three painted portraits and 20 porcelain figurines from his collection for display. Diaghilev ended the letter with the phrase: “I absolutely trust your choice and soon I will send someone to pick up the paintings.” See Pis’mo S. P. Dyagileva V. N. Argutinskomu-Dolgorukomu (The Letter From S. P. Diaghilev To Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff), 13 January 1906, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow, Fund 1900, Inventory 1, Storage Unit 159. 17 Benois, Moi vospominanija, p. 194. 18 S. Scheijen, Sergey Dyagilev: Russkiye Sezony Navsegda, Moscow: Kolibri, Azbuka-Attikus, 2018, p. 216. 19 Argoutinsky was a member of the council of the Museum of Old Petersburg and in 1917 became a member of the council of the Art Department of the Russian Museum. At the end of 1918 collector was offered the post of Curator of the Hermitage’s Drawings Department. He will hold this position until 3 March 1920, the probable time of his emigration to France. See Delo o sluzhbe khranitelya Vladimira Nikolayevicha Argutinskogo-Dolgorukova (The Case Of The Service Of The Curator W. N. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff), n.d., Department of Manuscripts and Documentary Fund of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Fund 1, Inventory 13, Case 43. 20 Cited from N. Solomatina, ‘Sobraniye Risunka Knyazya V. N. Argutinskogo-Dolgorukova’, Kollektsii  I Kollektsionery. Sbornik Stateĭ Po Materialam Nauchnoĭ Konferentsii, Vol. 16, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2009, p. 133.

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bought works of art for the city’s museums, the largest such donation being a collection of 533 architectural drawings depicting the city that he presented to the Museum of Old Petersburg between late 1907 and 191721. The collector declared his intention of transferring his whole collection to St. Petersburg museums on his retirement or his death.22

Fig. 3.4

Abraham Bloemaert, Landscape with Herdsmen and Satan Sowing Tares, 1604, oil on canvas, 47,5 × 62,5, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Previously owned by W. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff.

In the end, his collection was indeed transferred to the city’s museums, but not in the way he had intended. After the Russian revolution, in 1917 Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff lodged his collection with the State Russian Museum for temporary storage. But when he did not return from a trip to France around 1920, it was nationalized and became a part of the State Museum Fund of the USSR. In 1929 and 1930, drawings from the collection were divided between two museums: the State Russian Museum and the State Hermitage. 21 22

G.  Vasil’yeva, K.  Zhitorchuk, E.  Kononenko, Kollektsiya Knyazya  V.  N.  Argutinskog o-Dolgorukova  V Sobranii Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt-Peterburga, St. Petersburg, State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, 2013, p. 15. Solomatina, ‘Sobraniye Risunka Knyazya’, p. 133.

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His paintings and porcelain were also scattered across museums throughout the Soviet Union.

Collector in Exile

In Paris, Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff settled near the Champs-Élysées at 7 rue François I, in an apartment he had rented before the war, continuing to collect but also dealing in works of art, which probably became his main source of income. In 1927, according to Konstantin Somov, Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff was planning to open his own antique shop.23 It seems to have been around 1917 that the Prince started to place a collector’s mark ‘L.2602d’ on drawings he had put up for sale at public auction24. Probably in doing so, he wanted to consolidate his position among European collectors, and make his collector’s mark a guarantee of the quality of the drawings passing through his hands. But it was also a way of indicating that he belonged to the wider community of collectors of drawings, of elite connoisseurs in Europe. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff died in Nazi-occupied Paris on December 9, 1941. When Nina Berberova visited the Prince in 1936, she confirmed his activities as a dealer: “Up until the end of his life he was engaged in dealing in ‘Russian antiques’. He was not tall, but still beautiful. There was something special about his dealings with people, old-fashioned, but never ridiculous. He told me that now he was a ‘junk dealer’ but once he had been a ‘collector’”.25 List of References Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Wladimir Nikolaevitch. Prosheniye kn. W.  N.  ArgutinskogoDolgorukova razreshit’ yemu postupit’ v risoval’nuyu shkolu pri IOPKH (The Petition Of  W.  N.  Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff to Allow him to Enter the Drawing School at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Arts), 1893, Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg, Fund 14, Inventory 3, Case 28804. 23 24 25

K. Somov, Dnevnik, 1926–1927, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Dmitriĭ Sechin, 2019, p. 366. F. Lugt, ‘Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Wladimir Nikolaevitch’, Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d’Estampes, Fondation Custodia: http://www.marquesdecollections.fr/detail. cfm/marque/9747/total/1 (accessed 28 October 2021). N. Berberova, Tchaikovsky, St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 1997, p. 14.

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Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Wladimir Nikolaevitch. Pis’mo S.  P.  Dyagileva  V.  N. Argutinskomu-Dolgorukomu (The Letter From  S.  P.  Diaghilev  To ArgoutinskyDolgoroukoff), 13 January 1906, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow, Fund 1900, Inventory 1, Storage Unit 159. Benois, Alexandre. Khudozhestvennyye Pis’ma 1908–1917, Rech, Vol. 1 (1908–1910), St. Petersburg: Sad Iskusstv, 2006. Benois, Alexandre. ‘Sobraniye Risunkov  S.  P.  Yaremicha’, Staryye gody, (November, 1913), pp. 3–27. Benois, Alexandre. Moi Vospominanija, Vol. 4–5, Moscow: Nauka, 1980. Berberova, Nina. Tchaikovsky, St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 1997. Delo o sluzhbe khranitelya Vladimira Nikolayevicha Argutinskogo-Dolgorukova (The Case Of The Service Of The Curator  W.  N.  Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff), n.d., Department of Manuscripts and Documentary Fund of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Fund 1, Inventory 13, Case 43. Dillon, Andrew. ‘Collecting as Routine Human Behavior: Personal Identity and Control in the Material and Digital World’, Information & Culture, 54.3 (2019), pp. 255–280: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336587786_Collecting_as_routine_ human_behavior_motivations_for_identity_and_control_in_the_material_and_ digital_world (accessed 23 September 2021). Dittmar, Helga. The Social Psychology Of Material Possessions: To Have Is To Be, New York, St. Martin’s Press, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Dobuzhinskiĭ, Mstislav. Vospominaniya, Moscow: Nauka, 1987. Lugt, Frits. ‘Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Wladimir Nikolaevitch’, Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d’Estampes, Fondation Custodia: http://www.marquesde collections.fr/detail.cfm/marque/9747/total/1 (accessed 28 October 2021). Scheijen, Sjeng. Sergey Dyagilev: Russkiye Sezony Navsegda, Moscow: Kolibri, AzbukaAttikus, 2018. Solomatina, Natalia. ‘Sobraniye Risunka Knyazya  V.  N.  Argutinskogo-Dolgorukova’, Kollektsii  I Kollektsionery. Sbornik Stateĭ Po Materialam Nauchnoĭ Konferentsii, Vol. 16, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2009, pp. 133–142. Somov, Konstantin. Dnevnik, 1926–1927, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Dmitriĭ Sechin, 2019. Tchaikovsky, Piotr. Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, Pis’ma, Vol. 14, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Muzikalnoye Izdatelstvo, 1974: http://en.tchaikovsky-research. net/pages/Letter_4242 (accessed 28 October 2021). Vasil’yeva, Galina. Zhitorchuk, Konstantin. Kononenko, Eelena. Kollektsiya Knya zya  V.  N.  Argutinskogo-Dolgorukova  V Sobranii Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt-Peterburga, St. Petersburg: State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, 2013.

Fig. 4.1

Raimundo de Madrazo, María del Rosario Falcó y Osorio, 1881, oil on canvas, 117 × 217, Liria Palace, Madrid © Fundación Casa de Alba, Madrid.

Chapter 4

Collecting and Recollecting: Recuperating Family Memory in the House of Alba Whitney Dennis María del Rosario Falcó y Osorio (1854–1904), Countess of Siruela and Duchessconsort of Alba, was a woman of boundless intellectual appetite and also of extraordinary sensitivity to the value of the documental and artistic collections of the House of Alba. In addition to researching and cataloguing the family’s archive and art collection, she also rearranged the display of paintings in several rooms of Liria Palace. These spaces, ostensibly celebrated family splendour, historic feats and artistic patronage, but discreetly represented a preoccupation with restoring dispersed patrimony. These rooms would be the foundation of the musealization of the collection, and the ideals that inspired them – restoration and family memory – would define collecting priorities for the next generation. Her son, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart, the 17th Duke of Alba (1878–1953), inherited her passion for both the archive and art collection as well as the sense of obligation to restore and preserve. He continued his mother’s cultural initiatives and expanded on the museographic narratives she had set in place. The influence of Rosario Falcó is fundamental to the history of the Alba collection – its dissemination, display, and its endurance into the twentieth century.

Rosario Falcó y Osorio, 21st Countess of Siruela

In 1854, María del Pilar Osorio, Duchess of Fernán-Núñez, and Manuel Falcó d’Adda, Marquis of Almonacir, had their first child, María del Rosario Falcó y Osorio, the 21st Countess of Siruela (Fig. 4.1). Rosario grew up immersed in the Fernán-Núñez’s appreciation for languages, literature, history, and art, benefitting from a more extensive education than was typical for a lady of her

* Research for this article was carried out within the framework of the project: Politics for the Legitimation of Nobility: Similarities, dissimilarities, and appropriations in the collecting of the nobility and bourgeoise (1788–1931), PID2019-107636GA-100.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_005

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class at the time.1 In December of 1877, she married the 16th Duke of Huéscar, Carlos María Fitz-James y Portocarrero, the first-born son of Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Ventimiglia, the 15th Duke of Alba, and María Francisca de Sales y Portocarrero, the 9th Countess of Montijo. Rosario became “a defining person in the evolution of the House of Alba, bringing ideas and examples from the House of Fernán-Núñez, one of the best-managed noble houses in Spain, to Liria Palace”.2 In 1877, likely beset by financial troubles, the 15th Duke of Alba organized the sale of engravings, paintings, and tapestries at an auction which took place in the Hôtel Drouot in Paris.3 While it is possible that some of these objects were not sold, there is evidence to suggest that several pieces were recuperated by way of the mediation of a family member.4 The 17th Duke of Alba, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, clarified that the mysterious intercession had at least in part been the work of his maternal grandfather, the Duke of Fernán-Núñez, who had saved several ‘jewels’ of the collection from the sale thanks to the intervention of Rosario: 1 A. Salvador Benitez, ‘Mujeres a bordo’, in J. M. Sánchez Vigil (ed.), El viaje del Thistle. Diarios a bordo, Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 2020, p. 49. On the collecting and artistic policies of the House of Fernán-Núñez, see J. Vigara Zafra, ‘Arte y cultura nobiliaria en la Casa de Fernán-Núñez (1700–1850)’, PhD diss., Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2015. 2 Salvador Benitez, ‘Mujeres a bordo’, p. 50. 3 C. Blanc, Collection de S. A. Le Duc de Berwick et d’Albe. Tableaux de Velazquez, Murillo, Rubens. 75 Tapisseries de premier ordre en partie tissées d’or et d’argent. Expositions et ventes, Paris, 1877. On the auction, see G. Redín Michaus, ‘Murillo y la Colección de Alba en el siglo XIX: de la compra de un San Roque en Nápoles en 1816 a la subasta del retrato del canónigo Miranda’, in B. Navarrete Prieto (ed.), Murillo ante su IV centenario. Perspectivas historiográficas y culturales, Seville: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, ICAS, 2018, pp. 381–88; M. Á. Zalama, M. J. Martínez Ruíz, ‘Flemish Tapestries of the Alba Family’, in Fernando Checa Cremades (ed.), Treasures of the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting, exhibition catalogue, Meadows Museum (Dallas), Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 2015, pp. 270–77. 4 Redín Michaus, ‘Murillo’, p. 388; Zalama (et al.), ‘Flemish Tapestries’, p. 276; M. Del Valme Muñoz, ‘La historia recuperada. Vicisitudes del palacio de Liria durante la Guerra Civil española’, in Colección Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla (Seville), Seville: Junta de Andalucía: 2009, pp. 109–110; J. R. Triadó, ‘El arte en las colecciones de la Casa de Alba’, in El arte en las colecciones de la Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación Caja de Pensiones (Madrid), Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Pensiones, 1987, p. 54. Del Valme Muñoz and Triadó mentioned that the Eugénie de Montijo intervened in the sale to bring some pieces back to Madrid, although this author has been unable to confirm this. However, the 17th Duke of Alba did sustain that the Empress helped his grandfather in ‘otro apuro anterior’ forwarding capital to pay a debt to Credit Foncier. See Archive of the Dukes of Alba (ADA), Fondo Don Jacobo, Memorias, p. 22.

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And it could have all been [sold] if it had not been for my mother, newly married, who, thanks to her father’s help, was able to save some of the most important treasures, like the Grand Duke tapestries.5

As Duchess of Alba from 1881, Rosario dedicated herself entirely to the project of “recovering the value and prestige of the house and improving its administration”.6 As Salvador Benítez explained, her work in the archive was central to this project of reconstruction.7 Rosario’s correspondence with her ‘consejillo’ and other scholars, such as Henry Harisse, Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Antonio Sánchez Moguel, or Manuel Serrano y Sanz, testifies to her extensive knowledge of history; and to her keen interest, insatiable curiosity, and diligent work ethic.8 She published four books: Documentos escogidos del archivo de la Casa de Alba (1891); Autógrafos de Cristobal Colón y Papeles de América (1892); Catálogo de las colecciones expuestas en las Vitrinas (1898); Nuevos autógrafos de Cristobal Colón y Relaciones de Ultramar (1902). She also worked on a catalogue of paintings; although it would not be published until 1911, seven years after her death.9 Rosario’s work with the art collection was accompanied by its rearrangement. She oversaw the installation of tapestries in the dining room, and assembled a magnificent, musealized display of historic documents that was complemented by an exhibition of paintings in a salón de vitrinas (Fig. 4.2).10 This investigation presents the hypothesis that she was also involved in the design of the salón del Gran Duque, one of the most emblematic spaces of Liria Palace.

5 6 7

ADA, Fondo Don Jacobo, Memorias, p. 18. Salvador Benitez, ‘Mujeres a bordo’, p. 50. Salvador Benitez, ‘Mujeres a bordo’, p. 50. On her work in the archive, see J. M. Calderón Ortega, ‘El archivo de la Casa de Alba: Pasado y presente’, in N. Ávila Seoane, J. C. Galende Díaz, S. Cabezas Fontanilla (eds.), Paseo documental por el Madrid de antaño, Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Fundación Hospital de San José de Getafe, 2015, pp. 79–100. 8 ADA, 286.7. The consejillo worked with Rosario on her research. It consisted of Remón Zarco del Valle, the group’s president and director of the Royal Library, Antonio Paz y Mélia, director of the Mansucripts Section of the Spanish National Library, and Ángel María Barcia, director of the Prints Section of the Spanish National Library. See Calderón Ortega, ‘El Archivo de la Casa de Alba’, p. 86. Her son recalls his mother working daily with Antonio Paz. See ADA, Fondo Don Jacobo, Memorias, p. 15. 9 Á. M. Barcia y Pavón, Catálogo de La Colección de Pinturas Del Excmo. Sr. Duque de Alba, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1911. 10 Catálogo de las colecciones expuestas en las vitrinas del palacio de Liria, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1898; ADA, Fondo Don Jacobo, pp. 17–19.

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Rosario working in the salón de vitrinas in Liria Palace, 1893, Madrid. Courtesy of the Archive of the Dukes of Alba (ADA) © Fundación Casa de Alba.

These arrangements would pay special attention to the pieces that had been recovered from the auction, and would lay the groundwork for collecting in future generations. The dining room saw the first renovation, where Rosario ordered the installation of the Las Indias tapestry series.11 Although the tapestries do not appear in the Drouot catalogue, Redín pointed out that they are listed in Guiffery’s Histoire de la tapisserie in 1886 as having been sold to the Baron Friedrich Erlanger in 1877 for 24,500 francs.12 This would be an early expression of a budding narrative of the recovery of patrimony. In 1891, she put a selection of documents on display in vitrines, an idea which she had considered from the beginning of her research, and the contents of

11 ADA, Fondo Don Jacobo, p. 18. 12 Blanc, Collection de S. A. Le Duc. On the sale prices, see: J. Guiffrey, Histoire de la tapisserie depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à nos jours, Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils, 1886, p.  492. Cited in G. Redín Michaus, Nobleza y Coleccionismo de Tapices Entre La Edad Moderna y Contemporánea: Las Casas de Alba y Denia Lerma, Madrid: Arco Libros, S.L., 2018, pp. 34–35. Baron Erlanger was the principal buyer at the sale, which took place in 1877. Zalama (et al.), ‘Flemish Tapestries’, p. 278.

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which were published in 1898.13 Documental traces of the Alba estate’s most illustrious ancestors were displayed, musealizing the evidence of the Alba family’s virtues, their role in Spanish history, and their tradition of artistic patronage, which was reinforced with an accompanying exhibition that featured 53 paintings.14 An article in the press describes the paintings that hung there: Adding character to the room, notable paintings of the collection stand out against the crimson upholstery, perfectly varnished and with their old frames perfectly restored. There, a magnificent portrait by Murillo; a Holy Family by Perugino, worthy of hanging in a museum; a splendid Rubens and paintings by Teniers, Wouwermans and other Flemish painters. The curtains, as in nearly all palaces, are Flemish tapestries.15

The first three paintings that caught the journalist’s attention occupied the foremost positions in the gallery, and were also the first three listed on a document that Rosario must have come across in her archival research: an inventory of los mejores cuadros de la Galería de la Casa del Excmo. D. Jacobo Stuart y Ventimiglia Duque de Berwick y de Alba.16 In 1868, Isidoro Brun – nineteenthcentury painter, art restorer, and collector – completed this list of just 67 paintings, selected for their economic and aesthetic value, and which were hidden during the revolution of 1868.17 The highest appraised painting, at a substantial 13 ‘Necrología de Antonio Paz y Mélia’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia (B.R.A.H.), Vol. 90, Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1927, pp.  249–252. [50] in Calderón Ortega, ‘El Archivo de la Casa de Alba’, pp. 85, 87; Duquesa de Berwick y Alba, Catálogo de Las Colecciones Expuestas En Las Vitrinas Del Palacio de Liria; Madrid: Sucesores de Rivedeneyra, 1898. 14 On the musealization of noble collections, see A.  Urquízar-Herrera, J.  A.  Vigara  Zafra, ‘La nobleza española y Francia en el cambio de sistema artístico 1700–1850’, in L. Sazatornil Ruíz, F. Jiméno (eds.), El arte español en Roma y París (siglos XVIII y XIX), Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2014, pp 257–274; J. A. Vigara Zafra, ‘The Diputación de La Grandeza and the Organization of Retrospective Art Exhibitions in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 25.5 (2019), pp. 255–274. 15 Mascarilla, ‘Las audiencias de la emperatriz’, La Época, 19.408, 1 June 1904. 16 ADA, 197.21. 17 For the 1868 inventory of ‘mejores cuadros’, see ADA. 197.21. Another note in the archive of Liria Palace refers to their hiding Tasación hecha por Isidoro Brun de los mejores cuadros en número de 67 que se ocultaron cuando la revolución, with the total sum of 2 879 000 reales, the same as the 1868 appraisal. Valuations vary from 300 000 reales to 6 000 reales. The list is not limited to only the paintings of highest value, reflecting the double criteria of economic and aesthetic value. ADA, 209.5. On Isidoro Brun, see: O. Lavit, ‘La colección de dibujos franceses de Isidoro Brun (1819–1898) en el Museo del Prado’, Boletín del Museo del Prado, 35.53 (2017), pp. 98–112.

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300,000 reales, was the portrait of don Juan Antonio de Miranda y Ramírez de Vergara by Murillo, followed by The Holy Family by Perugino, at 280,000 reales, and Rubens’ Way to the Market, at 260,000 reales.18 The majority of the paintings in the gallery can be identified by photographs and Rosario’s sketches and notes on the design of the room.19 The remaining paintings were either from the list of ‘mejores cuadros’, or gifts from close relations, or purchases made by the 16th Duke and Duchess of Alba – manifestations of the continuing tradition of collecting.20 The portrait of Juan Antonio de Miranda by Murillo and the Way to the Market by Rubens were also two of the paintings that were recovered from the 1877 sale. The Murillo was saved by an unnamed family member.21 It seems that the Way to the Market was indeed sold, purchased in 1878 by the same Duke who had put it up for auction in 1877. The 15th Duke bought the painting in Paris for 23,000 francs.22 Coincidentally, this was the same price as its final asking price in the 1877 auction.23 The first reference to the salón del gran duque is a photograph dated 1893 (Fig. 4.3).24 No known catalogue or inventory prior to this date mentions this room. This fact, together with Rosario’s interest in the Grand Duke, and her father’s rescue of the tapestries makes it likely that she was involved with the design of this space as well. Even if this salón did exist prior to 1893, it would not have had the same appearance as that seen in the photograph, as the portrait attributed to Titian displayed in 1893 was previously in a different location.25 18 ADA, 197.21. At the time, the sitter of the Murillo portrait was associated with Gaspar Esteban or Gabriel, the painter’s sons, but has been identified as Juan Antonio de Miranda y Ramírez de Vergara. See M. Del Valme Muñoz, ‘Don Juan Antonio de Miranda y Ramírez de Vergara’ in Colección Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla (Seville), Seville: Junta de Andalucía: 2009, p. 262. 19 ADA, 286.7. 20 The Old Man and the Maid by David Teniers and the Battle of Saint Quentin by Luca Giordano were gifts from the Empress Eugénie de Montijo to the 16th Duke of Alba; and the Jesus with Lamb by Bernardo Luini, but then attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was a gift from Rosario’s father, the Duke of Fernán-Núñez. The Annunciation by the Maestro de Virgo Inter Virgenes, was purchased by the 16th Duke of Alba. See Barcia, Catálogo, pp. 7, 113, 140, 192. 21 Redín Michaus, ‘Murillo’, p. 388. 22 Rooses, Max. L’Oeuvre de P.P.  Rubens, histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, Antwerp, 1886–1892, Vol. 4, p. 383, no. 1199 in M. Díaz Padrón, ‘Camino del Mercado(el verano)’, P. Melendo (ed.), El legado de la Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, CentroCentro (Madrid), Madrid: TF Editores, 2012, p. 136. 23 See Redín Michaus, ‘Nobleza’, p.  34. On the purchase in 1878, see Rooses, ‘L’Oeuvre de P. P. Rubens’, p. 383, no. 1199. 24 ADA, Fondo artístico, Material gráfico. 25 ADA, 197.21. It appears several times in an 1882 catalogue, and may have been in a salón estucado, cuarto/despacho del duque, or an alcoba china.

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Fig. 4.3

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Salón del Gran Duque in Liria Palace, 1893, Madrid. Courtesy of the Archive of the Dukes of Alba (ADA) © Fundación Casa de Alba.

Everything in the salón del Gran Duque, one of the most emblematic spaces in Liria Palace, evokes the memory of the 3rd Duke of Alba, don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (1507–1582) and his service to Charles V and Philip II.26 Visible on the mantle is the marble bust of Charles V by Juan Bautista Monegro.27 Three impressive tapestries woven in wool, silk and gold by Pieter de Pannemaker in Brussels – and rescued from the sale by Rosario’s father – relive the three moments of the Duke’s victories in Germany, the “attack”, the “crossing of the Elbe River” and “the triumph of the Duke’s troops”.28 Rosario’s interest in the figure of the Grand Duke is evident in her correspondence with Paz, where she even mentions the daunting project of publishing Don Fernando’s correspondence; one that she would not live to see completed: “This book on the Grand Duke terrifies me more every day, it could be great, but such work!”.29 She and

26 27 28

J. M. Pita Andrade, El palacio de Liria, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1959, p. 31. Pita Andrade, El palacio, p. 32. Pita Andrade, El palacio, pp. 31–32. For a recent study on the subjects of these tapestries, see Redín Michaus, ‘Nobleza’, pp. 59–83. 29 ADA, 181.34.

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her husband also saw that the Grand Duke’s remains were properly kept in an urn in the Cathedral of San Esteban in Salamanca.30

Rosario’s Legacy: The 17th Duke of Alba

Rosario’s son, Jacobo, 17th Duke of Alba, inherited his mother’s intellectual appetite and passion for restoring the collection’s integrity (Fig. 4.4). His acquisitions supplemented narratives initiated by his mother that exhibited a tradition of artistic patronage, aspired to restore the collection, and glorified family memory, especially in the figure of the Gran Duque. In his advice on collecting to his only daughter, Cayetana, there is a perceptible attentiveness to the fact that much had been lost over time, and their obligation to purchase that which was related to the House: Know your collections of manuscripts, books, paintings, etc. They have suffered a lot, but quite a lot remains, and you can grow it, in which case, put all of your efforts towards that which is related to the House, that makes sense to be in it.31

Jacobo kept a reminder of those great works of art that had been lost on his bedroom dresser: a reproduction of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus,32 which had been part of the Alba collection. It seems that Charles IV had intervened on behalf of his favorite, Manuel Godoy, to facilitate his purchase of this and other paintings from the auction that followed the death of the 13th Duchess of Alba, contributing to the immense and newly created collection of artworks of the highest quality that Godoy brought together after his appointment as Prime Minister.33 However, the circumstances of Godoy’s purchases were unclear, and the 14th Duke’s mother appealed in court on behalf of her underage son

30 ADA, Memorias, pp. 166, 231–232; ADA, 286.7. 31 ADA, Fondo Don Jacobo. Consejos a Tanuca. Thank you to José Miguel Hernández Barral for discussing the Jacobo’s relationship with his daughter and son in law, the 18th Duchess and Duke consort of Alba. 32 V. De la Serna, ‘Mansiones españolas: El palacio de Liria’, Voluntad, 4 (1 February 1920). 33 For more on the Godoy’s collecting, who often “resorted to unscrupulous or forceful methods, as in the case of the paintings from the Alba collection”, see I. Rose de Viejo, Manuel Godoy, patrón de las artes y coleccionista, PhD diss., Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1983, especially Vol. I pp. 128, 172–73, 176; I. Rose De Viejo, ‘Desde el palacio madrileño de Godoy al mundo entero’, in M. Cabañas Bravo (ed.), El arte fuera de España, El arte fuera de España, Madrid: CSIC, 2003, p. 327; Barcia, Catálogo, p. 260.

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for the return of the paintings.34 Jacobo had the opportunity to see the painting before it was purchased by the National Gallery in London: I was in awe before that marvellous nude, and I cursed Godoy, whom I believe responsible for having robbed us of that jewel, and the famous Virgin of the Casa de Alba, by Raphael, the Psychis by Correggio, all entailed to the House and which should have passed on to my great-grandfather on the death of the Duchess Cayetana.35

The Duke also purchased The King’s Fox Hunter by Francisco Rizi, for 75,000 francs in Paris, another painting that had ended up Godoy’s possession.36 In 1924, he purchased two other pieces with the intent of restoring his greatgrandfather’s collection: he bought the Marshal Berwick Receiving From King Philip V of Spain the Order of the Golden Fleece, and a preparatory drawing for it by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres for 10,000 francs.37 The 14th Duke had commissioned the painting to Ingres in 1813, although it was never delivered due to insufficient payment.38 Jacobo defended the 14th Duke in his entrance speech to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, declaring that he had “recently acquired them for the palace for which Duke Carlos Miguel, who commissioned and paid Ingres, had intended”.39 Another driver of Jacobo’s collecting was the iconographic memory of the 3rd Duke of Alba, evident in the purchases: the portrait of the Grand Duke by Rubens after Titian; another portrait of the Grand Duke by Alonso Sánchez Coello; the reproductions of the bronze busts of Charles V, Philip II and the Grand Duke by Pompeo Leoni; and another bust of the Grand Duke by Jacques Jonghelincke.40 The negotiations for the busts once again speak to Jacobo’s 34 Barcia, Catálogo, p. 261, n. 1. 35 ADA, Memorias, pp. 243–244. 36 ADA, Fondo Artístico, Rizi; Barcia, Catálogo, p.  249; A.  Pérez  Sánchez, Carreño, Rizi, Herrera y La Pintura Madrileña En Su Tiempo (1650–1700), exhibition catalogue, Museo del Prado (Madrid), Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1986, p. 265; D. Berwick y Alba, Discursos leídos ante la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1924, p. 21; P. Madrazo, Catálogo de 1872, p. 683, cited in C. Justi, Velázquez y Su Siglo, Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1888 (1999), p. 346. 37 ADA, Fondo artístico, Ingres; D. Berwick y Alba, Discursos leídos, p. 17; F. Checa Cremades, ‘The Glory of the Albas: Five Centuries of Aristocratic Collecting’, in F. Checa Cremades (ed.), Treasures from the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting, exhibition catalogue, Meadows Museum (Dallas), Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 2015, p. 134; Barcia, Catálogo, p. xiv. 38 D. Berwick y Alba, Discursos leídos, p. 17; Barcia, Catálogo, p. xiv; Checa Cremades ‘The Glory’, p. 134. 39 D. Berwick y Alba, Discursos leídos, p. 17; Checa Cremades ‘The Glory’, p. 134. 40 ADA, Fondo Artístico, Rubens; ADA, Fondo Artístico, Escultura.

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Fig. 4.4

Joaquin Sorolla, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, 17th Duke of Alba, 1908, oil on canvas, 210 × 199, Liria Palace, Madrid © Fundación Casa de Alba.

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desire to recover lost objects, as they had been taken from the Alba de Tormes Palace during the War of Independence (1808–1814). When Joaquin Sorolla painted the Duke’s portrait in 1908, he represented Jacobo in the salón del Gran Duque as well. One of Jacobo’s final projects was the publication of the Grand Duke’s correspondence in 1952, yet again taking up an initiative begun by his mother.

Conclusion

This study shows how Rosario Falcó brought the influence and assistance from her father, Manuel Falcó d’Adda to the management of the Alba collection. She drew on her research on the Alba family archive to construct narratives that revolved around family memory and celebrated the restoration of the collection in musealized spaces of Liria Palace. Although the Drouot sale was an episode of immense loss for the Alba collection, it would also prove to be a story of perseverance and recovery. Rosario’s rearrangement of the collection established the values of restoration and the iconography of the Grand Duke as collecting priorities that would be continued by her son, the 17th Duke of Alba, who inherited her passion for the archive and art collection, and her sensitivity to the power of the symbolic capital that they held. This capital was based on a combination of artistic patronage and historical significance, a defining quality of the family’s legacy. Its reconstruction would serve to perpetuate the memory of the family and maintain its distinction in the twilight era of European aristocracy. List of References Archive of the Dukes of Alba (ADA), Fondo Don Jacobo, Memorias. Barcia y Pavón, Ángel María. Catálogo de la colección de pinturas del Excmo. Sr. Duque de Alba, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1911. Berwick y Alba, duquesa de. Catálogo de las colecciones expuestas en las vitrinas del Palacio de Liria, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1898. Berwick y Alba, duque de. Discurso de ingreso a la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1924. Blanc, Charles. Collection de S. A. Le Duc de Berwick et d’Albe. Tableaux de Velazquez, Murillo, Rubens. 75 Tapisseries de premier ordre en partie tissées d’or et d’argent. Expositions et ventes, Paris, 1877.

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Calderón Ortega, José Manuel. ‘El archivo de la Casa de Alba: Pasado y presente’, in Nícolas Ávila Seoane, Juan Carlos Galende Díaz, Susana Cabezas Fontanilla (eds.), Paseo documental por el Madrid de antaño, Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Fundación Hospital de San José de Getafe, 2015, pp. 79–100. Catálogo de las colecciones expuestas en las vitrinas del palacio de Liria, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1898. Checa Cremades, Fernando. ‘The Glory of the Albas: Five Centuries of Aristocratic Collecting’, in Fernando Checa Cremades (ed.), Treasures from the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting, exhibition catalogue, Meadows Museum (Dallas), Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 2015. Díaz Padrón, Matías. ‘Camino del Mercado (el verano)’, in El legado de la Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, Centro Cibeles de Cultura y Ciudadanía (Madrid), Madrid: TF Editores, 2012, pp. 135–37. Guiffrey, Jules. Histoire de la tapisserie depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à nos jours, Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils, 1886. Justi, Carl. Velázquez y Su Siglo, Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1888 (1999). Lavit, Oriane. ‘La colección de dibujos franceses de Isidoro Brun (1819–1898) en el Museo del Prado’, Boletín del Museo del Prado, 35.53 (2017), pp. 98–112. Mascarilla. ‘Las audiencias de la emperatriz’, La Época, 19.408, 1 June 1904. ‘Necrología de Antonio Paz y Mélia’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia (B.R.A.H.), Vol. 90, Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1927, pp. 249–252. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso. Carreño, Rizi, Herrera y La Pintura Madrileña En Su Tiempo (1650–1700), exhibition catalogue, Museo del Prado (Madrid), Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1986. Pita Andrade, José Manuel. El Palacio de Liria, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1959. Redín Michaus, Gonzalo. ‘Murillo y la Colección de Alba en el siglo XIX: de la compra de un San Roque en Nápoles en 1816 a la subasta del retrato del canónigo Miranda’, in Benito Navarrete Prieto (ed.), Murillo ante su IV centenario. Perspectivas historiográficas y culturales, Seville: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, ICAS, 2018, pp. 381–88. Redín Michaus, Gonzalo. Nobleza y coleccionismo de tapices entre la Edad Moderna y Contemporánea: Las Casas de Alba y Denia Lerma, Madrid: Arco Libros, S.L., 2018. Rooses, Max. L’Oeuvre de P.P.  Rubens, histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, Antwerp, 1886–1892, Vol. 4, p. 383, nr 1199 in Matías Díaz Padrón, ‘Camino del Mercado(el verano)’, Pablo Melendo (ed.), El legado de la Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, CentroCentro (Madrid), Madrid: TF Editores, 2012, p. 136. Rose de Viejo, Isadora. Manuel Godoy, patrón de las artes y coleccionista, PhD diss., Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1983.

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Rose De Viejo, Isadora. ‘Desde el palacio madrileño de Godoy al mundo entero’, in Miguel Cabañas Bravo (ed.), El arte fuera de España, Madrid: CSIC, 2003. Salvador Benitez, Antonia. ‘Mujeres a bordo’, in Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil (ed.), El viaje del Thistle. Diarios a bordo, Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 2020, pp. 31–70. Serna, Víctor de la. ‘Mansiones españolas: El palacio de Liria’, Voluntad, 4 (1 February 1920). Triadó, Joan Ramón. ‘El arte en las colecciones de la Casa de Alba’, in El arte en las colecciones de la Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación Caja de Pensiones (Madrid), Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Pensiones, 1987, pp. 51–65. Urquízar Herrera, Antonio. Vigara Zafra, José Antonio. ‘La nobleza española y Francia en el cambio de sistema artístico 1700–1850’, in Luis Sazatornil Ruíz, Frederic Jiméno (eds.), El arte español en Roma y París (siglos XVIII y XIX), Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2014; pp. 257–274. Valme Muñoz, María del. ‘Don Juan Antonio de Miranda y Ramírez de Vergara’, in Colección Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla (Seville), Seville: Junta de Andalucía: 2009, pp. 262–65. Valme Muñoz, María del. ‘La historia recuperada. Vicisitudes del palacio de Liria durante la Guerra Civil española’, in Colección Casa de Alba, exhibition catalogue, Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla (Seville), Seville: Junta de Andalucía: 2009, pp. 105–39. Vigara Zafra, José Antonio. Arte y cultura nobiliaria en la Casa de Fernán-Núñez (1700– 1850), PhD diss., Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2015. Vigara Zafra, José Antonio. ‘The Diputación de La Grandeza and the Organization of Retrospective Art Exhibitions in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 25.5 (2019), pp. 255–274. Zalama, Miguel Ángel. Martínez Ruíz, María José. ‘Flemish Tapestries of the Alba Family’, in Fernando Checa Cremades (ed.), Treasures of the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting, exhibition catalogue, Meadows Museum (Dallas), Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 2015, pp. 259–279.

Part II Modern Reinterpretations

Fig. 5.1

Leon Wyczółkowski, Potrait of Feliks Jasieński, 1911, pastel, 82 × 96, The National Museum in Kraków © The National Museum in Kraków.

Chapter 5

Feliks Jasieński: A Collector and ‘Artistic Activist’ Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik On 11 March 1920, Feliks Jasieński (1861–1929) bequeathed to the “Royal City of Kraków” a collection of more than 15,000 works of art assembled in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries (Fig. 5.1). It was the culmination of nearly twenty years of attempts at depositing them in a Polish museum. As he emphasised in 1901 “Without such a permanent museum of art, there can be no question of developing artistic taste among the general public, and, consequently, of creating a national art”.1 In fact, the collection, which was intended for a museum that despite belonging to the city had been considered by the Poles to be their first national museum ever since its inception in 1879, offered a panorama of contemporary Polish painting and sculpture, forming the basis for a presentation of the art of “Young Poland” movement. Its graphic section, primarily Polish and French graphic art from the turn of the century, was equally exceptional. The collection of oriental art, consisting of Islamic carpets and fabrics, but above all of Japanese woodblock prints and art objects, placed the Kraków Museum among the leading public collections in Europe. Apart from its great artistic value, the collection testified to Jasieński’s mission for the early Polish avant-garde and his commitment to the movement for the revival of the graphic and decorative arts.2

A Collector

The beginnings of Jasieński’s passion for collecting can be dated to the late 1880s, in Warsaw, were he had settled having returned from his study trip to Berlin and Paris. His artistic views were shaped in the entourage of artists of the Polish avant-garde grouped around the Wędrowiec (Wanderer) magazine; and its artistic editor being Stanisław Witkiewicz – painter and critic, theoretician 1 Püssari-Watàn, ‘U autora Mangghi’, Życie i Sztuka (supplement to the weekly magazine Kraj), 28 (1901), p. 322. 2 On the subject of Jasieński’s activities and collection, see A.  Kluczewska-Wójcik, Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński i jego kolekcja w Muzeum Narodowym w Krakowie / Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński and his Collection at the National Museum in Krakow, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2014. © Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_006

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of realism. It was from Witkiewicz that the future collector commissioned his first painting, and Jasieński used his help when acquiring the works of Józef Chełmoński. Most importantly, it was through Witkiewicz that Jasieński met Władysław Podkowiński and Józef Pankiewicz – two young painters suffering under violent attacks from critics for being susceptible to the school of Impressionism. His first public appearance was in defence of representatives of ‘the new art’ and to advocate for a reform of the Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych (Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts), the only Polish artistic institution of the Russian partition. Gradually Jasieński’s collection enlarged with works from their Impressionist period; and then those more symbolist in nature. After Podkowiński’s premature death, Jasieński co-organized an exhibition of his works. He expressed his reverence for the artist by purchasing his most famous canvas Szał (Frenzy) after a failed attempt at a public fundraiser for the painting’s acquisition by the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts. The occasion bettered his acquaintance with Leon Wyczółkowski, another propagator of impressionism who was hoverer formed not by Paris, but, as often emphasised by the artist himself, by plein-airs in the Ukrainian steppe. It quickly turned to friendship which formed the basis for long-lasting artistic cooperation between the painter and collector. Sculptor Antoni Kurzawa’s dramatic statement, described by Witkiewicz in his article entitled “The suicide of talent”,3 turned Jasieński’s attention to this discipline of art; and works purchased from the artist formed the nucleus of a methodically built collection of contemporary sculpture, the first of its kind in Poland. From the time Jasieński settled in Kraków in 1902 his collection was enriched with works by artists related to the School of Fine Arts, the only Polish higher education institution lifted to the rank of Academy in 1901, and the Society of Polish Artists Sztuka (Art), which had been bringing together Polish painters and sculptors active both at home and abroad since 1897. Acquired in this way were paintings by Julian Fałat – Rector of the Academy, Jan Stanisławski – founder of the Polish school of landscape painting, Jacek Malczewski – a leading symbolist, Józef Mehoffer – an author of the stained-glass in Freiburg cathedral, or Stanisław Wyspiański – the most gifted figure of his time, exceptional in all disciplines from painting to decorative arts; he was also genius poet and playwright. His circle of befriended creators included Konstanty Laszczka, a professor of the Academy, and tutor to the new generation of sculptors. Jasieński purchased works both from the master and his disciples, including those who, like Xawery Dunikowski, chose to continue their studies 3 S. Witkiewicz, ‘Samobójstwo talentu’, Kurier Warszawski, 27.1–2 (1890), pp. 1–2.

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or careers abroad. The only meaningful example of European sculpture was one work by Gustav Vigeland. The collector also had ties with painters based in Warsaw – Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Konrad Krzyżanowski, as well as those working in France, foremost with Władysław Ślewiński and Olga Boznańska. Jasieński began by collecting the works of his contemporaries, and became interested in Japanese art – which was for many years the reason for his renown as a collector – not only for its own aesthetic values, but also because it would serve as a model for the emerging Polish school. He knew from the outset that his mission would be to support its representatives; and so, he aimed to build a monument “to the glory of artists”.4 A monument which would eventually boast two hundred twenty canvases, over seven hundred pastels, watercolours and drawings; and seventy-eight sculptures, representing the changes in Polish art at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 Drawing a singular line of development from Maksymilian and Aleksander Giermski’s realism to Wojciech Weiss’ expressionism, from Laszczka’s “rodinisme” to the “new classicism” of Edward Wittig and Henryk Glicenstein in sculpture, the collection illustrated this incredible artistic revolution of which Jasieński was not merely a witness but also a participant. The end of the twentieth century was a time that saw a renaissance of the graphic arts in Europe to which Jasieński, ever sensitive to new forms of artistic expression, could not remain indifferent.6 The collection he built perfectly illustrates the consecutive stages of the development of this branch of art: from Goya, through Klinger and Redon, whose output he gathered almost whole, to Gauguin and the Nabis.7 Among over 2,300 prints by representatives 4 F. Jasieński, ‘Niechaj żywi nie tracą nadziei …’, Świat, 31 (1912), p. 4. 5 List of paintings and sculptures from the Jasieński collection in A. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Feliks Manggha-Jasieński (1861–1929), collectionneur et animateur de la vie artistique en Pologne, Vol. 3, PhD diss., Paris: Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1998. Catalogue of pastels and drawings: D. Godyń, M. Laskowska, Rysunki, akwarele i pastele z kolekcji Feliksa Jasieńskiego w zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie / Drawings, Watercolors and Pastels from Feliks Jasieński’s Collection at the Natioanl Museum in Krakow, in A. Kluczewska-Wójcik (ed.), Korpus daru Feliksa Jasieńskiego / Corpus of Feliks Jasieński’s Donation, Vol. 2, Part 2, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2016. See also S. Kozakowska, B. Małkiewicz, Nowoczesne malarstwo polskie. Katalog zbiorów, in Z. Gołubiew (ed.), Malarstwo polskie od około 1890 do 1945 roku, Catalogues of the Collections of the National Museum in Kraków, p. 2, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1997. 6 A more detailed analysis of this could be find in A. Kluczewska-Wójcik A., ‘Feliks MangghaJasieński (1861–1929), collectionneur d’estampes’, Nouvelles de l’estampe, 205.a (2006), s. 6–20. 7 L. Lencznarowicz (ed.), Francisco Goya y Lucientes: grafiki, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2002; H.  Blum, B.  Miodońska, Grafika Odilona Redona, exhibition catalogue, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1963; A. Kluczewska-Wójcik, ‘The Klinger collection of Feliks Manggha-Jasieński’, Print Quarterly, 23.b.3 (2006), p. 264–287.

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of the European avant-garde, there was a nearly complete review of Polish artists, with the ‘founding fathers’ of the Polish school of graphic arts – his closest friends – Pankiewicz and Wyczółkowski to the fore. This collection was also accompanied by some twelve hundred works of old masters, with the almost complete oeuvre of Piranesi. Repeated stays in Paris allowed Jasieński to become personally acquainted with dealers involved in the movement for the renewal of graphic arts, such as Edmond Sagot, Gustave Pellet or Ambroise Vollard. This fact was reflected in the collection, which came to include, alongside works by Félicien Rops, the avant-garde, 1896 L’Album des peintres-graveurs and the 1897 L’Album d’estampes originales de la Galerie Vollard. Of particular interest to the collector were albums and collective publications by societies of graphic artists from France but also England, Germany, Scandinavia and Russia.8 A majority of them were purchased through Karl Hiersemann, the Leipzig-based editor and bookseller with whom he cooperated until the outbreak of the Great War. Albums as well as a large body of Russian and Soviet propaganda posters were imported directly from Moscow. He also purchased etching and engraving illustrated magazines,9 artist monographies and other specialist publications,10 hoping to transform his print room into a place of gathering for all interested in this discipline of art. Additionally to his collection of graphic arts, Jasieński assembled an East Asian art collection, which has hitherto enjoyed the greatest interest. Its main body consisted of over five thousand Japanese woodblock prints and albums, depicting the history of ukiyo-e from the founders of this technique Moronobu and Masanobu, through the masters of the ‘golden age’, Harunobu and Utamaro,

8

9 10

E.g. L’Estampe Originale (ed. A. Marty, 1893–1895); L’Estampe Moderne (ed. Ch. Masson, H.  Piazza, 1897–1899); L’Estampe Originale (1888); The Etcher (1879–1881); The Artist Engraver (1904); Hollandsche Prentkunst (1887–1898); Föreningen for Grafisk Konst (1890– 1912), Verein für original Radierung in Karlsruhe (1894–1904); Verein für Original-Radierung in München (1892–1905); Die Graphischen Künste Wien (1902, 1904–1914); Jahresmappe der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst in Wien (1899–1908). E.g. L’Image (1896–1897); Maîtres de l’affiche (1896–1898, 1900); L’Estampe et l’affiche (1898– 1899); La Plume (1896); Pan (1895–1899); Ver Sacrum (1898–1903); Die Jugend (1899–1901). E.g. H.  Buchot, La lithographie (1895); A.  Mellerio, Lithographie originale en couleurs (1898); Ch. Holme (ed.), Modern Etchings, Mezzotints and Dry-points (1913); L.  Delteil, Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes des XIXe et XXe siècles (1925); Rottenstein, Goya (1900); F.  H.  Meissner, Klinger (1897, 1899); M.  Klinger, Malerei und Zeichnung (3rd ed. 1899); J. Destrée, L’œuvre lithographique d’O. Redon (1891).

Feliks Jasieński: A Collector and ‘Artistic Activist’

Fig. 5.2

Józef Pankiewicz, Japanese Woman, 1908, oil on canvas, 200 × 94, The National Museum in Kraków © The National Museum in Kraków.

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to Kuniyoshi, Hokusai and Hiroshige.11 A visible sign of his passion was his nom de plume “Manggha”, adopted in honour of Hokusai. In addition, his collection also included one hundred and fifty paintings, including works from the Rimpa school and paintings by Watanabe Seitei, a representive of the Nihonga style, famous across Europe, twenty six Buddhist sculptures, an excellent collection of militaria, with almost seven hundred tsuba, lacquerware, bronze, ceramics, katagami stencils as well as Chinese and Japanese textiles.12 Complimenting East Asian pieces was a collection of fabrics and rugs, mostly Middle Eastern, Persian and Turkic, with an excellent selection of ‘Polish’ silk sashes (Słuck sashes), of which the collector gathered no less than twelve hundred.13 Jasieński’s Japanese ‘passion’ originated in France, as did his collection, acquired almost entirely through Parisian dealers such as Siegfrid Bing, Tadamas Hayashi and Charles Vigner. The collector also paid close attention to the art market and auctions in Amsterdam, where he sourced Javan Batiks, and Berlin, where he purchased other orientalia. Publications about Japanese art and the decorative arts of middle and eastern Asia were imported in large part from Hiersemann, creating the only specialised library of its time in Poland.14 Jasieński encouraged the growth of interest in, and the accompanying 11 12 13

14

I. Hirayama, T. Kobayashi, Kôdansha (eds.), Kurakufu kokuritsu bijutsukan hizô. Nihonbijutsu taikan. The National Museum in Kraków. Japanese Art. The Great European Collections, Vol. 10, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993. Z.  Alberowa (et  al.), Sztuka japońska w zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie / Japanese art in the National Museum in Cracow, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1994. B.  Biedrońska-Słotowa, Kobierce tureckie, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1983; B.  Biedrońska-Słotowa, Perskie tkaniny jedwabne w zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2002; A.  Kluczewska-Wójcik, ‘Orientalisme versus orientalité. La nouvelle appréciation des arts de l’Islam en Pologne au début du XXe siècle’, in Francine Giese, Mercedes Volait, and Ariane Varela Braga (eds.), À l’orientale. Collecting, Displaying and Appropiating Islamic Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Leiden-London: Brill  2020, p.  48–61; M.  Taszycka, Pasy wschodnie, Katalog zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie (Catalogues of the Collections of the National Museum in Kraków), Vol. 4, Part 1, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1990; M.  Taszycka, Pasy francuskie, Katalog zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie (Catalogues of the Collections of the National Museum in Kraków), part Vol. 4, Part 2, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1994. L. Gonse, L’Art japonais (Paris, 1886); M. Paléolog, L’Art chinois (Paris, 1887); W. Anderson, The Pictorial Art of Japan (London, 1886); J. Brinckmann: Kunst und Handwerk in Japan (Berlin, 1889); W.  Seidlitz, Geschichte des japanischen Farbholzschnitts (Dresden, 1897); J.  Kurth, Utamaro (Leipzig, 1907), Suzuki Harunobu (München–Leipzig, 1910), Sharaku (München, 1910); Shiichi Tajima: Masterpieces Selected from the Kôrin School, Vol. 5 (Tokyo, 1903–1904), Masterpieces Selected from the Ukiyoê School (Tokyo, 1906–1909), Masterpieces by Motonobu, Vol. 2 (Tokyo, 1904).

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collecting of, Japanese art by his painter-friends. His own collection, always open to both artists and other art lovers, became the living heart of Polish Japanism (Fig. 5.2).15 When in 1902, Jasieński became the spokesman for the advocates of a new national “Zakopane style”, created by Witkiewicz, he naturally turned his attention to the crafts of the Podhale region (in the Tatra Mountains), and later to those of the Eastern Carpathians, Wolhynia and Podolia (present day Ukraine), as well as Kashubia (in northern Poland). He collected ceramics, woodwork, musical instruments, fabrics, hafts, and kilims. His collection served as a reservoir of examples of techniques, forms and motifs for the many artists who frequented his apartment. The “Jasieński Museum” subsequently, logically hosted their works, the fruit of this inspiration. Alongside folk art from all over Poland there are a few pieces of furniture and kilims made according to the designs of the artist-members of the Kraków Workshops, founded in 1913, among others Karol Tichy, Józef Czajkowski or Kazimierz Brzozowski, batiks made by the young apprentices of the Workshops, small objects made by students of the Professional Wood Industry School in Zakopane, as well as works by Stanisław Jagmin, author of the renewal of Polish artistic ceramics. Alongside examples of ancient Polish and European craft, furniture and fabrics, this part of the collection created an almost museum of decorative arts, significantly completing the collection of the National Museum and the Technical-Industrial Museum in Kraków (founded in 1868).16

An ‘Artistic Activist’

Feliks Jasieński was no mere collector but a self-described art patron and artistic activist. In his youth he had dreamt of a pursuing a career as a pianistcomposer.17 Impassioned by the works of Richard Wagner, he studied the 15

More details may be found in A. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Japonia w kulturze i sztuce polskiej i końca XIX i początków XX wieku, Warszawa-Toruń: Polski Instytut Studiów nad Sztuką Świata, Tako, 2016., pp. 51–170. 16 A.  Kluczewska-Wójcik, ‘Il n’y a qu’un seul art  … ». Feliks Jasieński et sa collection d’arts décoratifs au Musée national de Cracovie’, in: Art et industrie. L’Europe des musées au XIXe siècle, instruire, collecter et exposer, R. Froissart, A. Gril-Mariotte (eds.), Art et industrie. L’Europe des musées au XIXe siècle, instruire, collecter et exposer, (to be published in 2023). 17 Jasieński’s piano compositions, e.g.: Nina. Polka, [op. 5], composée pour le piano, Dorpat: L’imprimérie W. Just, 1882; Trzy polonezy na fortepian, Warszawa: E. Wende, 1882; Mazurki na fortepian, Warszawa: E.  Wende, 1883; Deux valses pour piano, op. 17, nr 1, Warszawa: E. Wende; Bourrée pour piano, op. 19, Paris: H. Nuyens, 1885; Chant d’Amour pour piano, Paris: H. Nuyens, Warszawa: E. Wende, Berlin: Schirmer und Möllendorf, Firenze: Brozzi et

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grand piano and composition under the direction of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the America’s famous virtuoso and later the Polish prime minister. Following a failed debut, his attention shifted towards the fine arts; but he later returned to his first calling as a professional music critic. Until the 1920s, he was a permanent contributor in this role to two Kraków dailies Głos Narodu (Voice of the Nation) and Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier). His second field of activity was as an art and literary critique; and his magnum opus Manggha. Promenades à travers le monde, l’art et les idées, published in 1901 (simultaneously in Paris and Warsaw), presented a complete panorama of the philosophy, critical thought and art, mostly French and German, of the turn of the century.18 In Poland, as in the rest of Europe, new magazines played a decisive role in the renewal of the visual arts. A contributor to Warsaw’s Chimera (in 1901), under the editorship of Zenon Przesmycki, the cradle of Polish Symbolism, Jasieński was also the co-founder and artistic director of two other journals Lamus (Granary, 1908–1909) in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine) and Miesięcznik Literacki i Artystyczny (Literary and Artistic Monthly, 1911) in Kraków. Aware that modern art was also promoted through publications, he took on the task of editing what may only be described as the first illustrated monograph of Polish painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sztuka Polska. Malarstwo (Polish Art. Painting) published as series from 1903 to 1904, and again as album in 1904, 1908 and 1909, was conceived as a collection of “minimonographs” consisting of a critical text, a black and white portrait of the artist and a full bleed colour reproduction of his painting.19 Jasieński ensured not only the standard of texts but also of the illustrations, which were at the cutting edge of modern reproduction techniques (photographic plates were from the Husnik and Haüsler atelier in Prague). He sent the publication to museum curators in Poland and abroad, including Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Recalling the profiles of gifted painters from Piotr Michałowski (born 1800) to Weiss (born 1875), the publication documented the birth of the “new Polish school” taking into consideration its widely understood genesis and underscoring the important role of Jan Matejko (1838–1893) Nicolai, 1886; Gavotte pour piano, Paris: H. Nuyens, Warszawa: E. Wende, Berlin: Schirmer und Möllendorf, Berlin, Firenze: Brozzi et Nicolai, 1886. 18 Félix [Jasieński], Mangha. Promenades à travers le monde, l’art et les idées, Paris-Varsovie: Vieweg-Fiszer, 1901. 19 F. Jasieński, A. Łada-Cybulski (eds.), Sztuka Polska. Malarstwo. Sześćdziesiąt pięć reprodukcji dzieł najwybitniejszych przedstawicieli malarstwa polskiego, Lwów: Altenberg, 1904; A.  Kluczewska-Wójcik, ‘Pierwsza monografia malarstwa polskiego modernizmu – przedsięwzięcie edytorskie Feliksa Mangghi-Jasieńskiego’, Spotkania z Zabytkami, 3–4 (2012), p. 32–35.

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Fig. 5.3

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Feliks Jasieński’s ‘Museum’, c. 1914, Polish National Archives, The National Digital Archive (Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe) © The National Digital Archive.

to whom it dedicated a separate volume. Even today the publication remains the indispensable source for the study of art criticism in Poland at the turn of the century.20 Faithful to his musical interests, the collector attempted to support young Polish composers by founding a publishing house – Edition du Musée Jasieński. Between 1907 and 1910, it published compositions by pianist Maria Sarnecka and the future illustrious playwright Karol Hubert Roztworowski21. An expert in the graphic arts, Jasieński worked with the greatest European marchands and publishers. It is interesting to note that, among the many print dealers active in Paris, he chose those who had escaped the hegemony of the Société des Aquafortistes, the first to actively support the movement in favour 20

21

A. Brzyski, ‘Constructing the Canon: The Album “Polish Art” and the Writing of Modernist Art History of Polish 19th-Century Painting’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide,  3.1 (2004), pp.  52–74: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring04/284-constructingthecanon-the-album-polish-art-and-the-writing-of-modernist-art-history-of-polish-19thcenturypainting. H.  Marcinkowska, ‘Edition du Musée Jasieński. Kilka uwag o publikacjach muzycznych Feliksa Jasieńskiego’, Rozprawy Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, Nowa Seria, Vol. 5, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2012, pp. 263–274.

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of lithography in colour, with which he associated himself through his acquisitions and publishing initiatives. As the founder of the Stowarzyszenie Polskich Artystów Grafików (Society of Polish Graphic Artists, 1902), and a regular collector of the most prominent representatives of this field of artistic creation of the time, Jasieński was largely responsible for the revival of original Polish graphic arts in the early twentieth century. His interest in albums and publications of societies or associations of etchers and engravers, and of the dealers involved in the movement, culminated in his own publication of the first Teka Stowarzyszenia Polskich Artystów Grafików. Staraniem Feliksa Jasieńskiego, (Portfolio of Graphic Artists’s. The Endeavour of Feliks Jasieński, Kraków 1903), which was a milestone in Polish artistic life. He exhibited it in Kraków in March 1903, alongside the two albums of the Galerie Vollard.22 Together with the presentation of the works of Redon and Klinger, these were the first exhibitions of this kind in Poland – and among the first in Europe.23 Journalistic and editorial activity by the collector formed part of a broader popularisation programme, promoting novel aesthetic rules and the accomplishments of the polish artistic school of which he was a patron. Jasieński supported and animated artistic societies – the Society of Polish Artists Sztuka, the Society of Polish Applied Art and the Society of Friends of the National Museum in Kraków, founded in 1903 on his initiative. In 1921, he funded a prize for young Polish sculptors, musicians and graphic artists at the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków. Thought of as complementary to the pre-existing Probus-Barczewski prize (‘Polish Nobel’) for painters, it was mostly meant to support artists who enjoyed the least interest from a wider public. Symptomatically for Jasieński, who was a champion of women artists and greatest collector of Olga Boznańska, one of the first prize-winners was sculptress Olga Niewska, his protégée. Among the laureates were also Alfons Karny and Stanisław Szukalski. Jasieński was a curator, organising exhibitions and giving conferences. His whole career encompassed more than fifty such events in Warsaw, Zakopane, Lwów and Krakow. Making a performance of every public appearance, the collector skilfully used an aura of scandal appearing in oriental costumes and moulding press coverage. Having exceptional skill in handling the press, he used this new type of media in all his artistic endeavours. 22 ‘Dziesiąta wystawa ze zbiorów p. Jasieńskiego’, Czas 59 (evening edition 1903), p.  3; (‘Sztuka graficzna’), Kraj, 11 (1903), p. 15. 23 F. Jasieński, ‘Max Klinger (Ustęp z Mangghi)’, Czas, 211 (1901), pp. 1–2; 212 (1901), pp. 1–2; F. Jasieński, ‘Goya (Urywek z polskiej “mangghi”) przez Feliksa Jasieńskiego. (Z powodu Wystawy akwafort)’, Głos Narodu, 256 (1902), p. 2–4.

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A Museum Donor

Jasieński bequeathed his collection to the Kraków Museum in 1920, but the plan to make the donation had been formed much earlier, dating back to December  1900, when Jasieński had offered his collection to the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in his native Warsaw. However, due to the press campaign that disparaged not only the first public presentations of his Japanese collection but also the collection itself, he soon gave up this project and made a decision to leave Warsaw. In 1903, he sent his proposal to the National Museum in Kraków, the city he had chosen as his place of residence (Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.4

The Feliks Jasieński Department of National Museum in Kraków, 1934, Polish National Archives, The National Digital Archive (Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe) © The National Digital Archive.

Despite the unconditional support of the Museum’s director, Feliks Kopera, negotiations with the city authorities, the de facto owner of the Museum, dragged on. In 1906, he wrote a new version of his will, specifying the conditions of the donation. The most important and at the same time the most controversial was the one stipulating the indivisibility of his collection. The ancillary problem, but not the least, remained that of assessing the value of the works of art offered to the city, which, according to its critics, were not

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quite worthy of entering the sanctuary of Polish art and culture that was the National Museum. The negotiations were widely reported in the press. The articles discuss the collection in detail, focusing on Polish art: “The National Museum, which until now did not have any painting by Podkowiński, Pankiewicz, Ruszczyc or Weiss, will be enriched by more than 60 works by these artists, while the oeuvre of Wyczółkowski, Malczewski, Stanisławski and Laszczka will now be presented in nearly a hundred paintings and sculptures”.24 The future donor constantly ‘supports’ the Museum’s Gallery of contemporary Polish art with works from his collection. According to the National Museum guidebooks, published between 1909 and 1914, paintings, watercolours, pastels and drawings from his collection, deposited with the Museum, constituted almost half of all the works of art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century presented there.25 Discouraged by his conflict with the Kraków courts, Jasieński decided to transfer his collection to Warsaw. From 1909, the city had its own museum, the future National Museum; and in 1911, the city purchased a plot of land for the construction of a permanent headquarters. This last circumstance undoubtedly influenced the collector’s decision, who had hoped his collection would be exhibited not only as an integral whole but also correctly arranged. The city council accepted the donation in a resolution on 28 April 1914.26 The future “Feliks Jasieński department” would occupy a separate wing with a library of graphic works and an exhibition of artistic craft, including fabrics, at ground level. The first floor rooms would have been used for presenting the collection of Polish paintings and sculptures whereas the second floor would have housed the Japanese art collection.27 Jasieński emphasised the educational nature of his museal project. Aside from a library, the new department was to house auditoriums to hold lectures for a wider public as well as workshops for artists studying the collected objects. The outbreak of the First World War put paid to this plan. Jasieński, a bearer of a Russian imperial passport, was forced to leave Kraków as it was situated in Austria-Hungary. The collection fell under the care of the museum, which delegated Kopera to perform this duty in its name. 24 Pełka (A. Chołoniewski A.), ‘Muzeum Feliksa Jasieńskiego’, Kraj, 3 (1904), p. 4. 25 E.g. Przewodnik po Muzeum Narodowym w Krakowie, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1909. Przewodnik po Muzeum Narodowym w Krakowie, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1914. 26 Kurier Warszawski, 117 (29 April 1914); Kraj, (29 April 1914), Goniec Warszawski, (29 April 1914). 27 Kurier Warszawski, 117 (29 April 1914).

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After war’s end, in a new political environment, Jasieński returned to his original plan of ceding his collection to the city of Kraków. As per the City Council’s decision, his entire collection was incorporated into the museum; and he was appointed curator of the new department.28 The objects, however, remained in his apartment, a situation which he considered very unsatisfactory; and which unfortunately remained unchanged until his death. The Feliks Jasieński Department was only established in 1934 and operated shortly until 1939 (Fig. 5.4). After the war, the collection was divided among the various departments that made up the institution. Jasieński was one of the most colourful characters of Polish cultural life in the first decades of the twentieth century. The legend of “Young Poland’s enfant terrible” overshadowed the scope of his accomplishments and the avant-garde nature of his methods. In fact, Jasieński’s approach as a collector, artistic activist and museum donor was distinguished by its extraordinary modernity. In addition to works that are traditionally the object of collection, he was interested in works and objects that were “outside the canon”, both geographically, and materially. He adopted the rule of inclusiveness by adding to painting and sculpture folk art, crafts and decorative arts; including non-European ones. He gave them equal importance and did not consider them as minor arts. Moreover, he worked hard to make his collection accessible to the public, organising exhibitions, lectures and other educational activities, and finally making his collection public through his donation to the National Museum in Kraków. List of References Alberowa, Zofia (et al.). Sztuka japońska w zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie / Japanese art in the National Museum in Cracow, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1994. Biedrońska-Słotowa, Beata. Kobierce tureckie, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1983. Biedrońska-Słotowa, Beata. Perskie tkaniny jedwabne w zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, Vol. 3, Part 1, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2002. 28 Notarial deed of Jasieński’s donation to the National Museum in Kraków dated 11  March  1920, Department of Inventory TD Jas kol. 43–45; the unabridged text with English translation in A.  Kluczewska-Wójcik, Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński i jego kolekcja w Muzeum Narodowym w Krakowie / Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński and his Collection at the National Museum in Krakow, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2014, p. 205–222.

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Blum, Helena. Miodońska, Barbara. Grafika Odilona Redona, exhibition catalogue, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1963. Brzyski, Anna. ‘Constructing the Canon: The Album “Polish Art” and the Writing of Modernist Art History of Polish 19th-Century Painting’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3.1 (2004), pp. 52–74: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring04/284constructing-thecanon-the-album-polish-art-and-the-writing-of-modernist-arthistory-of-polish-19th-centurypainting. Chołoniewski, Antoni (Pełka). ‘Muzeum Feliksa Jasieńskiego’, Kraj, 3 (1904), pp. 3–5. ‘Dziesiąta wystawa ze zbiorów p. Jasieńskiego’, Czas, 59 (1903 evening edition), p. 3. Lencznarowicz, Lucyna (ed.). Francisco Goya y Lucientes: grafiki, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2002. Godyń, Danuta. Laskowska, Magdalena. Rysunki, akwarele i pastele z kolekcji Feliksa Jasieńskiego w zbiorach Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie / Drawings, Watercolors and Pastels from Feliks Jasieński’s Collection at the National Museum in Krakow, in Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik (ed.), Korpus daru Feliksa Jasieńskiego / Corpus of Feliks Jasieński’s Donation, Vol. 2, Part 2, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2016. Hirayama, Ikuo. Kobayashi Tadashi. (eds.). Kurakufu kokuritsu bijutsukan hizô. Nihonbijutsu taikan. The National Museum in Kraków. Japanese Art. The Great European Collections, Vol. 10, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1993. (Jasieński), Félix. Mangha. Promenades à travers le monde, l’art et les idées, ParisVarsovie: Vieweg-Fiszer, 1901. Jasieński, Feliks. ‘Max Klinger (Ustęp z Mangghi)’, Czas, 211 (1901), pp. 1–2; 212 (1901), pp. 1–2. Jasieński, Feliks. ‘Goya (Urywek z polskiej ‘mangghi’) przez Feliksa Jasieńskiego. (Z powodu Wystawy akwafort)’, Głos Narodu, 256 (1902), pp. 2–4. Jasieński, Feliks. Łada-Cybulski, Adam (eds.). Sztuka Polska. Malarstwo. Sześćdziesiąt pięć reprodukcji dzieł najwybitniejszych przedstawicieli malarstwa polskiego, Lwów: Altenberg, 1904. Jasieński, Feliks. ‘Niechaj żywi nie tracą nadziei …’, Świat, 31 (1912), pp. 3–4. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. Feliks Manggha-Jasieński (1861–1929), collectionneur et animateur de la vie artistique en Pologne, Vol. 3, PhD diss., Paris: Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1998. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. ‘Feliks Manggha-Jasieński (1861–1929), collectionneur d’estampes’, Nouvelles de l’estampe, 205.a (2006), pp. 6–20. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. ‘The Klinger collection of Feliks Manggha-Jasieński’, Print Quarterly, 23.b.3 (2006), pp. 264–287. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. ‘Pierwsza monografia malarstwa polskiego modernizmu – przedsięwzięcie edytorskie Feliksa Mangghi-Jasieńskiego’, Spotkania z Zabytkami, 3–4 (2012), pp. 32–35.

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Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński i jego kolekcja w Muzeum Narodowym w Krakowie / Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński and his Collection at the National Museum in Krakow, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2014. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. Japonia w kulturze i sztuce polskiej ikońca XIX i początków XX wieku, Warszawa-Toruń: Polski Instytut Studiów nad Sztuką Świata, Tako, 2016. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. ‘Orientalisme versus orientalité. La nouvelle appréciation des arts de l’Islam en Pologne au début du XXe siècle’, in Francine Giese, Mercedes Volait, and Ariane Varela Braga (eds.), À l’orientale. Collecting, Displaying and Appropiating Islamic Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Leiden-London: Brill 2020, pp. 48–61. Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka. ‘Il n’y a qu’un seul art. Feliks Jasieński et sa collection d’arts décoratifs au Musée national de Cracovie’, in Rossella Froisart, Aziza Gril-Mariotte, Brepols Turhout (ed.), Art et industrie. L’Europe des musées au XIXe siècle, instruire, collecter et exposer, (to be published). Kozakowska, Stefania. Małkiewicz, Barbara. Nowoczesne malarstwo polskie. Katalog zbiorów, in Zofia Gołubiew (ed.), Malarstwo polskie od około 1890 do 1945 roku, Katalogi Zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, Nowa Seria, (Catalogues of the Collections of the National Museum in Kraków), Vol. 2, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1997. Marcinkowska, Halina. ‘Edition du Musée Jasieński. Kilka uwag o publikacjach muzycznych Feliksa Jasieńskiego’, Rozprawy Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, Vol. 5, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2012, pp. 263–274. Püssari-Watàn. ‘U autora Mangghi’, Życie i Sztuka (supplement to the weekly magazine), 28 (1901), pp. 322–333. Przewodnik po Muzeum Narodowym w Krakowie, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1909. Przewodnik po Muzeum Narodowym w Krakowie, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1914. ‘Sztuka graficzna’, Kraj, 11 (1903), p. 15. Taszycka, Maria. Pasy wschodnie, Katalog zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie (Catalogues of the Collections of the National Museum in Kraków), Vol. 4, Part  1, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1990. Taszycka, Maria. Pasy francuskie, Katalog zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie (Catalogues of the Collections of the National Museum in Kraków), Vol. 4, Part  2, Kraków: Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1994. Witkiewicz, Stanisław. ‘Samobójstwo talentu’, Kurier Warszawski, 27.1–2 (1890).

Fig. 6.1

William Malherbe, Portrait of Paul Gallimard with a Book, c. 1920, oil on canvas, 64 × 53, private collection © Public Domain.

Chapter 6

Paul Gallimard (1850–1929): A ‘Dandy Collector’ in Paris at the Fin de Siècle Léo Rivaud Chevaillier Among the most important Parisian art collectors and bibliophiles flourishing at the turn of the twentieth century, Paul Gallimard appears to be an uncommon figure who quickly occupied many positions in the “worlds of art”, to quote Howard Becker. Gallimard’s family background and cultural networks show that he belonged to the Parisian elite, a bourgeois and intellectual class that developed after the collapse of the Second Empire and emerged during the French Third Republic (1870–1940). A friend of Auguste Renoir and many other artists, Gallimard was at the same time a theatre owner, a translator, a collector of paintings, an independent publisher, a bibliophile and, in a way, an exhibition curator. Considering his social environment and his economic and cultural practices, a monographic approach to Paul Gallimard’s collection allows us to understand better how the issues of social identity are intertwined with the Parisian bibliophilic scene and the collecting practices related to Impressionist art and the works of the Old Masters.

A ‘Dandy Collector’?

Paul Gallimard (Fig. 6.1) was born in 1850 in Suresnes – a city on the left bank of the Seine, in the rich western suburbs of Paris. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met many of his future friends, notably the artists Albert Besnard, Eugène Carrière and the architect Frantz Jourdain, who arranged the meeting between Rodin and Gallimard. He sometimes presented himself as a trained architect, but he never really practiced this profession. In Pierre Assouline’s biography of Gaston Gallimard, Paul’s son and the founder of the famous Gallimard publishing house (Les Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française), we learn that as a young man, Paul Gallimard travelled a great deal, especially to Latin America where he drew up the Catalogue raisonné of the collection of the Buenos Aires Museum.1 However, he seemed 1 P. Assouline, Gaston Gallimard: un demi-siècle d’édition française, Paris: Balland, 1984, p. 19. © Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_007

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to have finally devoted himself to business, notably with his management of the Théâtre des Variétés at least from 1873.2 The Gallimard family lived at Saint-Lazare in Paris, and they owned a property in Neuilly-sur-Seine and a manor in Bénerville, Normandy, where they regularly invited their friends. In his memoirs, Jean Renoir, who frequently saw Gallimard in the company of his father Pierre-Auguste Renoir, remembered him as “a true eighteenth century Frenchman”.3 Gallimard was also an opera lover, and became one of the founding members of the Livre d’Or des chefs d’œuvre de l’opéra français (The Golden Book of French Opera Masterpieces), along with the composer Ernest Chausson, the Duc d’Aumale, Count Isaac de Camondo and Camille Saint Saens. Concerning his wealth, the critic Octave Mirbeau ironically summarised that “Monsieur Paul Gallimard is a very rich man and a very popular collector. He collects books, paintings  … and income. Because it is necessary to have incomes to collect paintings, and paintings to collect incomes”.4 A part of his fortune also came from the grandfather of Lucie Duché, the wife of Paul Gallimard, who “knew a rapid social and economic ascension under the July Monarchy” and finally had invested “in the purchase of villas, land, buildings and theatres”.5 Both Paul and Lucie Gallimard, who painted in the shadow of Renoir, were therefore very familiar with the artistic and literary circles of Paris. Indeed, Lucie was portrayed by Eugène Carrière in 1889 and also by Renoir in 1892, while Paul Gallimard was painted by Carrière at least twice around 1887–1888.6 In her monograph on Renoir, Anne Distel recalled that Gustave Gallimard, Paul Gallimard’s father, was himself a collector of paintings by Jongkind, Corot and, more broadly, the Barbizon school. The paintings of Gustave and those of his son Paul were hung on different floors, according to a letter from Gaston Gallimard to Marcel Proust.7 Paul then continued his father’s already prestigious collection, developing it thanks to his friend, the critic Gustave Geffroy, by buying more contemporary paintings by the Impressionists, in particular Monet, Degas and above all Renoir from the end of the 1880s. He bought from Paul Durand-Ruel, Georges Petit and Bernheim’s galleries. He also knew Camille Pissarro and Monet, whom he visited in Giverny, before buying some 2 3 4 5 6

Letter to Paul Gallimard, Paris, Fondation Custodia, Inv. No 2001-A.131. J. Renoir, Pierre Auguste Renoir, mon père, Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1999, p. 363. Cited in A. Cerisier, Gallimard: un éditeur à l’œuvre, Paris: Gallimard, 2011, p. 17. Assouline, Gaston Gallimard, p. 18. V.  Bonnet-Nora, Eugène Carrière (1849–1906): catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris: Gallimard, 2008, pp. 261–262. 7 P. Fouché (ed.), Marcel Proust-Gaston Gallimard. Correspondance 1912–1922, Paris: Gallimard, 1989, p. 55.

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of his paintings. However, it was with Auguste Renoir that he shared a friendship, which led them travelling together to Spain. As well as his father, Paul Gallimard was close to artists but he distinguished himself from his father by creating his own personal collection. Whether Gallimard harnessed an ambition to compete with his father in the practice of collecting remains an open question; but the fact that their collections were displayed in two different spaces indicates that there was a genuine distinction between the two. It seems that Paul Gallimard’s collection was at the heart of what art historian Léa Saint-Raymond has recently attempted to show, by placing Impressionist paintings in a broader spectrum of what she calls the “system of collected objects”, to use Jean Baudrillard’s concept.8 Through the use of amassed statistical data, Saint-Raymond aimed to show what collectors of Impressionist paintings were collecting, in order to analyse their tastes more globally. When, in 1968, Baudrillard analysed the new consumer society and the proliferation of new objects through the “system of objects”, from a sociological stance, he detected new relationships between individuals and materiality9. In particular, he pointed to the integration of the individual into the social system via objects, with an increase in demand for prestige and distinction. For Baudrillard, objects were vectors of personal projection, wherein magic and symbols converge in the collection. Therefore, Gallimard collected books first, but also fumés – prints from woodcuts – and the works of Old Masters and modern paintings. In September 1908, in an issue of the magazine Les Arts – one of the rare documents about Paul Gallimard still kept in the archives of the Gallimard publishing house – the critic Louis Vauxcelles described how Paul Gallimard devoted himself to collecting of books very early on: “the library of Gallimard is a truly definitive summary of the history of the book” (Fig. 6.2). Vauxcelles continued the chronology of the collection, and pointed out its particularly interesting aspect of assembling fumés: [Paul Gallimard] enjoyed collecting fumés (as you know, this is the name given to the rare proof that the engraver prints on chine in carbon black, which he sends to the draughtsman, and which the latter returns to him, with corrections, with the mention: very good, fairly good, to be revised, etc.). M. Gallimard collected more than fifteen hundred fumés, signed Pauquet, Charlet, Penguilly, Eugène Lami, Granville, Traviès, Johannot, Gigoux, Isabey, Meissonier, etc., […] From the wood engravers and illustrators of the Second Empire, he moved on to the 8 L.  Saint-Raymond, ‘L’impressionnisme dans le “système des objets” collectionnés’, in Collectioning Impressionism, conference materials, Rouen: Museum of Fine Arts: hal. archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03006093 (accessed 20 April 2021). 9 See J. Baudrillard, Le système des objets, (1st ed. 1969), Paris: Gallimard, 2014.

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Fig. 6.2

Louis Vauxcelles’s article Collection de M. P. Gallimard, in Les Arts, 81 (September 1908) © Public Domain.

moderns (he entrusted Besnard with the illustration of the Clemenceau Affair). These book illustrators led him to wish that, in his father’s collection, which was almost exclusively composed of landscapes, the human figure would be better represented. He acquired Jesus on Lake Tiberias, a dramatic masterpiece by Delacroix. Then he became enamoured of the Impressionists …10

Some years later, on the 14 May 1918, the art dealer René Gimpel recalled a visit to the bibliophile Gallimard, where his mistress, the actress Amélie Diéterle, and the art dealer Ambroise Vollard were also present. Gimpel reported the words of Gallimard who would have said to him: “I have fifteen hundreds of the two thousand woods that illustrate the main books of the nineteenth century. The day after the death of the great engravers, I would run to their widows or see their families and buy their engraved work. I have made some opportunities”.11 Louis Vauxcelles detected a ‘uniqueness’ in the collection, and wrote: “Gallimard never bothered to bring together works by this or that master, this or that school. His sure instinct as an artist, his delicate sensibility, refined by a deep culture, made him admit the most apparently diverse works, sometimes 10 11

L. Vauxcelles, ‘Collection de M. Paul Gallimard’, Les Arts, 81 (1908), p. 2–32. R. Gimpel, Journal d’un collectionneur: marchand de tableaux, Paris: Hermann, 2011, p. 43.

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even the most disparate. Thus, in the same room, Greco, Daumier, Corot and Renoir can be found side by side”.12 Depending on the period, his collection included between 130 and 180 paintings, consisting of 7 works by Delacroix, 8 by Daumier, 9 by Corot, 11 by Carrière, 16 by Renoir, as well as Fragonard, Géricault, Greco, Poussin, Bonnard, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard. Anne Distel stated that Paul Gallimard’s collection was “without doubt one of the most personal and remarkable Parisian collections prior to the First World War”.13 Despite his wealth, Paul Gallimard sometimes broke away from the gallery market to negotiate directly with painters, and had the reputation of being only slightly generous. Moreover, his childhood friend Frantz Jourdain seemed to be progressively critical of Gallimard, and Edmond de Goncourt reported on the 11 March 1895 that the latter “is talking about the avatar of Gallimard, about this man who lived only for books, then for paintings, and who now spends all his evenings at the Variétés, with his buttonhole in bloom, […] who has at last become quite a party animal and declares loudly that the artists, of whom he once made his sole society, are melancholy, sad, annoying people who bring nothing but gloom into their relations, and that he now wants gaiety and joy around him!”.14 Indeed, Paul Gallimard’s artistic, cultural and political network placed him at the crossroads of an elitist intellectual bourgeoisie and a popular worldliness linked to the ownership of two Montmartre theatres, including the Variétés, which Eugène Carrière painted for the bibliophile – Edmond de Goncourt wrote about it that “the characters are admirably arranged in the crossing of the hemicyclic curves of the room”.15 Thus, if we adopt Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of social distinction, Gallimard’s collecting practice affirmed his status as a traditional collector who at the same time was open up to modernity; whether through the dissemination of a new aesthetic of the ‘modern book’, or through the purchase of modern impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. For instance, Gallimard organised several exhibitions of the modern books, from the Art Nouveau exhibition in 1896 to the Salon d’Automne created at the beginning of the twentieth century.16 Paul Gallimard enjoyed showing his treasures directly in his apartment, and he frequently loaned works for exhibitions. Therefore, his collection 12 13 14

Vauxcelles, ‘Collection’, p. 1. A. Distel, Renoir, Paris: Citadelles & Mazenod, 2009, p. 306. E. de Goncourt, Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1887–1896, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004, p. 929. 15 Goncourt, Journal, p. 436 (Notes from 5 June 1890). 16 L.  Rivaud  Chevaillier, Genèse et réception des dessins de Rodin pour les Fleurs du Mal: du livre ‘illustré’ unique à l’édition en fac-similé (1887–1940), Paris: Université Paris  1

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was recognised by his peers among both art critics and bibliophiles, and his collection thus brought him symbolic prestige, in the sense of the social dynamics that Bourdieu meant.

A Modern Bibliophile: the Heir of the “fermiers-généraux”

Mostly known by the historians of art for his collection of paintings,17 Paul Gallimard also actively participated in a trend to modernize book illustration, along with Octave Uzanne (1851–1931). In 1887, Gallimard asked Auguste Rodin to create original drawings for his personal copy of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire.18 This unique book, now located in the library of Rodin Museum in Paris, rapidly became one of the most precious items of Gallimard’s collection. As Willa Z. Silverman precisely explained it in The New Bibliopolis,19 the bibliophilia scene was essentially represented by two major trends: between the heirs of the aristocratic bibliophilia – as perpetuated in the old and powerful Société des Bibliophiles François – and the new ‘modernist’ trends, embodied by the ideas of Octave Uzanne, who precisely coined the expression “New Bibliopolis”. Paul Gallimard, though interested also in old books, invested in the preservation of modern books. The practice of illustrating a single copy in the margins – as in Rodin’s Flowers of Evil – was not an isolated one, as Hélène Védrine underscored with the cases of James Ensor and Félicien Rops.20 Actually, the singularization of such a book was also a common practice for the writer Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896), one of the most important modern bibliophiles of the nineteenth century. Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote about the French arts and politics until his death in his Journal, constituted an important collection of unica – that is to say, books that exist as single copies (Fig. 6.3).21 Paul Gallimard met him several times, and he had the idea of creating a three-copy edition of de Goncourt’s novel Germinie Lacerteux (1865), illustrated by Jean-François

17 18 19 20 21

Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2021: dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03386086, pp.  54–63, published online 19 October 2021. See, for example A. Distel, Les Collectionneurs des impressionnistes: amateurs et marchands, Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1989. See Rivaud Chevaillier, Genèse et réception. See W. Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2008. H.  Védrine, ‘Le marginal et le liminal: quelques pratiques d’annotations littéraires et visuelles chez Félicien Rops et James Ensor’, Paris, Textyles, 17–18 (2000), pp. 15–30. B.  Vouilloux, ‘Une collection d’unica’, COnTEXTES 14 (2014): journals.openedition.org/ contextes/5919 (accessed 21 August 2021).

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Fig. 6.3

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Paul Cardon, Portrait of the writer, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt (1822–1896), in his office, between 1885–1895, albumen silver print, Musée Carnavalet, Paris © Public Domain.

Raffaëlli: one copy was given to de Goncourt, one to the art critic Gustave Geffroy; and Gallimard kept the last copy for himself. Moreover, Edmond de Goncourt commissioned a portrait of himself to Eugène Carrière, to paint on the cover of the book (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale). Later, Gallimard asked Carrière, who was also his friend, to do the same for his own copy (Paris, Custodia Foundation, Frits Lugt Collection). Therefore, this singularization, completely turned towards the modernity these bibliophiles called for; along with Uzanne and Henri Béraldi, who coined the expression “creative bibliophilia”, one could see a way to distinguish oneself – in Bourdieu’s sociological sense.22 On the one hand, Gallimard distinguished himself from the rest of the bibliophiles by calling upon modern artists (such as Carrière, Besnard or Rodin) who were not simply illustrators. On the other hand, he held himself aloof of the global book market, which

22 See P. Bourdieu, La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979.

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Gallimard considered decadent because of the progressive abandonment of the traditional techniques of reproduction.23 Silverman considers that de Goncourt, Béraldi, Uzanne and Gallimard had a very similar social profile, sharing as they did Bourdieu’s “bohemian bourgeois”.24 If de Goncourt kept away from bibliophile societies, he cultivated his own publishing practice, inspired by Rococo and Japonism, and represented a model for many enthusiasts such as Robert de Montesquiou, also a close friend of Paul Gallimard, who would be one of the first members of the Société des Amis du Livre Moderne (Society of Friends of the Modern Book). As Silverman underlines, Edmond de Goncourt considered Gallimard as a “publisher grand-seigneur”, as the “heir of the fermiers-généraux of the eighteenth century, the newly rich upper middle class and royal tax collectors who had invested their income in commissioning magnificent illustrated editions of texts by La Fontaine and others”.25

Paul Gallimard and the Société des Amis du Livre Moderne

A significant part of Gallimard’s network was crystallized at the beginning of the twentieth century within the mentioned Société des Amis du Livre Moderne, founded in 1908 by his friend, the bookbinder Charles Meunier (1865–1948), which Gallimard chaired until 1923. It was this society that published two hundred copies of a facsimile edition of Rodin’s Les Fleurs du Mal in 1918, which should have been a unique copy in 1888.26 Paul Gallimard was always attentive to the evolution of taste, and this choice of publisher could reflect a desire to legitimise himself as a precursor of the taste for the “artist’s book”, before the art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard.27 It is worth remembering that the Société des Amis du Livre Moderne gathered together personages from the worlds of politics and the aristocracy. In the Spring 1925 issue of the journal Byblis,28 the novelist Léon Thévenin, who had been secretary of the Society of Friends of the Modern Book since its establishment, summarised that “the most brilliant personalities of society, politics 23 24 25 26 27 28

See for instance P. Kaenel, Le Métier d’illustrateur. 1830–1880. Rodolphe Töpffer, J.-J. Grandville, Gustave Doré, (1st edition), Paris: Messene, 1996. Silverman, Art Nouveau, p. 11. Silverman, Art Nouveau, p. 14. Silverman, Art Nouveau, pp. 72–79. See C. Roca, Edition Limitée, Vollard, Petiet et l’estampe de maîtres, exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais, Paris: Paris Musées, 2021. L. Thévenin, La Société des Amis du Livre moderne, Paris: Byblis, 1925, pp. 33–35.

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and the arts were among the first members”, such as members of the aristocracy like Mrs Bischoffsheim, the Marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre, the Countess of Fels, the Duchess of Guiche, the Duchess of Rohan, but also the Count of Montesquiou; and so the collector Jacques Doucet, the deputy Louis Barthou, the historian Henri Houssaye, the senior civil servant Henri Monod, the deputy and then senator Maurice Quentin-Bauchart, the activist Gabriel Séailles, the jeweller Henri Vever, etc. Moreover, the Society did not limit itself to publishing fine luxury books for its members, but also developed an annual programme of causeries, which were conferences devoted to specific themes related to bibliophilia. These talks were organised in the “most elegant salons in Paris”, including that of the Countess of Fels, located in the actual Canadian Embassy in Paris. A conference by Léon Thévenin was published in the 1908 bulletin of the Société, concerning the “women bibliophiles”.29 In this fascinating piece, Thévenin explained his vision of bibliophilia and the social and political implications of a passion for books: But even if books did not have the virtue of consoling us from the disgraces of life and of softening the bitterness which comes to us from the commerce of the world, it would still remain to love them by a sort of duty, of moral obligation. One cannot have a great soul and a penetrating mind without some passion for letters. It is by them, in fact, that the superiority of a nation is measured. And it is the enlightened encouragement they receive that justifies the legitimacy of aristocracies. There is nothing more noble for a person of status, than to extend his protection to those arts which are addressed only to an elite, and which, by their very nature, are as far removed as possible from the vulgar.30

Enlightening Paul Gallimard’s very personal practice of collecting, Thévenin added that: […] the taste for books is a personal taste. It is a preference for oneself, of which one hardly entertains others and which is part of one’s inner life. That is why true book lovers do not lend themselves easily to the curiosity of others. The world knows little about them. They are bibliophiles for themselves, not for others.31

That is why modern bibliophilia thus seems to be such a heuristic social milieu for studying the social, cultural, artistic and political dynamics at the turn of the twentieth century; which Paul Gallimard embodied for a time before sinking into oblivion following his involvement in 1919 in the scandal of the fake 29 L. Thévenin, Les femmes bibliophiles, Paris: Société des Amis du Livre Moderne, 1908. 30 Thévenin, Les femmes bibliophiles, pp. 59–60. 31 Thévenin, Les femmes bibliophiles, p. 73.

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Rodin. His son Gaston Gallimard, who enjoyed great success the publishing world, would be left to carry the mantle of the family name. Paul Gallimard’s collection was sold after his death in 1929 to the Swiss art dealer, Walter Feilchenfeldt.32 Paul Gallimard, being close to the highest echelons of the Parisian elite, was the intersectional figure of a wide network of artists, erudite bibliophiles, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the political world. Gallimard built himself up as a dandy collector after the fashion of Charles Baudelaire, whom he so admired. For Baudelaire, who most of all perceived originality as a sign of modernity, the dandy possessed an ardent need to make himself original; and that the individual is more important than anything else. That is why Paul Gallimard embraced this way of life: being relatively discreet – there are hardly any photographs of him.33 Indeed, he would play on this invisibility in order to make himself known to the wider world. List of References Assouline, Pierre. Gaston Gallimard: un demi-siècle d’édition française, Paris: Balland, 1984. Baudrillard, Jean. Le système des objets, (1st ed. 1969), Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Bonnet-Nora, Véronique. Eugène Carrière (1849–1906): catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Bourdieu, Pierre. La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979. Cerisier, Alban. Gallimard: un éditeur à l’œuvre, Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Distel, Anne. Les Collectionneurs des impressionnistes: amateurs et marchands, Lausanne: Ed. La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1989. Distel, Anne. Renoir, Paris: Citadelles & Mazenod, 2009. Feilchenfeldt, Christina. ‘The Paul Cassirer Gallery (1933–1945), Berlin-AmsterdamLondon’, in Ines Rotermund-Reynard (ed.), Echoes of Exile: Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Fouché, Pascal (ed.). Marcel Proust-Gaston Gallimard. Correspondance 1912–1922, Paris: Gallimard, 1989. 32 See C. Feilchenfeldt, ‘The Paul Cassirer Gallery (1933–1945), Berlin-Amsterdam-London’, in Ines Rotermund-Reynard (ed.), Echoes of Exile: Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933–1945, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. I warmly thank Christine Koenigs for the reference. 33 Except for one photograph with his mistress Amélie Diéterle during her first flying experience, published in the journal Comoedia (26 February 1913).

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Gimpel, René. Journal d’un collectionneur: marchand de tableaux, Paris: Hermann, 2011. Goncourt, Edmond de. Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1887–1896, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004. Kaenel, Philippe. Le Métier d’illustrateur. 1830–1880. Rodolphe Töpffer, J.-J.  Grandville, Gustave Doré, (1st edition), Paris: Messene, 1996. Renoir, Jean. Pierre Auguste Renoir, mon père, Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1999. Rivaud Chevaillier, Léo. Genèse et réception des dessins de Rodin pour les Fleurs du Mal: du livre ‘illustré’ unique à l’édition en fac-similé (1887–1940), Paris: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2021: dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03386086 (published online 19 October 2021). Roca, Clara. Edition Limitée, Vollard, Petiet et l’estampe de maîtres, exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais, Paris: Paris Musées, 2021. Saint-Raymond, Léa. ‘L’impressionnisme dans le ‘système des objets’ collectionnés’, in Collectioning Impressionism, conference materials, Rouen: Museum of Fine Arts: hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03006093 (accessed 20 April 2021). Silverman, Willa Zahava. The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Silverman, Willa Zahava. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, Style, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Thévenin, Léon. Les femmes bibliophiles, Paris: Société des Amis du Livre Moderne, 1908. Thévenin, Léon. La Société des Amis du Livre moderne, Paris: Byblis, 1925. Vauxcelles, Louis. ‘Collection de M. Paul Gallimard’, Les Arts, 81 (1908), pp. 2–32. Védrine, Hélène. ‘Le marginal et le liminal: quelques pratiques d’annotations littéraires et visuelles chez Félicien Rops et James Ensor’, Textyles, 17–18 (2000). Vouilloux, Bernard. ‘Une collection d’unica’, COnTEXTES, 14 (2014): journals.open edition.org/contextes/5919 (accessed 21 August 2021).

Fig. 7.1

Gustave Ricard, Portrait of Adèle Caussin, 1868, oil on canvas, 182 × 131, Paris Musées, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris © Paris Musées, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Chapter 7

She “Who Does Only What She Wants and Wants Only What She Must”: Adèle Caussin, Marquise de Landolfo-Carcano (1831–1921), Demimondaine and Collector Pauline Guyot In 1912, Adèle Caussin, a once notorious Parisian demimondaine, and an active yet now forgotten collector of nineteenth-century Academic art, was given the title of Marquise de Landolfo-Carcano. In the same year, she sold her art collection for nearly 4 million francs, bringing together the most important collectors and art dealers of the era time, including Paul Durand Ruel (1831– 1922), Jules Féral (1874–1944), Roland Knoedler (1856–1932) and Alexandre Bernheim (1839–1915). During this sale, the Louvre Museum acquired L’Allée des châtaigniers by Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) for 270,000 francs.1 The sale catalogue reveals Adèle Caussin’s strong interest in paintings by her contemporaries. Nearly 89 works were described as modern, including works by William Bouguereau (1825–1905), Paul Baudry (1828–1886), Narcisse Diaz de la Pena (1807–1876), Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876), Ernest Meissonnier (1815–1891) and Camille Corot (1796–1875). It contained a dozen works by Antoine Vollon (1833–1900), several by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), five paintings by Marià Fortuny (1838–1874) including the Vicarià, and several by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), among them L’Assassinat de l’Evêque de Liège. In addition, there were about fifty modern drawings and some sculptures, notably by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and Emmanuel Frémiet (1824–1910). She also had a complementary group of 39 antique paintings, including a Greuze (1725–1805), a Rubens (1577–1640) and a Veronese (1528–1588), from the sale of the Palazzo San Donato in 1870.2 The importance of the sale of this collection, which was a major social and artistic event, testifies to the singularity and quality of Adele 1 Catalogue des tableaux modernes, aquarelles, dessins, pastels, sculptures, tableaux anciens, dessins anciens, objets d’art et d’ameublement appartenant à Madame de la Marquise de Landolfo-Carcano dont la vente, par suite de son départ, aura lieu …, auction catalogue, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 30 May -1 June 1912, Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1912. 2 Purchased at the sale of the collection of the industrialist Anatole Nikolaievich Demidoff (1812–1870), prince of San Donato, 3 and 4 March, 1870, No 189.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_008

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Cassin’s collection, particularly when compared to those compiled by other demimondaines.3 A collection which, in the words of Octave Mirbeau: “deontes in the one who assembled it, a choice that, if not always logical, was at least often curious, and unexpected from a woman whose job is not to love the arts, let alone understand them”.4 How did a former ‘milliner’, the daughter of a modest dyer from Commercy, manage to assemble one of the most important collections of her time? By relying on a set of partly unpublished sources, this article aims to shed light on the collection and identity of a now-forgotten woman who, in her own words, was “one of those children born with a vocation for the arts akin to the religious vocation of others”.5

From Adèle Caussin to Marquise de Landolfo-Carcano

Anne Marie Adèle Caussin was born in Commercy (Meuse) on 26 January 1831.6 Her father was a dyer. Little is known about the first years of her life in Commercy, apart from the fact that on 23 December 1850, at the age of nineteen, she gave birth to a girl named Gabrielle Emma Augustine. The birth certificate specifies the name of the father who recognized her: Prosper Albuquerque, twenty-three years old, a contractor in public works. They did not marry and she continued her living as a marchande-modiste.7 This is the only mention of Prosper Albuquerque. Gabrielle’s biological father was most likely one of the

3 In order to define the notion of demimonde, it is necessary to situate prostitution in the social spectrum of venal love. In the case under consideration, it is a question of high-flying prostitution, that is to say, of women who escape the regulatory insoumises, whose clientele was exclusively made up of wealthy personalities, aristocrats, the great bourgeoisie, great industrialists or wealthy provincials and foreigners. This ‘summit of gallantry’ included different types of relationships, ranging from courting to being a kept woman. According to Alain Corbin “the imprecision and evolution of the expressions “demi-monde” and “demimondaine” are significant”; it is a milieu separated from the world and honest wives by scandal, courtesans and by money at the beginning of the Empire to become a “variety of gallantry” designating a “high-flying prostitute”, a “great star of the prostitution world”, in the second half of the century. “Zed”, Le demi-monde sous le Second Empire, Paris: Kolb, 1892, p. 11; A. Corbin, Les filles de noce, Misère sexuelle et prostitution au XIXe siècle, Paris: Flammarion, 1982, p. 246. 4 O. Mirbeau, ‘Notes sur l’art’, La France (3 October 1884). 5 Municipal Archives of Commercy, Correspondence between Adèle Landolfo-Carcano and Adrien Recouvreur, letter of 14 November 1904. 6 Departmental Archives of Meuse, Commercy, 2 E 125, register of births, marriages and deaths, 1831. 7 Departmental Archives of Meuse, Void, 2E 587, register of births, marriages and deaths, 1850.

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sons of the House of Montfort, Philippe de Monfort (1826–1887), with whom she appears to have been employed for a time.8 Very little is known about when, and in what circumstances, Adèle Caussin arrived in Paris. Perhaps she followed Prosper Albuquerque, who had left the Meuse to reside in Saint-Mandé around 1860?9 In any case, the remarkable wealth she acquired in the very short time between her arrival in Paris – probably around 1855–1860 – and the purchase of her private mansion in 1867, 1 rue de Tilsitt, suggests that she had been maintained by one or more particularly wealthy individuals upon her arrival in the capital.10 One of her first lovers seems to have been the painter Edouard Delessert (1828–1898),11 with whom she subsequently maintained a friendly relationship for more than 8

A. Garcia-Rancaño, ‘Anne Marie Adèle Caussin, (1831–1921). Coleccionismo y mecenazgo en París durante el Segundo Imperio’, Liño: Revista anual de historia del arte, 27 (2021), pp. 77–90. 9 He appears as a public works contractor living in Saint-Mandé in the newspaper Le Droit (4 June 1862), but seems to have moved to Bordeaux as early as 1869 (Archives of Paris, Civil Status, marriage table, 1869, V4E 941). An article in La Petite Gironde (8 December 1892) mentions his arrest at the age of 66 for “numerous frauds committed in Bordeaux or in the district”. 10 Like many demimondaines, Adèle Caussin lived in the new fashionable districts of western Paris. In 1864, she lived at 1, boulevard de l’Empereur, now avenue du Trocadero. In 1867, she built a private mansion overlooking the Place de l’Etoile at 1, rue de Tilsitt. It was built by the architect Rohault de Fleury (1801–1875) on a model designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorf (1792–1867). The interior decoration of decorative paintings and marouflaged canvases was created in 1868 and entrusted to several artists, including Alexis Mazerolle (1826–1889), Charles Chaplin (1825–1891), Alexandre Denuelle (1818–1879) and Pierre-Victor Galland (1822–1892). A set of photographs preserved at the Carnavalet Museum and probably taken shortly before the collection was put up for sale, allow us to discover the layout of Adele’s collections within the hotel (Archives of Paris, land register, Tilsitt Street, DQ18567). 11 As Édouard Delessert did not seem inclined to marry her, she put an end to this relationship in 1885 by a letter that she submitted to Alexandre Dumas for approval: “Ma maison t’attriste dis-tu, mais si je n’avais que ce sujet de tristesse, je t’assure que la vie me semblerait encore bien bonne en me rendant un peu utile aux autres. Ma tristesse, puisque tristesse il y a, tient à un ordre de choses plus élevées. Puisque tu dis avoir pour moi des tendresses très extraordinaires, montre que tu as l’âme assez noble pour braver l’opinion en gardant sur ton cœur la femme que tu aimes! […] Tout cela est très loin, cher Edouard, et si j’en ai pleuré pendant bien des années, la blessure ne saigne plus, les années l’ont fermée, ma vie est restée vide et tu pourrais lui rendre la dignité et la joie en devenant un bon mari mais pour cela, il faudrait renoncer à beaucoup de mauvaises habitudes qui te sont encore plus chères que moi n’est-ce pas? Cher maître, le brouillon de lettre aura-t-il votre blâme? En tout cas j’ai décidé d’en finir avec une situation qui n’est ni chair ni poisson depuis 20 ans”. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), National Archives of France (NAF) 14663, f. 474–475.

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twenty years.12 If he was not the only source of her financial capital, he was for a time its manager. A notarized deed of 27 May 1864 mentions that he was “in charge of the management of the capital that possessed and of the annual savings she could make, either by investing them, or by employing them with his own capital and under his name in the last business operations in which he himself had an interest”. In the same act, he acknowledges that he is accountable to her for 550,000 francs, which gives an idea of Adèle’s financial means at that time.13 It is most probably at this time that she abandoned her name of “Caussin” for “de Cassin”. In a letter to Alexandre Dumas ( fils) dated 17 April 1881, she evokes the appropriation of the particle “de”, a very common practice in the demimonde, as an initiative of Delessert to whom she owes this “little vanity touch”.14 Adèle Caussin was surprisingly invisible in the press before 1880. Most demimondaines used the press in order to promote their attendance at theatre premieres or at the Opera, scrutinized for their outfits, their lovers, or their carriages. This was not the case of Adèle Caussin, who remained very discreet. She belonged rather to the category of women maintained by one or several lovers than to the very fantasized category of grandes horizontales. What is certain is that she operated outside the framework of bourgeois marriage and that the sums of money she obtained very quickly upon her arrival in Paris imply relations with rich and powerful men. An article in Gil Blas evokes this same fact directly: This woman can be considered as one of the most curious products of our contemporary society – of this society where the duchess would willingly trade her coat of arms and her quarters of nobility for the insolent luxury of the lady of the night […] The nobility of Mrs. de Cassin is quite recent. Before playing Aspasie, she was a laundress. It was only at the age of thirty that fortune appeared in the form of a rich English lord […] the courtesan’s opulence came from an entrepreneur who, not content with devouring a dozen million to satisfy his whims, earned forty million in the construction of the Boulevard Haussmann.15 12

In 1914, she gave the Carnavalet Museum a bust of Edouard Delessert draped in antique style, in marble, by Alexandre Schoenewerk (1820–1885). Carnavalet Museum, Inv. No S1584. 13 AN, MC/ET/XXV/231, Minutes of Julien François Yver, 28 May 1864. 14 Unless otherwise mentioned, the correspondence kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France cited in this article concerns a set of letters addressed by Adèle Caussin to Alexandre Dumas around 1880–1890: April 17, 1881: ‘Quand vous me ferez l’honneur de m’écrire, supprimez je vous prie, la particule qui ne m’appartient pas. C’est un ridicule que je dois à un petit côté vaniteux de Delessert, ce qui n’a pas empêché la chose de devenir de notoriété publique quoi que je dise’. BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 276–278. 15 Gil Blas (29 September 1884): “Cette femme peut être considérée comme l’un de produits les plus curieux de notre société contemporaine – de cette société où la duchesse

Adèle Caussin, DemiMondaine and Collector

Fig. 7.2

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Henri Regnault, Salome, 1870, oil on canvas, 160 × 102.9, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Public Domain.

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What is remarkable is that Adèle Caussin made her appearance in the press precisely at the moment when she was asserting herself as a collector. Her purchases at the Salon during major sales and the special exhibition devoted to her collection by the Georges Petit’s gallery in 1884 seem to have put Caussin at the centre of attention in the newspaper Gil Blas.16 The attendant articles leave no doubt that she belonged to the demimonde since Caussin was listed among other vieilles pécheresses in 1882, alongside Hortense Schneider (1833– 1920), 17Adèle Courtois, Louise Mangin, Gabrielle Elluini, Laure de Croze, and Caroline Hassé in an 1887 article dedicated to the vieille garde impériale.18 She was also mentioned in a licentious listing published in London in 1883, Les jolies femmes de Paris, under the name “de Cassin”. The anonymous author attributes the fortune of Adèle Caussin to “a rich Englishman”, but also to a relationship with Napoleon III and another rich entrepreneur whom she was said to have ruined.19 The author also attributes Bonapartist sympathies to Adèle Caussin; it was also written that she had diplomatic influence extending to Spain. Although it is difficult to confirm this information, the author seems to have been well informed since Adèle Caussin appears to have been in close contact with the Spanish royal family. She also had relations with the English aristocracy, notably a certain Lord Poulett in the years 1870–1880.20 In her correspondence with Alexandre Dumas she confesses several times her “delicate social situation”, evoking “the pitfalls that were set for me as they can be set for any woman in my situation” since she must “suffer the fatality of her background” and “the iron gates of the world closed before her”.21

16 17 18 19 20

21

troquerait volontiers son blason et ses quartiers de noblesse contre le luxe insolant de la fille […] La noblesse de Mme de Cassin est toute récente. Avant de jouer les Aspasie, elle était blanchisseuse. C’est à trente ans seulement que la fortune s’offrit à elle. Elle apparut sous la forme d’un riche seigneur anglais […] l’opulence de la courtisane revient à un entrepreneur à qui, non content de dévorer pour satisfaire ses caprices, une dizaine de millions, lui fit gagner quarante millions dans le percement du boulevard Haussmann”. A catalogue was published on this occasion: Une exposition particulière. Exposition au profit de la société philanthropique, du 1er au 10 décembre 1884, Georges Petit Gallery: Paris, 1884. Gil Blas (3 May 1882). Gil Blas (29 September 1889). Pretty women of Paris, Their Names and Adresses, Qualities and Faults, Being a Complete Directory; or Guide to Pleasure for Visitors to the Gay City, London: Press of the Prefecture de Police, 1883. BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 360–365, 368–371, undated, ca. 1881: “Il n’y a pas que Girardin qui compte sur vous. Il y a un oncle du roi Alphonse XII qui écrit comme un Espagnol de l’île de Cuba. […] Il a dû se faire présenter à vous pour vous demander un petit conseil parce que vous avez plus l’habitude! Je trouve cela aussi sans-gêne et aussi amusant […]”. BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 444–445, 482, 498–501.

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Adèle’s situation was therefore particular: her social ascent was spectacular and she enjoyed a form of autonomy outside the strict legislative frameworks that governed the lives of daughters, wives and mothers in the nineteenth century. Indeed, she remained relatively detached from marital guardianship, even after marrying the Marquis of Landolfo-Carcano in 1889. Their marriage contract was very clear on the issues of the separation of properties and the status of her collection.22 Nevertheless, this late marriage which resulted in the acquisition of a title of nobility allowed her to establish his social position. This financial and cultural independence was an important factor in the building of her collection. Krzysztof Pomian’s hypothesis that a collection is often an instrument of self-promotion, serving sometimes to legitimise inherited or acquired wealth in the eyes of the owner or others, seems twice as true in the case of a demimondaine like Adèle Caussin, who, in a rare occurrence for a woman of her time, managed to cross the social and cultural divide between her modest origins and her newly acquired privileged.23 She seized upon a distinctive practice of the social elite in order to establish her success in a world where collecting was largely perceived as a male practice. She succeeded despite her marginality on two fronts: one linked to her gender and another to her social status as a woman with a disreputable past.

Collecting “her Jewels of Paint”24

Collecting, which was a source of prestige of personal fulfilment and of an affirmation of economic and cultural power, accompanied Adèle Caussin’s social ascent.25 It is particularly interesting to note that she made her first purchases 22 AN, MC/ET/XXXIV/1331, Me Péan-de-St-Gilles, notary, 2 rue de Choiseul, marriage contract between the Marquis de Carcano and Miss Caussin, 26 October 1889: “Le futur époux apporte en mariage et se constitue personnellement en dot, ses habits, lignes, bijoux, effets mobiliers d’une valeur de deux mille francs […] Arrivant la dissolution du mariage, tous les meubles meublants, objets mobiliers, objets d’art, argenterie, bijoux, tableaux, voitures, chevaux, objets de lingerie et vêtements qui pourront se trouver soit dans l’hôtel situé à Paris, rue de Tilsitt n°1, soit dans toutes autres habitations en France seront réputés appartenir à la future épouse sans qu’elle soit obligée d’en constater la propriété par aucun titre”. 23 K.  Pomian, Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne: Venise-Chicago, XIIIe-XXe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 2003, p. 328. 24 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 286–289. 25 J. Verlaine, Femmes collectionneuses d’art et mécènes, de 1880 à nos jours, Paris: Hazan, 2014, p. 20. See also S. Pearce, On collecting: an investigation into collecting in the European tradition, New York: Routledge, 1995.

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soon after her arrival in Paris, since she acquired a painting by Léon Bonnat (1833–1922), Pasqua Marià, at the Salon in 1863. She made numerous purchases from 1865 onwards, coinciding with her moving to the rue de Tilsitt; and she continued to do so until the end of the 1890s, when philanthropy and charity work in her home town took over her life. As with Bonnat’s Pasqua Marià at the 1863 Salon, she was interested in works and painters regularly exhibited on the walls of the Salon, which partly explains the predominance of academic painters in her collection while ensuring social visibility. This was the case not only with a painting by Václaw Brožík (1851–1901) at the 1881 Salon,26 but also with a marble statue by Prosper d’Epinay (1836–1914), Ceinture dorée, which had been a great success with the public at the 1874 Salon.27 Generally speaking, like many contemporary collectors, Caussin bought the works of the most expensive and popular painters of the late Second Empire and the early Third Republic. These were also the artists most frequently represented by dealers, in particular the landscape painters of the Barbizon School, Orientalist painters and those whom Durand-Ruel called L’Ecole de 1830.28 Her financial resources enabled her to acquire the most popular painters between 1868 and 1875:29 Eugène Delacroix,30 Ernest Meissonnier, Théodore Rousseau, Eugène Fromentin, Alexandre Decamps, Jules Dupré (1811–1889), Camille Corot, Daubigny, Félix Ziem (1821–1911), Narcisse Diaz de la Pena and Jean-François Millet (1814–1875). Her penchant for fashionable academic painting encouraged her to turn to the catalogues of dealers who offered the most reliable choice for those wishing to acquire paintings.31 She frequented several important art dealers and gallery owners, including Francis Petit (1877) and his son Georges (1856–1920). A possible family link between 26 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 407–408: “Le tableau de Brozik vous prépare une surprise; vous n’avez pas une idée de ce qu’il perdait à l’exposition. Il en est toujours ainsi, les bons tableaux se font valoir. J’ai remanié tous les miens, le Brozik était si grand que j’ai vu le moment ou je ne pourrais pas le placer chez moi, enfin en enlevant ma bibliothèque je le placerai dans le grand panneau. Dans quelques années vous verrez quelle réputation aura ce peintre. Certainement vous l’avez mal vu. Ce que je peux vous en dire de moins exagéré c’est qu’il supporte très fièrement le terrible voisinage de ce magicien de Fortuny”. 27 Its purchase is relayed by the press in particular Le Français (18 June 1874). 28 L.  Saint-Raymond, À la conquête du marché de l’art:  le Pari(s) des enchères (1830–1939), Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021, p. 284. 29 Saint-Raymond, À la conquête, pp. 275–285. 30 The 1912 sale includes a self-portrait drawing by the painter as well as several paintings, L’assassinat de l’évêque de Liège, sold for 250,000 francs, Intérieur d’une cour au Maroc, acquired by Durand-Ruel for 86,000 francs, La leçon d’équitation, sold for 140 100 francs, Chef arabe et Les adieux de Roméo et de Juliette. 31 A.  Penot, La maison Goupil: galerie d’art internationale au XIXe siècle, Paris: Mare et Martin, 2017, p. 318.

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the dealer and Adèle, mentioned in her correspondence, could partly explain this.32 She bought works by Delacroix from Francis Petit in 1868 and exhibited her collection at the Georges Petit gallery in 1884.33 Petit had just opened his luxurious gallery at 8 rue de Sèze in February 1882,34 and was responsible for selling her collection in 1912. Between 1867 and 1872, Adèle appeared several times as a client of the Goupil House. She bought two works by Jean-Louis Hamon (1821–1874) for 1,500 francs each in November  186735 and several in 1870,36 including La Vicarià, by Marià Fortuny,37 exhibited at the gallery in April 1870, one of the most celebrated works in her collection. She also made important purchases from Durand-Ruel, notably L’Allée de Châtaigniers and La Vue des Alpes, prise de la Faucille38 by Rousseau and L’Assassinat de l’Evêque de Liège by Delacroix, which the dealer had just acquired at the Khalil-Bey sale on 16 January 1868. She acquired Henri Regnault’s Salome for 40,000 francs, which she sold in 1912 for 480,000 francs.39 In addition, Durand-Ruel visited her faithfully at least until May 1906.40 Although female bidders of paintings were rare at public sales at the Hôtel Drouot in the nineteenth century, Adèle Caussin participated in the major sales of the second half of the nineteenth century.41 Indeed, she was one of the dealers and collectors who bid at the sale of Marià Fortuny’s estate in 32 BnF, NAF, 14663, f.532–534, 574–575. Adèle Caussin mentions to Dumas fils a marriage that her ‘friend Petit’ did not allow her to have in 1869 and specifies that this “M. Petit was [her] relative through her mother”. 33 L’assassinat de l’Evêque de Liège reached the record price of the year 1868 at the Khalil Bey sale. It was bought for 46 000 francs by the dealers Brame and Durand-Ruel, sold to the dealer Francis Petit before being sold to Adèle Caussin for 50 000 francs in April 1868. 34 The first sale to take place at the gallery was that of the Narischkine collection on 5 April 1883, attended by Adèle Caussin. She was one of the first to exhibit her collection at the gallery from 1 to 10 December 1884. 35 Getty Research Institute, Goupil & Cie Stock Books, book No 3. 36 In 1870, she acquired La Balayeuse and L’amour perroquet by Jean-Louis Hamon as well as Le petit musicien by Ernest Hébert for 4,000 francs, La Guitare by Cécile Ferrère for 1,500 francs and the Portrait de la femme de l’architecte Gedon by Wilhelm Leibl for 6 000 francs. In 1871, a painting by Xavier de Cock for 3,000 francs and La Sainte famille by Jean Léon Gérôme in 1872 for 6,000 francs. Getty Research Institute, Goupil & Cie Stock Books, 1846–1875. 37 Marià Fortuny, La Vicarià, 1870, oil on wood, 60 × 93.5, National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona. 38 ‘Théodore Rousseau’, Revue internationale de l’art et de la curiosité (15 July 1869). 39 Henri Regnault, Salome, 1870, oil on canvas, 160 × 101, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 40 Municipal Archives of Commercy, letter (19 May 1906). 41 The inventory after Adèle Caussin’s death by Mr Lanquest (14 March 1922), mentions a cupboard in which she kept a set of sales catalogues (kept at the study).

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April 1875, where she bought Maria-Luisa et deux de ses enfants, which fetched 10,000 francs, as well as the next lot, Portrait du peintre Francisco Bayeu Y subia, for the same price.42 She took part in the auctions of Anatole Demidoff’s43 and Prince Narischkine’s collections, the second of which took place at of Georges Petit Gallery.44 She also made a point of buying works at the sales of her friends’ collections, in particular at the Alexandre Dumas sale, where she bought Jules Dupré’s painting La Passerelle in 1892, and at the posthumous Edouard Delessert sale, where she acquired Delacroix’s painting Les Adieux de Roméo et Juliette and Fromentin’s Campement arabe.

Fig. 7.3

42 43

Interior of the mansion belonging to Adèle de Cassin, Marquise de Landolfo – Carcano, 1 rue Tilsitt, 8th arrondissement, Paris, photograph, Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris © Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris.

Archives of Paris, Minutes of Marià Fortuny’s sale (26–30 April 1875), D48E3 65. Municipal Archives of Commercy, correspondence Landolfo-Carcano, letter (29 January 1906): “J’ai acheté ce chef-d’œuvre de Rubens à la vente San Donato […] Quand Ricard peignait mon portrait, il me demandait comme une faveur de pouvoir venir souvent s’assoir devant cette merveille”. 44 Le Figaro (6 April 1883).

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Encouraged by her meteoric rise in society and by the expansion of her collection, which she had begun in 1860, Adèle Caussin established her private mansion at 1, rue de Tilsitt (which she used to call “a gilded cage”)45 as a place of artistic sociability. She gathered around her many of the principle figures of the official art scene of that time.46 Her collection reflects the importance of this artistic network and the many friendships she managed to forge with painters. Indeed, while Delessert undoubtedly introduced her to artistic circles, she was also early friends with Bonnat, who painted a portrait of her daughter in 1866 (presented at the 1867 Salon under the name Gaby).47 They met in Paris; but also in Ustaritz, where she had taken refuge during the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, and where she resided on a regular basis until the end of her life. It was there that he painted the portrait of one of her servants which was to become the Vieille femme d’Ustaritz (1872 Salon). The 1912 sale included at least ten works by Bonnat, including a self-portrait painted for Caussin in 1876 for 8,000 francs.48 It is interesting to note that the writer and salonnière Juliette Adam (1836–1936), a close friend of Bonnat, was also one of the buyers at the 1912 sale.49 Moreover, Adèle Caussin was often visited by Gustave Ricard (1823– 1873), who painted a large portrait of her in 1868, as well as several portraits of her daughter, which she donated to the Petit Palais museum in 1906.50 She 45 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 368–371. 46 It is certain that she received prominent personalities at her home, notably Léon Gambetta (1838–1882) who visited in the presence of Dumas in 1881, or Eugène Stoffel (1821–1907), an archaeologist and lieutenant-colonel of Napoleon III, whom she had for a time considered marrying. She corresponded with Adolphe Alphan (1817–1891), a civil engineer close to Baron Haussmann, to whom she expressed concern about a July 14 firework display that took place too close to her hotel and collections. Adèle Caussin also refers to a ‘Baron Gustave’ and a ‘Baron Adolphe’ who advise her to accept to open her collection to the public upon request two days a week and to announce it in the pages of the Figaro. It is likely that these two men are the banker and collector Gustave de Rothschild (1829–1911) and Adolphe de Rothschild (1823–1900). BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 401–402, 286–289, 375–376. 47 She also refers to Bonnat in a letter to Dumas, telling him that “he is not a danger”. BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 330–331. 48 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 377–380: “Quant à Bonnat je suis tout à fait à l’aise avec lui ayant tout payé à l’exception du paysage qu’il a perdu ayant parié avec moi en 1875 qu’avant 1878 je serai mariée à un célèbre colonel, celui-là je le garderai car il le mérite. J’ai quelques autres brimborious de lui qui pourraient être vendus puisqu’ils sont échangés contre des dessins ou des eaux fortes, je ne vois pas non plus pourquoi son portrait n’entrerait pas dans la vente je l’ai parfaitement payé 8,000 francs en 1875”. 49 Juliette Adam acquired Giuseppe de Nittis Les joueurs d’orgue devant la porte du château and Le repos by Bonnat. Archives of Paris, D42E3 122. 50 Gustave Ricard, Portrait d’Adèle Caussin, Marquise de Landolfo-Carcano, 1868, oil on canvas, 180 × 130, Petit-Palais, Paris.

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corresponded with Auguste Cain (1821–1894) in 188351 and regularly mentioned in her correspondence “her old worshipper”52 Jean Gigoux (1806–1894), a witness at her marriage on 20 November 1889 to the Count of Landolfo-Carcano.53 She also visited the studio of Benjamin-Constant (1845–1902), whose talent she appreciated and for whom she predicted “a great future”, as well as that of Ernest Hébert, of whom she owned several paintings.54 Also mentioned in her entourage were Paul Baudry,55 Pierre-Victor Galland (1822–1892), Francis de Saint-Vidal (1840–1900), Edouard Lièvre (1828–1886) and Ferdinand Roybet (1840–1920).56 Adèle Caussin also maintained a regular correspondence with the Swiss painter, Auguste Baud-Bovy (1848–1899), a friend of Courbet and Corot. She visited his studio with Antoine Vollon in February 188857 and it is she who introduced Baud-Bovy to Galland and to Dupré whose work they both admired.58 She was also acquainted with other painters from the Geneva art scene, in particular Francis Furet (1842–1919), whom she considered a painter of “always pretty things”.59 51 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 431–432. 52 Municipal Archives of Commercy, Landolfo-Carcano correspondence, letter of 18  May 1906. 53 Archives of Paris, marriage register, 1889, V4E 6118. 54 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 602, 622. 55 Municipal Archives of Commercy, Landolfo-Carcano correspondence, undated letter to Recouvreur: “De tous les artistes qui étaient mes amis, Galland, Mazerolle, Paul Baudry qui me faisait sa visite chaque dimanche avec son ami, Charles Ephrussi, morts, morts morts et tant et tant d’autres. Quel cimetière de souvenirs […]”. 56 BnF, NAF, 14663. 57 Geneva Library (CH BGE), Arch. Baud-Bovy  237, f. 108–133. Correspondance between 1884 and 1896 largely concerns Adèle’s real estate searches in order to settle in the countryside in Vevey and then on the Côte d’Azur. The relationship between Adèle Caussin and Auguste Baud-Bovy appears familiar, even affectionate. Adèle knew his wife and regularly inquired after her state of health. Caussin was also acquainted with his son, the writer and art historian Daniel Baud-Bovy (1870–1958), to whom she showed her collection in 1896; as well as his second son, also a painter, André-Valentin Baud-Bovy (1875–1903) to whom she had several works by Victor-Hugo sent in 1897. She also kept a painting by Auguste Baud-Bovy until her death Route des Alpes. Vue prise à Aeschi, No 227 of the catalogue of sale after her death in 1921. 58 Geneva Library (CH BGE), Arch. Baud-Bovy  237, f. 132–133: “J’avais réparé un oubli, M.  Galland a emporté votre carte avec l’espoir d’aller mettre la sienne chez vous aujourd’hui même. […] Lui me quittant, il m’a remercié de la rencontre qu’il a fait de vous, monsieur, qui lui avez remis au cœur le souvenir très doux de votre parent qu’il aimait. […] Oui, j’écrirai un mot à Dupré pour le prier de sortir ces études, nous passerons là une heure charmante, inoubliable”. 59 Geneva Library (CH BGE), Arch. Baud-Bovy 237, f. 111–113, letter written from Rome, on January 9, 1896.

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Alexandre Dumas, Adèle’s Great Friend and Fellow Art Collector

The absence of family or private archives is an obstacle to better understanding Adèle Caussin’s life and personality. Fortunately, a great deal of information can be found in her rich correspondence with Alexandre Dumas (1824–1895), which bears witness to a closeness, even a form of familiarity; that Adèle expresses through her stated admiration and devotion to the writer and art collector. He himself seems to have been under Caussin’s spell from the time he called her his “diamond in the rough”.60 Collecting seems to have been an important shared preoccupation since in one of her first letters to the writer, in 1881, she expressed the wish to send him a painting by Octave Tassaert (1800– 1874), of whom Dumas was an important collector.61 Thereafter, they visited each other regularly; and their correspondence was prolific between 1881 and 1887. From 1885 onwards, Adèle Caussin was very much in love with him, expressing her regret at having met him so late in life;62 confessing in turn both her feelings and her jealousy.63 This correspondence reveals intimate aspects of 60 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 338–341: “Vous voilà à Evian tenant compagnie à Meissonnier. Je l’envie, il est heureux de pouvoir vous entendre quant à moi j’en suis à relire vos lettres et à me souvenir de fragments de conversations si remplies d’intérêt et qui me sont une source de pensées nouvelles et de méditations: j’y trouve des vérités que je pressentais, elles ne sont épanouies et éclairées par une vive lumière que de bonnes pensées je vous dois. Taillez bien votre diamant brut! Il faut espérer qu’un jour viendra où vous aurez fait quelque chose de moi, ou mon faible cerveau sera à la hauteur de votre philosophie transcendante. En attendant je vous aime beaucoup et je me permets de vous le dire”. 61 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 268–269: “Je n’ai pas voulu vous porter le Tassaert. Mon notaire nous aurait dénoncé à mes héritiers et les ducs de Montfort aiment ce qui est à moi. Vous me permettrez bien de mettre celui-ci à vos pieds, il trouvera une place dans votre immense et splendide collection. Il vous appartient de droit, tous les Tassaert doivent être à vous”. It is most probably a red chalk drawing by Octave Tassaert, Jeune femme et enfant, No 30 of the sale in 1912. 62 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 464–467, 2 September [s.d.] [1885?]: “Vous parlez, cher ami, de vos relations de famille, permettez-moi de vous le dire […] Je regretterais éternellement de vous avoir connu 20 ans trop tard! C’est vrai, je ne tiens pas en place, je vais devant moi à la recherche de ce que je ne vois pas chaque jour. Partout je trouve l’isolement parce que pour jouir des beautés de la nature, il ne faut pas être seul. Voilà ce que vous ne voulez pas comprendre cher ami. […] Croyez-vous donc que si j’étais moins soutenue par un orgueil qui, jusqu’ici ma préservée de tant d’écarts, je n’aurais pas associé à ma vie quelque malhonnête homme. […]”. 63 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 542–543: “Voici, mon cher ami, une des plus tristes journées de ma vie. Je m’explique seulement pourquoi en six années, je n’ai jamais pu vous voir sans éprouver une grande émotion et pourquoi tout m’a été si sensible venant de vous. En lisant la lettre que je vous renvoie j’ai éprouvé une telle angoisse, une telle jalousie, je me suis sentie si profondément malheureuse que j’ai compris que vous aimez cette belle personne et que

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Adèle’s persona, in particular the solitude she suffered during the 1880s, which she expressed bitterly on numerous occasions, calling herself a “mismatched vase that no longer has a price”.64 The collection and her contemplation of masterpieces appeared to be a compensation for her isolation, since “only in art can one take refuge, in sadness as well as in joy”.65 Unfortunately in Adèle’s case this proved not to be enough: “It is true, things of art do not fill life, they soften solitude, and they only speak to the eyes. When I look at the Allée des châtaigniers, I say to myself how beautiful it is! My eyes are satisfied, but nothing more …”. She also evoked the boredom she felt when admiring this painting by Rousseau alone in her “golden cage” which “leads her to melancholy”.66 Dumas fils, in turn, certainly played an important role in building up both the collection and Caussin’s artistic connections. She told him about her acquisitions, and they shared a network of acquaintances in the art world. Dumas was her intermediary with Madeleine Lemaire (1845–1928), whose work Caussin appreciated and to whom she wished to entrust the refurbishment and adornment of her study.67 The same year, in 1881, Dumas introduced Caussin to Antoine Vollon, whose spirit she appreciated and from whom she immediately bought a first work; she would go on to purchase nine oils on canvas as well as several drawings by him and his son.68 In 1882, the writer acted as her intermediary with Giuseppe de Nittis (1846–1884), whom she suspected of inflating the price of a pastel because of her by then well-recognised status

64 65 66 67

68

sans m’en douter, je suis amoureuse de vous depuis toujours. Je ne me souviens pas d’avoir autant pleuré qu’aujourd’hui”. BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 464–467. Municipal Archives of Commercy, Adrien Recouvreur fonds, undated letter. BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 294–296, 368–371. BnF, NAF, 14663, f.354–359, f.383–384, f.385–386: “Mme Lemaire voudrait me peindre ses fleurs sur une glace qui orne le dessus d’une cheminée? Mais il faudrait peindre ici – si elle s’y refuse dite le moi je vous enverrai la dimension – tout le sera en glace. J’aimerais une grande gerbe de fleurs de Mme Lemaire non pas dans un cadre tout bêtement accroché au milieu de la cheminée au-dessus de la pendule, mais partant du côté gauche de la cheminée et ayant l’air de s’épanouir à la lumière de la fenêtre qui est au côté droit de la cheminée. ‘et’ Comme il faut que tout bonheur soit acheté, j’ai su hier que le miroitier ne peut pas ôter la glace de la cheminée du cabinet sans être obligé de […] toutes les autres qui sont du même. Il me faut renoncer à mon rêve si chèrement caressé d’avoir cette glace couverte de fleurs de Mlle Lemaire. Je vous demanderai à genoux d’obtenir autre chose par exemple une aquarelle pour remplacer l’indécence de Greuze. Mlle Lemaire voudraitelle peindre ses fleurs sur un panneau en satin? En gouache?”. BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 385–386: “Ce Vollon qui ne peint comme personne a aussi de l’esprit à revendre. Je ne sais pas comment vous dire merci pour toutes les preuves d’intérêt que je reçois de vous à chaque instant. Je serai très heureuse d’avoir un tableau de Vollon et suis enchantée qu’il ait choisi son cadre aussi tarabiscoté qu’il l’a voulu”.

Adèle Caussin, DemiMondaine and Collector

Fig. 7.4

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Interior of the mansion belonging to Adèle de Cassin, Marquise de Landolfo – Carcano, 1 rue Tilsitt, 8th arrondissement, Paris, photograph, Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris © Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris.

as a collector of considerable financial means.69 Dumas ‘happily’ introduced Adèle Caussin to Meissonnier, and it was he whom she asked to negotiate with the painter for the acquisition of a painting representing the death of Henri Regnault, which she wished to place next to the Salome that she intended for the Louvre Museum.70 She probably also became acquainted with Gustave Doré through Dumas, whom she called “our poor Doré”.71 Adèle Caussin was 69 BnF, NAF 14663, f.393 “Vous m’envoyez le prix sans me dire ce que vous en pensez. Mon avis est que c’est trop cher. J’aurais volontiers payé de dix à douze mille francs, vingt mille, non, c’est trop quand les plus beaux pastels de maîtres du siècle dernier n’atteignent pas ce prix élevé. […] Cependant je veux le revoir demain soir chez Petit, mais je doute qu’il entre au Louvre en passant par la rue de Tilsitt si M. de Nittis ne baisse pas son prix. Je suis sûre que c’est bien là votre impression bien que vous ne m’en dites rien, mon cher ami, à vous, Cassin”. 70 BnF, NAF, 14663, f.602. This is probably Ernest Meissonier’s commemorative work, Le Siège de Paris, sketched in 1870 and painted again in 1884 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 1249). 71 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 416–417.

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deeply affected by the artist’s death and kept in touch with some of his relatives, including Édouard Kratz (1831–1910). She also acted as an intermediary between Frédéric Auguste Laguillermie (1841–1934), a friend of Henri Regnault (1843–1871), who was close friends of Georges Petit and Alexandre Dumas.72 However, in the course of their epistolary exchanges, Adèle Caussin asserted her very personal taste. She addressed the writer by evoking his “stony imperiousness to whom no one dares tell the truth”73 and took exception to his reductive criticisms: “I spend my money badly, who tells you that? You judge me harshly […] Upholsterers do not fill my whole life, believe it or not; and if I am so superficial, how can you be interested in me?.” She asserted, in turn, her artistic choices: “I wouldn’t sell Doré’s great landscape because I love it and the day will come when he will be respected as a landscape painter”.74 She also did not hesitate to express her autonomy when it came to taste: We will do as you have said. In the same way, we will happily purge what is weak or unworthy. I warn you that I believe in the Bonnats and the landscapes of Gustave Doré. Are you shouting? I don’t care, I’ll give you others! You will not be able to doubt your influence on me, in this respect you are preaching to the choir. It has been a long time since my taste purified since you decided to leave my small collection in the Louvre, please believe that I have never thought of making my country accept what I myself have put out of sight.75

As early as 1881, Caussin discussed with Dumas her wish to make a donation to the Louvre, which would have paved the way for Regnault’s Salome becoming a part of the national collection. This project is particularly interesting for the fact that it was a time when only 10% of the museum’s donors were women.76 Although it unfortunately did not succeed, this philanthropic practice, which was largely male dominated, could have been the final step in the affirmation of Adèle’s legitimacy as a collector and her definitive recognition into the public sphere.77 72 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 454–455, letter (2  January  1885). She also has a watercolor by Laguillermie, Vue prise à l’intérieur de l’Alhambra de Grenade, dated 1869. 73 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 403–404. 74 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 395, 377–380. 75 BnF, NAF, 14663, f. 375–376. 76 V.  Long, Mécènes des deux mondes:  les collectionneurs donateurs du Louvre et de l’Art Institute de Chicago, 1879–1940, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007, p. 37. 77 She was well aware of the recognition that the donation or bequest of a collection to a museum conferred. Municipal Archives of Commercy, letter to Adrien Recouvreur, 24 septembre 1898: “Je ne sais pas encore ce que je ferai, la chose a trop d’importance pour être décidée à la légère. Mon mari préférerait Nancy au Louvre mais il me laisse libre sachant le peu d’influence qu’on peut avoir sur moi. Il n’y a, dans ma collection que

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Adèle Caussin sold the vast majority of her collection in 1912 so as to be able to devote herself entirely to charitable works78. From 1898 until her death in 1921, Caussin pursued philanthropic activity for the benefit of her native town of Commercy, donating large sums of money and real estate. Her desire to promote art and to participate in artistic life remained strong. The latter period of her life is particularly well documented through her correspondence with the painter, Adrien Recouvreur (1858–1944), which spans more than ten years and reveals the extent of her relations with the political and artistic life of her native region.79 Women’s collecting has long suffered from the same silence as that concerning the history of women more generally. It forms a crucial part of the historiography of private collecting and of the constitution of museum collections. Having said that, recent decades have seen the publication of several works on women collectors, with the aim of writing their history and deconstructing stereotypes.80 Adèle Caussin’s missed appointment with the Louvre Museum Bonnat et Vollon qui soient vivants, je souhaite que ce soit pour de longues années pour le bien qu’ils font l’un et l’autre. Naturellement les tableaux de ces maîtres iront donc au Luxembourg avant d’entrer au Louvre. […] Si je donne ma collection au Louvre ce sera sous condition, de même pour Nancy, mon nom devra rester attaché, d’une manière durable, comme tout ce que je fais, un don a son importance. Si je vends ma collection, je saurai faire une large part pour les œuvres utiles”. Her correspondence with Adrien Recouvreur also reveals the exchanges she had with Henri Lapauze (1867–1925), curator of the Petit Palais, concerning the donation of her large portrait by Gustave Ricard in 1906. 78 Inventory after the death of Adèle Caussin by Me Lanquest dated 14  March  1922 and Catalogue de la succession de Madame la Marquise de X …, Importants bijoux, tableaux, riche mobilier moderne, tapisseries anciennes, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 28 novembre-2 décembre 1921, 28 November – 2 December 1921, Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1921. 79 Caussin and Adrien Recouvreur shared a project for an art school that she wanted to offer to the city and asked him to draw up the plans. She endowed the project with a budget of 50,000 francs and promised a pension of 800 francs per year as well as the creation of four ‘Carcano prizes’ of 100 francs each. In addition to financing the project, she was involved in the choice of land, the architecture of the project, the location of the moulding workshop, and the library. Unfortunately, the project was delayed due to the town’s lack of enthusiasm and it was finally abandoned. Municipal Archives of Commercy, Correspondence between Adèle Landolfo-Carcano and Adrien Recouvreur. 80 Following the pioneering work of Dianne MacLeod Sachko (D.  MacLeod Sachko, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940, Berkeley: University of California Press 2008), see S. Bracken, A. Gáldy et A. Turpin, Women Patrons and Collectors, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012; J. Verlaine, Femmes collectionneuses; K. Hill, Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016; M.  Boussahba-Bravard et R.  Rogers  Rebecca (ed.), Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937, New York: Routledge, 2019; ‘Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, c. 1850–1920’ in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth

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but also, very probably, her social status on the fringes of the norms of nineteenth century society, partly explain the obscurity of her collection. Far from the discriminations and restrictions that associate women’s collections with the accumulation and consumption of objects by confining them to the decorative arts, Adèle Caussin’s collection of paintings can be seen as the expression of economic and cultural power; as well as an illustration of how we may all shape our reputations in the eyes of others. Collecting in this instance, gave meaning to the existence of a woman who had chosen to do “only what she wants and only what she must”.81 List of References Avery-Quash, Susanna. Pezzini, Barbara (eds.). Old Masters Worldwide: Markets, Movements and Museums, 1789–1939, New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. Bracken, Susan. Gáldy, Andrea. Turpin, Adriana. Women Patrons and Collectors, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012. Catalogue de la succession de Madame la Marquise de X …, Importants bijoux, tableaux, riche mobilier moderne, tapisseries anciennes, auction catalogue, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 28 November–2 December 1921, Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1921. Catalogue des tableaux modernes, aquarelles, dessins, pastels, sculptures, tableaux anciens …, objets d’art et d’ameublement, appartenant à Mme la marquise Landolfo Carcano …, auction catalogue, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 30 May–1 June 1912, Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1912. Charpy, Manuel. Le théâtre des objets. Espaces privés, culture matérielle et identité bourgeoise, Paris, 1830–1914, Ph. D. diss., Tour: Université de Tours, 2011. Effros, Bonnie. ‘Elle pensait comme un homme et sentait comme une femme: Hortense Lacroix Cornu (1809–1875) and the Musee des Antiquites Nationales de SaintGermain-en-Laye’, Journal of the History of Collections, 24.1 (2012), pp. 25–43. Emery, Elizabeth. Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-century France (1853–1914), New-York: Bloomsbury, 2020. Foucher Zarmanian, Charlotte. ‘Le Louvre des femmes. Sur quelques présupposés à l’égard des femmes dans les musées en France au XIXe siècle’, Romantisme, 173.3 (2016), pp. 56–67.

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Century, 31 (2020), https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/3347/; A. Leis, K. Wills (ed.), Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe, London: Routledge, 2021. Municipal Archives of Commercy, Correspondence between Adèle Landolfo-Carcano and Adrien Recouvreur, letters (24 November 1898; 5 June 1904; 7 June 1904; 20 October 1905).

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Garcia-Rancaño, Avelino Fernandez. ‘Anne Marie Adèle Caussin, (1831–1921). Coleccionismo y mecenazgo en París durante el Segundo Imperio’, Liño: Revista anual de historia del arte, 27 (2021), pp. 77–90. Getty Research Institute, Goupil & Cie Stock Books, 1846–1875. Goggin, Maureen Daly. Tobin, Beth Fowkes (eds.). Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Goggin, Maureen Daly. Tobin, Beth Fowkes (eds.). Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, Farnham: Burlington, Ashgate, 2009. Gonzalez-Quijano, Lola. Filles publiques et femmes galantes, des sexualités légitimes et illégitimes à l’intérieur des espaces sociaux et géographiques parisiens (1851–1914), Paris: EHESS and University of Naples, 2012. Grazia, Victoriade. Furlough, Ellen. The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Gutiérrez, Ana. Martínez Plaza, Pedro (eds.). Epistolario  del Archivo Madrazo en el museo del Prado, Madrid: Fundacion Maria Cristina Masaveu Peterson, 2017. Higgonet, Anne. A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift, Pittsburg: Periscope, 2009. Higgott, Suzanne. ‘Unmasking an Enigma: Who Was Lady Wallace and What Did She Achieve?’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2021), https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/3006/ (accessed 20 December 2021). Hill, Kate. Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Houbre, Gabrielle. Le livre des courtisanes: archives secrètes de la police des mœurs, 1861–1876, Paris: Tallandier, 2006. Leis, Arlene. Wills, Kacie (eds.). Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Routledge: London, 2021. Long, Véronique. ‘Collections et intérieurs à Paris de 1850 à 1914’, Hypotheses, 7.1 (2004), pp. 23–32. Long, Véronique. Mécènes des deux mondes: les collectionneurs donateurs du Louvre et de l’Art institute de Chicago, 1879–1940, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007. Macleod, Dianne Sachko. ‘Eliza Bowen Jumel: Collecting and cultural politics in early America’, Journal of the History of Collections, 13.1 (2001), pp. 57–75. Macleod, Dianne Sachko, Enchanted lives, enchanted objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. MacLeod, Dianne Sachko. Annalisa, Zox-Weaver (eds.). Women’s studies (special issue), ‘The Woman Art Collector’, 6 (2010). Macnaughton, Lindsay, ‘Beyond the Bowes Museum: The Social and Material Worlds of Alphonsine Bowes de Saint-Amand’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the

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Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2020), https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.3348 (accessed 20 December 2021). Orr, Clarissa Campbell (ed.). Women in the Victorian Art World, Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Pearce, Susan Mary (ed.). The Collector’s Voice:  Critical Reading in the Practice of Collecting, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Pearce, Susan Mary. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, New York: Routledge, 1995. Penot, Agnès. La maison Goupil: galerie d’art internationale au XIXe siècle, Paris: Mare et Martin, 2017. Pety, Dominique. Poétique de la collection au XIXe siècle: du document de l’historien au bibelot de l’esthète, Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010. Pomian, Krzysztof. Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne: Venise-Chicago, XIIIe–XXe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Poulot, Dominique. Cerezales, Nathalie. Goûts privés et enjeux publics dans la patrimonialisation: XVIII–XXIe siècle, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012. Saigne, Guy. Léon Bonnat: le portraitiste de la IIIe République: Catalogue raisonné des portraits, Paris: Mare & Martin, 2017. Saint-Raymond, Léa. À la conquête du marché de l’art: le Pari(s) des enchères (1830–1939), Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021. Saisselin, Remi. Le Bourgeois et le bibelot, trans. Jacqueline Degueret, Paris: A. Michel, 1990. Schopp, Marianne. Schopp, Claude. Dumas fils ou L’anti-Oedipe:  biographie, Paris: Phébus, 2017. Shoory, Natasha. ‘Gendering Collecting, Collections, and Consumption in EighteenthCentury Paris’, in Collectionner: acteurs, lieux et valeurs(s) (1750–1815), Paris: Association GRHAM, 2022, pp. 45–58. Stammers, Tom. The Purchase of the Past. Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Stammers, Tom. ‘Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, c. 1850–1920’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31 (2021), https://19.bbk. ac.uk/article/id/3347/. The Pretty women of Paris, Their Names and Adresses, Qualities and Faults, Being a Complete Directory; or Guide to Pleasure for Visitors to the Gay City, London: Press of the Prefecture de Police, 1883. Une collection particulière, Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1884. Verlaine, Julie. ‘Women Art Collectors and Patrons in the Age of the Great Exposition’, in Myriam Boussahba-Bravard, Rebecca Rogers (eds.), Women in international and universal exhibitions, 1876–1937, New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 27–47.

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Verlaine, Julie. Femmes collectionneuses d’art et mécènes, de 1880 à nos jours, Paris: Hazan, 2014. Vouilloux, Bernard. ‘Le collectionnisme vu du XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 109.2 (2009), pp. 403–417.

Fig. 8.1

Z. Muller, Gronkowski’s portrait, 1940, charcoal on paper, 40 × 30,5, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris.

Chapter 8

A Museum Curator, Art Collector and ‘Guardian’ of the National Heritage: Camille Gronkowski’s Donations to the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris Agnieszka Wiatrzyk Camille Gronkowski (1873–1949), the son of Polish aristocrat emigrants, was a curator who worked for more than thirty years at the Palais des Beaux-arts, known today as the Petit Palais. He was also a collector. During his lifetime, Gronkowski acquired a rich art collection composed of European Old Masters and Modern paintings, drawings, furniture, and Modern Chinese ceramics, which he donated in 1949 to the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris. The Gronkowski Collection remains one of the most important donations made to this Society. This contribution aims to study the origins of Gronkowski’s Parisian art collection; and we shall see how the literature on art collecting presents this period as being defined by spectacular dynamics between aristocratic and bourgeois patronage,1 and being linked in turn to the simultaneous growth of the museum and private collections.2 Therefore, this article focuses on Gronkowski’s activity as a collector and museum curator and will examine three topics: the Gronkowski’s network to build up his art collection; the impact of his activity as an art advisor on the final shape of his art collection; and the context for his donation made to the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris.

Education, Professional Career and Establishing a Network

Camille Achille Félix Gronkowski (Fig. 8.1), the son of a Polish insurgent, was born in Paris on August 11, 1873. The family cultivated the memory of its Polish 1 F. Haskell, L’Amateur d’art, Paris: Hachette, 1997; F. Haskell, Le Musée éphémère. Les maîtres anciens et l’essor des expositions, Paris: Gallimard, 2000. 2 K.  Pomian, Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne. Venise-Chicago. XIIIe–XXe siècle, Paris: Bibliothèque des histoires, Gallimard, 2003, p. 303.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_009

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roots. Some facts testify to this. For example, Camille used to spend summer vacations with his parents in Brittany in a small villa named Vistula (the symbolic name deriving from the longest river flowing through Polish territory). After graduation from the Parisian Lycée Condorcet, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he received the title of Doctor of Law. In 1902, he entered the French administration. A year later, he joined the staff of the Palais des Beaux-arts as the conservation attaché. Mobilized in August 1914 he returned to administrative services in 1918. After the death of Henry Lapauze, his superior at the Petit Palais, Gronkowski was nominated as the head of Conservation at the Palais des Beaux-Arts a position he held until his retirement in 1933 (Fig. 8.2). It was in the context of the Second World War that he became active again, by restoring links with the Polish Historical and Literary Society (SHLP – Towarzystwo Historyczno-Literackie w Paryżu); and in 1946 until his death on 14 August 1949 he held the position of the President of the Society.

Fig. 8.2

Paul Hugues, The Interior of the office of Camille Gronkowski at the Petit Palais, 1932, oil on cardboard, 42 × 53, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris.

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Gronkowski would not have been able to build his collection without his network of specialists. First to mention is his superior Henry Lapauze at the Petit Palais. As it is well known the Petit Palais was built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900; and a year after it was converted into a museum. In 1903, Lapauze was elected as the Deputy Director, and then he succeeded Georges Cain as director in 1905. By this time, Lapauze had already put in place a program to enrich the collections by acquiring workshop funds in order to “bear witness to the efforts of our modern sculptors”.3 This meticulous plan was overseen by both Lapauze and Gronkowski. From 1904, Petit Palais made many successful acquisitions as Jean-Joseph Carriès donated two hundred and twenty-five sculptures and ceramics, which was the first studio collection to join the Petit Palais collections. Soon donations were made from the workshops of Jules Dalou, Félix Ziem, Jean-Jacques Henner, Falguière and Courbet. The curatorial activity of Lapauze and Gronkowski was not limited to the acquisition process of modern art, but also in the organization of temporary exhibitions. David and his Pupils organized in 1907 was not only original in its theme, but also demonstrated the diplomatic skills of its organizers by bringing into the exhibition works from private collections around the world.4 To promote the event, Gronkowski himself published two critiques in the Burlington Magazine.5 Lapauze’s impact on the collection assembled by Gronkowski caused also the parallelism in amassing both ancient and modern art; in a sense where the tradition of ancient painters can be found in the modern works. This was initiated in the review La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe by Henry Lapauze. The main goal of that editorial project was to show the artistic heritage and its continuity in French contemporary art and design. The review’s purpose was to praise the modern movement presented at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. The review had its own pavilion built by Guillaume Tronchet whose plans and models had been validated by Lapauze. As Gronkowski was Lapauze’s

3 C. Champy-Vinas, ‘“Témoigner de l’effort de nos sculpteurs modernes”: Henry Lapauze et les fonds de sculptures au Petit Palais (1904–1925)’, in C. Georgel (ed.), Choisir Paris: les grandes donations aux musées de la Ville de Paris, Paris, Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art 2015: https://books.openedition.org/inha/6920 (accessed 20 April 2020). 4 H. Lapauze, Exposition David et ses élèves, exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais (Paris), Paris: Petit Palais, 1913. 5 C. Gronkowski, ‘David et ses éleves at the Petit Palais – II. The Pupils’, Burlington Magazine, 23.123 (1913), pp.  136–137, 139–140. Here is a complete list of journals and reviews of Gronkowski’s publications: Gazette des Beaux-arts, Revue de l’art ancien et moderne, Art et décoration, Art décoratif, Monde Illustré, Revue hebdomadaire, Revue Bleue, l’Illustration.

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assistant, this is how he was able to approach Antoine Bourdelle who donated the two sculpted pieces that today we can find in his collection.6 We have relatively little information on how Gronkowski acquired his works of art, all of which he exhibited in his Parisian apartment on Avenue Marceau.7 Some of them were also to be found in his office at the Petit Palais.8 However, it is obvious that many works from the Gronkowski collection came from private collections previously presented in the exhibitions organized at the Petit Palais by Gronkowski alone or together with Lapauze; as was the case for Dehodencq’s Sacrifice of Jewish Women from the family collection Paix-Séailles shown at the Petit Palais during the exhibition Conquête de l’Algérie in 1930.9 Gronkowski also had connections with the art market, in particular with Parisian Gallery Charpentier, where he made at least number of acquisitions in the period between 1933 and 1944.10 Another testimony is the photographic Victor Hugo’s Portrait by Boulanger, which was probably sent to Gronkowski by an unidentified gallery owner with the proposition of an acquisition. A representative part of his personal library, which is still preserved in the Polish Library in Paris contains a great number of sale catalogues, with Gronkowski’s annotations, whose presence argues for his passion for art and his impressive network built to expand his collection.

An Art Advisor

Regarding his network, it is not surprising to discover that the very first mention of an object from the Gronkowski collection is located in the exhibition catalogue of the Petit Palais David and his pupils (1913). Under number 234 one can read: Young Boy playing with a cat by Louis-Edouard Rioult belonging to

6

7 8 9 10

Two Bourdelle’s bronzes from Gronkowski collection: Adam Mickiewicz as a pilgrim, THL/BPP. No. Rz-151 and Study for Head of Adam Mickiewicz, THL/BPP, No. Rz-170. Gronkowski was known to have been a supporter for the foundation of the Antoine Bourdelle Museum in the artist’s atelier at Montparnasse. See C. Gronkowski, ‘Préface’, in C. Gronkowski, Exposition Antoine Bourdelle, exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais (Paris), Paris: Petit Palais, 1933, pp. 9–10. See Archives of the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris: Legs de Camille Gronkowski (1949). Paul Hugues, The Interior of the office of Camille Gronkowski at the Petit Palais, 1932, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris, THL.BPP.M.604. C. Gronkowski, Exposition du Centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie: 1830–1930, exhibition catalogue, Paris: Petit Palais, 1930. See the Gronkowski documentation in the Archives of the Polish Historical and Literary Society, The Polish Library in Paris.

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Mr. Camille Gronkowski (Fig. 8.3).11 Hence a supposition that Gronkowski surely started collecting in the early 1910s. However, considering his activity as an art advisor for Ernst Cognacq, the progenitor of a bourgeois family, the beginnings of Gronkowski collection can be traced back to the first decade of the twentieth century. As a museum curator Gronkowski also advised Cognacq to purchase various works of art at auction; some of these pieces were extremely significant. According to a precise description in a posthumous eulogy written in honor of Ernest, Gronkowski’s close friend, these two gentlemen had met during the famous sale of the Victor Desfossés collection on 26 April 1899.12 Thanks to Gronkowski’s advice, the great French industrialist purchased a Reclining Naked Woman by Courbet, La Barque by Millet and Woman in the Hat by Corot.13 We can also thank Gronkowski for other Cognacq acquisitions, such as Le Banquet de Cléopâtre by Tiepolo (Princess Mathilde Bonaparte sale, May 17, 1904) and the Portrait of Robert Henley by Reynolds (Baron sale ***, 1906).14 In the 1920s, it was Gronkowski who is said to have given Ernest the idea of donating his collection to the Petit Palais. This project never materialized, however, because the great industrialist chose for unclear reasons to engage in a project that would establish an independent public structure, which in 1946 became the foundation of Cognacq-Jay Museum located in Parisian Marais.

11

12 13

14

H. Lapuze, Exposition David et ses élèves, exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais (Paris), Paris: Petit Palais, 1913, p. 61: No. 234. Here list objects that Gronkowski acquired for his collection after Petit Palais exhibition’s show: David et ses élèves: one item (1913); Maîtres illustrateurs: one item (1919); L’art et la vie romantique: two items (1923); Paysage français de Poussin à Corot: one item (1925); Le Centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie (1930): five items (1932); Rétrospective de Gustave Doré: two items (1932). List of objects from Gronkowski Collection present on exhibition at the Petit Palais: David et ses élèves (1913) under No. 234 painting of Louis Edouard Rioult Le jeune garçon portant un chat; Exposition Paysage français (1925) under No. 700 Carle Vernet, Les Marionnettes; Le Centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie (1930) under No. 93 (letter by Cavaignac), under No. 183 (Head of marocean solgier, pastel by Eugène Delacroix), under No. 375 (aquarelle by Henri Regnault ‘Arabe appuyé sur son fusil’), under No. 167 (painting by Alfred Dehodencq Exécution d’une femme juive), provenance: collection de Mme Paix-Séailles. C.  Gronkowski, ‘Quelques souvenirs sur M.  Cognacq’, La Revue hebdomadaire, 6 (March 1928), p. 120. T. Burollet, Les Peintures / Musée Cognacq-Jay. Musée du XVIIIe siècle de la Ville de Paris, Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004, p. 260–262, No. 93; p. 286–293, No. 102; B. Couilleaux, ‘La collection Cognacq, entre legs et dispersion’, in C. Georgel (ed.), Choisir Paris: les grandes donations aux musées de la Ville de Pari, Paris: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2015: https://books.openedition.org/inha/6906 (accessed 20 April 2020). Couilleaux suggests two possibilities: one is that Gronkowski and Cognacq had a different opinion on legacy conditions. Second one is that Cognacq were afraid that his donation will rest in the shadow of another that Petit Palais had already accepted in that time, those of Tuck collection. See Couilleaux, ‘La collection Cognacq’, p. 6.

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Fig. 8.3

Agnieszka Wiatrzyk

Louis-Edouard Rioult, Boy with a Cat in Paris, 1st half of the nineteenth century, oil on canvas, 33 × 25, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris.

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Both Gronkowski and Congnacq as collectors shared a taste for fin de siècle eclecticism, in which each piece of the collection was at the same an expression of their personality. Among the objects in Gronkowski’s personal library, we may discern an interest in numerous types of art object from Europe, such as drawings, paintings, sculptures, objects of art and furniture from the eighteenth century as well as Venetian glass chandeliers, but also many Far Eastern samples: Turkish carpets, ceramics, porcelain and precious objects from Japan, China, India and Iran. This curiosity was mirrored in the model of art collecting linked to the Goncourt brothers aesthetics; and followed by a number of the great private collectors, such as Richard Wallace (1818–1890) in London or Henry Clay Frick in New York. Gronkowski’s collection gave pride of place to eighteenth and nineteenthcentury art. Like Cognacq, Gronkowski collected artists such as François Boucher, Charles Nicolas Cochin, François Granet, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Paul Huet, Augustin Pajou, Pierre Wille and many others, those masters of the Ancient Regime who were in need of rehabilitation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, in the same manner as the great industrialist, Gronkowski also looked to display his objects in adorned and lavish settings. It is worth noting how he contemplates how the paintings were hanged at Prado Museum: The presentation of the paintings at the Prado really struck me, never more than two rows above the picture rail; the backdrops are very varied, often in beautiful damask fabrics, in a shade appropriate to the group of paintings to be highlighted. The care of the presentation is extremely meticulous – right down to the suspension cords which are made of beautiful silk in the color of the background.15

This passage explains Gronkowski’s pedantry in framing his art collection, understandable given that the repertoire of frames was vast and represented by styles ranging from the period of Louis XIII until Louis XVI, as in the first exhibition of Ernest Cognacq in Samaritaine.16

15 See Letter of Camille Gronkowski, 1er May xxx, Archives of Petit Palais, Paris. The exhibition was shown also at Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux. 16 T. Burollet, Les Peintures / Musée Cognacq-Jay. Musée du XVIIIe siècle de la Ville de Paris, Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004, pp. 260–262, No. 93; pp. 286–293, No. 102; Couilleaux, ‘La collection Cognacq’.

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A Private Donation for Public Purposes

At the end of Gronkowski’s life, his art collection was to be found in wardrobes, bookcases, and display cases in the privacy of his apartment on Avenue Marceau. On the 14  August  1949, the Gronkowski Collection was moved to the Polish Library in Paris, where it has been located up to present times. The transport was divided into five stages and its finalization took two months to complete. It consisted of approximately 42 pieces of furniture, 19 cases of paintings and drawings, 34 boxes with tables and unpacked drawings. The end of the Second World War saw Gronkowski deciding to donate his collection to the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris.17 In 1946, he was elected Honorary President of the International Relief Work at the Polish Library in Paris with two more members of the French Academy, Georges Duhamel and Admiral Lacaze.18 With this association he engaged his entire network of friends. Following his election as the President of the SHLP, he published a book on the history of the Polish Library and it collection. In the introduction (written in French) he recalled the objectives of this institution. The first would be the creation of a centre of studies of “the near and distant past”,19 but also an intellectual centre where Polish national traditions would be perpetuated. These ideas merged with those of Adam Mickiewicz’s son, Ladislas, who had looked to keep alive the memory of the great Polish bard by founding The Mickiewicz Museum, located within the Polish Library itself.20 For Ladislas, creating this place was a way to revive the Polish soul through objects that bore witness to memory, to act “against thick and thin”.21 In that expression we find his ambition, which makes his donation all the more valuable. In this endeavour, the concern to safeguard heritage is clearly to the fore. Indeed, Gronkowski never forgot his mission as a curator: to conserve, study and provide access to the public. This approach could also be seen as a sensitive act of patriotism, with the difference being that Gronkowski was not born in Poland, probably never lived there and surely could not even write in Polish. But he had inherited a passion for Polish history and literature from his 17

See the Gronkowski documentation in the Archives of the Polish Historical and Literary Society. 18 L’œuvre internationale de secours à la Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris dévastée par les Allemands en 1940, facsicule II, Paris, 1946. 19 L’œuvre internationale, pp. 5–10. 20 F.  Pulaski, Biblioteka Polska w Paryżu w latach 1893–1948 with the introduction of C. Gronkowski (Bibliothèque polonaise de Paris au cours des années 1893–1948 avec préface de Camille Gronkowski), Paris: (sine nomine), 1949, pp. 7, 28. 21 Pulaski, Biblioteka Polska.

Camille Gronkowski’s Donations to the Polish Society in Paris

Fig. 8.4

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Jean-Pierre Norblin de La Gourdaine, The Polish Diet in a Church, 1808, pen, brown ink, sanguine on paper, 36 × 42, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris.

father and grandfather. As a practical example and conclusion, we could use Gronkowski’s study devoted to the graphic corpus of Norblin Le Gourdaine, the artist and collector of the eighteenth century: Because Norblin, with his many works of amazing variety, has truly established a tradition. We even wrote, at the begin of this study, that he created national art in Poland […] But do we really have to surround him with a lot of reservations if we consider that Norblin, with his surprising realism, his investigative eye, the right hand, brought to Poland precisely what was lacking in Polish art, that is to say the direct study of his picturesque manners, of his costumes, of his companion of all this rich national existence that her sons had until then contented themselves with living – without painting her?22 22

C. Gronkowski, ‘Un artiste français en Pologne: Norblin de la Gourdaine (1745–1830). A propos de l’exposition franco-polonaise au Pavillon de Marsan’, Revue de la Renaissance de l’art français et des industries, 1 (1919), pp. 111–117.

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When Gronkowski was writing this article, he possessed most probably at least one composition of Norblin in his collection (Fig. 8.4).23 The interest for this artist lies in his own biographical specificity: a French artist who discovered Poland without knowing the language, translates what he could understand to the entire world through his graphics and laid the foundations for a Polish pictorial tradition. In addition, Norblin was fortunate to have had two sons, one of whom, Sébastien, carried his father’s collection back to France.24 One may ask whether the loss of the Norblin collection did not ground the legacy of the Gronkowski collection. To conclude, Gronkowski’s donation to the Polish Library was an expression of engagements with Poland in the new geopolitical situation after 1945, wherein he looked to play a part in rebuilding the national heritage of his parents’ homeland, which had been devastated by war, and to restore the prestige of the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris, which had been founded by the great Polish Romantic figures of Chopin and Mickiewicz. Henceforth, Gronkowski’s collection would be preserved for future generations, and equally importantly … available to the public. List of References Burollet, Thérèse. Les Peintures / Musée Cognacq-Jay. Musée du XVIIIe siècle de la Ville de Paris, Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004. Champy-Vinas, Cécilie. ‘Témoigner de l’effort de nos sculpteurs modernes: Henry Lapauze et les fonds de sculptures au Petit Palais (1904–1925)’, in Chantal Georgel (ed.), Choisir Paris: les grandes donations aux musées de la Ville de Paris, Paris: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art 2015: https://books.openedition. org/inha/6920. Couilleaux, Benjamin. ‘La collection Cognacq, entre legs et dispersion’, in Chantal Georgel (ed.), Choisir Paris: les grandes donations aux musées de la Ville de Pari, Paris: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2015, https://books. openedition.org/inha/6906. Gronkowski, Camille. Camille Gronkowski’s letter, 1er May xxx, Archives of Petit Palais, Paris.

23 There are three drawings by Norblin in Gronkowski Collection: THL.BPP.Rys.210.3–5, Paris, The Polish Historical and Literary Society, The Polish Library in Paris. 24 On this topic, see T.  de  Rosset, Polskie kolekcje i zbiory artystyczne we Francji w latach 1795–1919, Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2005.

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Gronkowski, Camille. ‘David et ses éleves at the Petit Palais – II. The Pupils’, Burlington Magazine, 23.123 (1913), pp. 136–137, 139–140. Gronkowski, Camille. ‘Un artiste français en Pologne: Norblin de la Gourdaine (1745– 1830). A propos de l’exposition franco-polonaise au Pavillon de Marsan’, Revue de la Renaissance de l’art français et des industries, 1 (1919), pp. 111–117. Gronkowski, Camille. ‘Quelques souvenirs sur M. Cognacq’, La Revue hebdomadaire, 6 (March 1928), p. 120. Gronkowski, Camille. Exposition Antoine Bourdelle, exhibition catalogue, Petit (Paris), Paris: Petit Palais, 1933. Gronkowski, Camille. Exposition du Centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie: 1830–1930, exhibition catalogue, Petit (Paris), Paris: Petit Palais, 1930. Haskell, Francis. L’Amateur d’art, Paris: Hachette, 1997. Haskell, Francis. Le Musée éphémère. Les maîtres anciens et l’essor des expositions, Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Hugues, Paul. The Interior of the office of Camille Gronkowski at the Petit Palais, 1932, Archives of the Polish Historical and Literary Society, The Polish Library in Paris, THL.BPP.M.604. Lapauze, Henry. Exposition David et ses élèves, exhibition catalogue, Petit (Paris), Paris: Petit Palais, 1913. Legs de Camille Gronkowski (1949), Archives of the, Paris, Archives of the Polish Historical and Literary Society, The Polish Library in Paris. L’œuvre internationale de secours à la Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris dévastée par les Allemands en 1940, facsicule II, Paris, 1946. Pomian, Krzysztof. Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne. Venise-Chicago. XIIIe–XXe siècle, Paris: Bibliothèque des histoires, Gallimard, 2003. Pulaski, Francois, Biblioteka Polska w Paryżu w latach 1893–1948 with the introduction of Camille Gronkowski (Bibliothèque polonaise de Paris au cours des années 1893–1948 avec préface de Camille Gronkowski), Paris: (sine nomine), 1949. Rosset, Tomasz Feliks de. Polskie kolekcje i zbiory artystyczne we Francji w latach 1795– 1919, Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2005.

Fig. 9.1

Max Bram with his wife Elisabeth Oswald, c. 1907, F 6467, The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim © The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim

Chapter 9

A Modern Collector of Traditional Art: The Bourgeois Art Collection of Max Bram and its Role in the National Socialist Art World Felix Steffan Between 1886 and 1912, throughout the regency of Prince Regent Luitpold, the cultural and social life of Bavaria underwent a previously unseen time of prosperity and opulence.1 Since the Prince Regent himself was known for his extraordinary favoring of the fine arts, artistic endeavor belonged to the main beneficiaries of his term in office.2 As a direct consequence of Luitpold’s all-embracing sponsorship of the local art scene, Munich, as Bavaria’s capital and the residential city of the monarchy, experienced an unexpected artistic boom. At the turn of the century, the city developed into a respected trading and exhibition location for fine arts.3 Munich’s growing reputation as a leading art metropolis in the German Reich is reflected in the number of residing artists. While in 1882, around 960 painters and sculptors lived and worked in the Bavarian capital, over the course of the following two decades the number rose to almost 1500.4 At the same time, the quantity of art traders and 1 That would of course not have been possible without the previous developments. As early as the 1870s, the city of Munich began to question Düsseldorf’s leading role as the German art capital. Accordingly, in 1875 King Ludwig II wrote to his uncle Luitpold that it was the task of the Bavarian state to maintain Munich as a great art metropolis and to strongly promote the local art and cultural life. See especially R. Lenman, Die Kunst, die Macht und das Geld: Zur Kulturgeschichte des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1871–1918, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1994, p. 61 ff. 2 The Prince Regent was known for promoting artists regardless of existing and repeatedly flaring up disputes over artistic directions and thereby largely putting personal preferences aside. As a direct consequence, Munich’s artistry eventually granted him the title ‘Artium Protector’. C.  Schack-Simitzis, ‘Artium Protector: Der Prinzregent und die Künstler, in N. Götz, C. Schack-Simitzis (eds.), Die Prinzregentenzeit, exhibition catalogue, Stadtmuseum (München), München: Stadtmuseum, 1988, p. 203. 3 Compare B. Jooss, ‘Ein Tadel wurde nie ausgesprochen: Prinzregent Luitpold als Freund der Künstler’, in U.  Leutheusser, H.  Rumschöttel (eds.), Prinzregent Luitpold von Bayern: Ein Wittelsbacher zwischen Tradition und Moderne, München: Allitera, 2012, pp. 151–176. 4 See  W.  Ruppert, Der moderne Künstler: Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der kreativen Individualität in der kulturellen Moderne im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998, pp.  127–128. Nevertheless, the actual number of artists in Munich

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Otto von Ruppert, Auer Dult, 1873, oil on canvas, 22,5 × 16,1, in L. Horst, Münchener Maler im 19. Jahrhundert, Vol. 3, München, Bruckmann, 1982, p. 410, Image 629.

fine art publishers more than doubled.5 However, only a small fraction of the most established artists managed to achieve a professional breakthrough, whereas hundreds of others remained anonymous and largely impoverished.6 Eventually, this process of artistic consolidation entailed an enormous surplus of art production that presupposed a new spectrum of wealthier clientele.7 As in many other aspects, the class of the Bourgeoisie as the leading bearer of social developments in the nineteenth century played a decisive role in this varies depending on the underlying sources. According to Birgit Jooss, there might have been as many as 3,000 artists in Munich around 1900. Compare  B.  Jooss, ‘Bauernsohn, der zum Fürsten der Kunst gedieh: Die Inszenierungsstrategien der Künstlerfürsten im Historismus’, Plurale, 5 (2005), pp. 196–228, here p. 217. 5 According to Wolfgang Ruppert, from 1886 to 1912 the number of art salons and art publishers in Munich rose from 65 to 133. See Ruppert, Der moderne Künstler, p. 105; S. Möller, ‘Kunsthandel und Kunstexport: Ein Markt für gehobene Schichten’, in K. Prinz, M. Krauss (eds.), München – Musenstadt mit Hinterhöfen: Die Prinzregentenzeit 1886–1912, München: C. H. Beck, 1988, pp. 248–252. 6 Jooss, ‘Bauernsohn’, p. 217. 7 S.  Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich: Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsammlerkultur, Kiel: Ludwig, 2005, pp. 27–28.

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development and differentiation of the modern art world.8 Collecting art, as a matter of fact, became a common cultural practice as well as a repertoire of cultural identity of the Bourgeoisie. In the course of this “democratization of collecting”,9 as Wolfgang Hardtwig referred to it, the accumulation of artworks and other objects became a diversionary activity of the general public. In fact, building up a private art collecting lost its status as a privilege as it was attainable and desirable also for common citizens, such as public servants, physicians or teachers (Fig. 9.2).10 Especially for members of the Bourgeoisie, the composition of an individual art collection provided an opportunity to create and strengthen identity as well as to distinguish oneself from being a part of either the lower or privileged classes.11 Within a very short time period, the Bourgeoisie developed into the most potent social group in the field of collecting art.12 However, the cultural praxis of the Bourgeoisie in terms of their collecting differed greatly from the hitherto existing archetype. In contrast to the traditional art collections of aristocratic patrons, the modern way of collecting displayed a wider variety of forms and concepts. Public art collections of the ruling classes had primarily represented wealth and power. Since private collectors were not bound to any public commission, their collecting followed rather individual patterns with respect to their private education, their individual taste in art as well as their financial background. Notwithstanding the fact that private 8

Compare  A.  Schulz, Lebenswelt und Kultur des Bürgertums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, München: Oldenbourg, 2005, p. 22. 9 W.  Hardtwig, ‘Privatvergnügen oder Staatsaufgabe? Monarchisches Sammeln und Museum 1800–1914’, in E.  Mai, P.  Paret, I.  Severin (eds.), Sammler, Stifter und Museen: Kunstförderung in Deutschland im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, Köln: Böhlau, 1993, pp. 81–103, here p. 82. 10 As private art collectors of the Bourgeoisie enumerated are often merchants, industrialists or bankers who accumulated a small fortune in the era of industrialization. However, these collectors made up only a small fraction of those who can be assigned to the art collecting of the Bourgeoisie. Compare Möller, ‘Kunsthandel’, p. 215; Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler, pp. 62–67. For the situation in Munich, see especially K. Meissner, ‘Der Handel mit Kunst in München 1500–1945’, in R. Walser, B. Wittenbrink (eds.), Ohne Auftrag: Zur Geschichte des Kunsthandels, München: Walser und Wittenbrink, 1989, pp. 12–103. 11 Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler, p. 27 ff. 12 The Bourgeoisie fostered the artistry not only by way of their purchases, but also through their foundation of art associations as well as the organization of exhibitions and art raffles. In the nineteenth century more than 100 art associations were founded in Germany and their memberships grew sharply towards the turn of the century. See for example W.  Grasskamp, ‘Die Einbürgerung der Kunst: Korporative Kunstförderung im 19. Jahrhundert’, in E.  Mai, P.  Paret, I.  Severin (eds.), Sammler, Stifter und Museen: Kunstförderung in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Köln: Böhlau, 1993, pp. 104–113.

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art collections differed greatly from each other, their historical significance must not be underestimated. In fact, the collecting of the Bourgeoisie set decisive processes in motion that would modernize the way art was collected.13 Depicting the concrete example of one specific private collector in the following, the importance of these societal changes as well as their consequences become even more evident.

The Bourgeois Art Collection of Max Bram

The Munich-based art collector Max Bram (Fig. 9.1) decided around 1885 to devote his leisure time to collecting fine arts. Being a typical member of the well-educated Bourgeoisie, Bram’s vita corresponds exactly to the earlier described type of the private collector. As a schoolteacher with a regular and decent income, he earned enough to afford an accumulation of several hundred artworks.14 After Bram initially bought inexpensive drawings and chance finds from junk market dealers, he soon went to visit the artists themselves in their studios. Later he also bought new pieces for his collection from art dealers and at official auctions.15 When selecting works for his collection, Bram cultivated a very objective approach to art, which he constantly consolidated in exchange with his favored artists and befriended collectors. According to his extensive inheritance of autographs, as well as the very content of his art collection, he seemed to reject any form of modernity and focused primarily on the landscapes, still lifes and genre paintings of the late nineteenth century.16 Since the orientation of the market was strongly influenced by the cultural perceptions, demands and tastes of the new supporting level of the Bourgeoisie, Bram’s aesthetic ideals were exuberantly satisfied. Not least because of that, he considered his conception of art to be the exclusively right one. It is consequently not surprising that he eventually decided to endow a bigger part 13 Compare Meissner, ‘Der Handel’, p. 17 ff. 14 Max Bram was born in Pfarrkirchen in 1855 and spent his childhood and youth in Rosenheim. In the early 1870s, he studied to become a primary school teacher. After several years of teaching in Ingolstadt, he was transferred and eventually moved to Munich. In general, see K.  Mair, ‘Der erste Ehrenbürger’, Oberbayerisches Volksblatt, 27 December 2013, p. 16. 15 M. Bram, Meine Entwicklung zum Kunstsammler, typescript, 1921, Municipal Archive of Rosenheim, p. 8 ff. 16 Bram’s correspondence with more than 120 individuals covers the time frame between the late 1890s and the early 1930s and includes not only renowned artists but also art dealers as well as other bourgeois art collectors. The letters are preserved Municipal Archive of Rosenheim and have not yet been systematically evaluated.

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of his collection to the municipality of his former hometown of Rosenheim in order to make it publicly available in perpetuity. In his autobiography My Development as an Art Collector, which Bram wrote in 1921, he retrospectively stated about his educational intentions: I wanted my collection to be preserved as a whole, in the assumption that the pieces together also formed a certain artistic entity. This whole collection, as an echo of my own joy, my own happiness, should also mean joy and happiness to others. Should also arouse and promote a sense of art and artistic joy. The collection should therefore be passed on as an endowment to a larger city. […] On my many trips to Italy, I found role models for my intent. Almost every smaller town had its art galleries there, which made the communes famous and proud. Why shouldn’t that also be possible with us? Why should only the main sites be places of art? Bring out the art to the plain country. The countryside may also enjoy it and learn from it. It is supposed to educate and ennoble the receptive minds there as well, and to help dispose of the dreary junk from the living and reception rooms.17

As we learn from this quote, Bram’s collection did not only function as an individual fulfillment and creation of his personal identity as an art enthusiast. In fact, he was of the opinion that his personal conception of art could be a measure of visual art in general and, as a local newspaper advertisement suggests, therefore provide a basis for educating other people who did not have the kind of comprehensive access to art that he had. By donating his artworks to the municipality of Rosenheim, he raised his individual artistic tastes to the educational standards of the general public and thus adopted a formative social function. His approach thereby corresponded to the general societal processes described earlier. With the establishment of the Bourgeoisie not only as private collectors, but also as sponsors of public culture, the previous status quo in which the museum and exhibition structures were subject to the ruling classes had changed. Cultural identity, which had been largely determined by the subjective ideas of a monarch or aristocrat, was hereinafter based on the knowledge and values of private individuals. The transformation of Bram’s private art accumulation into a public collection can therefore also be interpreted as an expression of the increasing political and cultural power of the Bourgeoisie.18 With regards to the very content of his art collection as well as its further development, however, the outcome of this approach was by no means solely progressive.

17 Bram, Meine Entwicklung, p. 34. The quote was translated by the author. 18 Ruppert, Der moderne Künstler, p. 78.

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A Modern Collector of Traditional Art

Based on the prior indications, one could argue that the private – and later public – art collection of Max Bram was in its evolutionary history a modern art collection. As mentioned before, Bram was neither a privileged nobleman nor the possessor of extraordinary wealth. Moreover, as a schoolteacher he was rather a middle-class person with an average wage.19 It was therefore not his societal status or simply aristocratic boredom that led to his becoming an art collector. In fact, the very impetus of his personal development were the circumstances and possibilities of his time. As we have seen, Bram started to accumulate artworks at the turn of the nineteenth century and was therefore able to access a broad spectrum of acquisitional opportunities, which in their complexity and sophistication would have been unthinkable just a few decades earlier.20 The growing variety of artists, the increasing art market, and not least the concomitant surfeit of art production enabled him to acquire artworks for reasonable prices. It was these altered and democratized structures of the modern art world in tandem with Bram’s enthusiasm and parsimony that facilitated the creation of his collection. Being a member of the Bourgeoisie and using the full spectrum of possibilities in the contemporary art world from contacting artists to trading and swapping artworks with art dealers, other collectors and auctioneers, Bram honed a large personal network and was so regarded by his peers as a modern art collector.21 Stating that, one can also argue that Bram’s collection in terms of its content could be considered anything but progressive, but rather resembled the subjective approach of a noble patron.22 From his endowment to the city of Rosenheim in 1904 until his passing in 1935, he oversaw the purchase of new 19

At that time, most of the bourgeois art collectors did not have unlimited funds, which is also the reason why the assortment of many art shops was dominated by cheap souvenirs and simple home decorative objects. Compare K.-H. Meissner, ‘Der Handel mit Kunst in München 1500–1945’, in R. Walser, B. Wittenbrink (eds.), Ohne Auftrag: Zur Geschichte des Kunsthandels, München: Walser und Wittenbrink, 1989, p. 24. 20 As Meissner points out, the origin of Munich’s art trade can be dated back no earlier than to the first half of the nineteenth century. See Meissner, ‘Der Handel’, p. 16. 21 The art market undoubtedly played an important role for Max Bram. However, as a survey of the above-mentioned correspondence reveals, the personal contact with the artists seemed to be even more a core element of his activity as an art collector. 22 In other words, as Ruppert theorized, though the status of the modern artists was no longer regulated by the requirements of monarchs and rulers, his economic success remained dependent on the cultural perceptions and needs of contemporary clientele, who made their purchasing decisions based on their individual education in the art community. See Ruppert, Der moderne Künstler, p. 79.

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Fig. 9.3

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Max Bram with his art collection in Rosenheim, c. 1934, F 6476, The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim © The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim.

acquisitions or the sale of singular artworks. Unlike other public art collections in Germany which aimed at freeing themselves from the contaminated sites and collection practices of the late nineteenth century by buying and displaying modern art and thus initiating a fundamental reform process, the municipal art collection in Rosenheim seemed to be intrinsically tied to the individual taste of its founder (Fig. 9.3).23 While around 1900 Bram’s understanding of art corresponded to contemporaneous levels of appreciation, his same understanding became more and more antiquated. In comparison to other institutions and private collections that tried to initiate a reform process by abandoning figurative artworks and opening up to modern art in the 1920s, Bram did not reconsider his standpoint and continued to acquire landscape and genre paintings in the style of the late nineteenth century.24 This somewhat undermined his respectable didactic approach to donating his art 23 24

For this see especially the examples Hannover and Mannheim depicted in J. Baumann, Museum als Avantgarde. Museen moderner Kunst in Deutschland 1918–1933, Berlin, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2016. In a memorandum from 1928, Bram stated that ‘the current conservative character of the collection’ must be ‘preserved’ and that ‘modernism even in its less grotesque forms must be permanently eliminated’. The citation was translated by the author. Bram’s

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collection in order to make it accessible to everyone for the purpose of artistic education. While befriended artists as well as conservative friends continued to support his collection, many other contemporaries considered the naturalistic and bucolic sujets of the works in his art collection to be outdated and anachronistic. Ironically, it was this conservative and antimodern outlook of the communal collection in Rosenheim would prove most appealing to the National Socialists.

Max Bram’s Legacy in the Era of National Socialism

As early as the 1920s, Modern Art was confronted by increasing criticism from national-conservative circles and in some places even lead to a reorganization of local collection and exhibition policies.25 When the National Socialists eventually came in power in 1933, cultural life in Germany found itself increasingly centralized and influenced by political ideology. Mostly because of restrictive interventions on the part of the authorities, many public institutions rapidly adapted to the new policies.26 While most forms of modern art were discredited and regarded as “degenerate”, realistic landscapes and figurative genre paintings in the style of the late nineteenth century experienced a revival. It is therefore not surprising that Max Bram’s donation of his art collection in Rosenheim accorded with the outlook of the new rulers.27 Whereas the written records do not provide clear evidence of Bram’s political views, his conservative and critical position towards the artistic modernity ‘memorandum on the expansion of the city’s collection of paintings’ is conveyed in several version in the estate of the collector in Municipal Archive of Rosenheim. 25 The prime example for this campaign against modernity was Weimar, where the director of the state arts collection Wilhelm Köhler was criticized for his promotion of modern art throughout the 1920s. Eventually, in 1930 he had to remove all objects of modern art from the public showrooms by the order of the Thuringian chairman of the NSDAP Wilhelm Frick. See  G.  Wendemann, ‘Die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar im Dritten Reich’, in J.  Ulbricht (ed.), Klassikerstadt und Nationalsozialismus. Kultur und Politik in Weimar 1933 bis 1945, exhibition catalogue, Stadtmuseum (Weimar), Weimar: Stadtmuseum, 2002, pp. 118–127. 26 H.-U.  Thamer, ‘Autonomie, Selbstmobilisierung und politische Intervention. Museen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland In Zwischen Kulturgeschichte und Politik’, in L.  S.  Löw, M.  Nuding (eds.), Zwischen Kulturgeschichte und Politik. Das Germanische Nationalmuseum in der Weimarer Republik und der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2014, pp. 17–24. 27 See  M.  Pilz, ‘Literatur und Bildende Kunst im Rosenheim der Zwischenkriegszeit’, in M.  Pilz, M.  Treml (eds.), Rosenheim: Geschichte und Kultur, Rosenheim: Historischer Verein, 2010, pp. 419–436.

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Gauleiter Adolf Wagner at the Opening of Rosenheim’s new art gallery, 1937, F 10266, The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim © The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim.

did seem to be aligned with the new art policies.28 Consequently, the geriatric founder of Rosenheim’s communal art collection and his stubborn traditionalism was cherished by the National Socialists.29 Unlike other provincial galleries in Germany, in Rosenheim there was no substantial need to reorganize the art collection after the National Socialist upheaval in 1933.30 Furthermore, 28 29

Compare footnote No. 24. See for example the article ‘Dreißig Jahre Rosenheimer Gemäldegalerie’, in Rosenheimer Tagblatt Wendelstein, 23 October 1934, where it is reported that Bram donated to the city of Rosenheim in 1904 an ‘already important collection at the time’, which indirectly emphasizes its continuous importance in the incipient time of National Socialism. Furthermore, the article claims that frequent visits to Bram’s art gallery have become a necessity of life for some fellow citizens and stresses, that the worth of the painting collection was invaluable. Even after Bram’s passing shortly afterwards, these public expressions of honor did not abate. 30 In contrast, the exhibition of the municipal art collection of Soest, which had with about 22,500 citizens almost the same number of the population of Rosenheim in 1933, was shut down in 1936 in order to – as it was officially framed – reorganize the existing collection in terms of the National Socialist conception of art. See G. Köhn, 2007: ‘Die Kunstsammlung der Stadt Soest und ihre “Ausrichtung nach den Prinzipien nationalsozialistischer Kulturpolitik” ab 1936/37’, Soester Zeitschrift Heft, 118 (2007), pp. 162–176.

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apparently to demonstrate the integrity of its founder, the commune decided just shortly before Bram’s passing in October 1935 to install an art commission consisting of three artists, who were not only befriended with the art collector, but who also represented similarly conservative artistic views. The establishment of this commission meant that Bram’s rather outdated conception of art would persist.31 As it is well-known today, Adolf Hitler’s personal taste in art had its roots in the figurative works of the long nineteenth century.32 Traditionally oriented art collections of the Bourgeoisie as one of the driving forces within the art world around 1900 experienced an unexpected revitalization. It can be considered more than an unfortunate historical coincidence that Max Bram’s art collection experienced a rather unexpected and at the same time inglorious revitalization over three decades after its establishment. Moreover, just weeks after the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich in the summer of 1937, the local art association followed Bram’s yearlong appeal to build a gallery in Rosenheim in order to provide a permanent exhibition space for his donated art collection.33 Getting back to Bram’s initiative and realizing the gallery building to honor the collection’s founder was clearly a propagandistic move. Nonetheless, it demonstrated the scope of the collector’s real influence. All local exhibitions until 1944 were mostly regaled with the existing communal art collection. While the Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellungen (Great German Art Exhibitions) in Munich were reserved for contemporary artists and their works, in Rosenheim almost two thirds of the 151 displayed artists at the opening exhibition in 1937 were deceased years or even decades before.34 Subsequently, Rosenheim’s communal art scene in the era of National Socialism can in no way be depicted as an expression of the ‘renewal’ of art that was postulated by the National Socialists.35 In fact, 31 These artists were Emil Thoma, Constantin Gerhardinger and Hermann Groeber, who was succeeded by Anton Müller-Wischin after his death in 1935. See for instance F. Steffan, ‘vermacht, verfallen, verdrängt: Eine Ausstellungsidee und ihre historische Situiertheit’, in C. Fuhrmeister, M. Hauser-Mair, F. Steffan (eds.), vermacht, verfallen, verdrängt: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus, exhibition catalogue, Städtische Galerie (Rosenheim), Rosenheim: Städtische Galerie, 2017, pp. 76–83. 32 For Hitler’s personal understanding of art, compare especially K.  Hartewig, Kunst für alle! Hitlers ästhetische Diktatur, Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2018, p. 28 ff. See also R. Bavaj, Die Ambivalenz der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Bilanz der Forschung, München: Oldenbourg, 2004, p. 154. 33 Cf. Pilz, ‘Literatur’. 34 Cf. Steffan, Ausstellungsidee. 35 An illustrative example can be seen in Hitler’s speech on the occasion of the ‘Kulturtagung des Parteitags der NSDAP’ in Nuremberg on September 6, 1938. See R. Eikmeyer (ed.),

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it was rather a matter of integrating the existing collection of traditional and outdated art into the National Socialist art world. Ultimately, the anachronistic elevation of Max Bram’s bourgeois art collection reveals one of the core mechanisms of cultural instrumentalization in the era of National Socialism. List of References Baumann, Jana. Museum als Avantgarde. Museen moderner Kunst in Deutschland 1918– 1933, Berlin, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2016. Bram, Max. Meine Entwicklung zum Kunstsammler, typescript, 1921, Municipal Archive of Rosenheim. Bavaj, Riccardo. Die Ambivalenz der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Bilanz der Forschung, München: Oldenbourg, 2004. Eikmeyer, Robert (ed.). Adolf Hitler: Reden zur Kunst- und Kulturpolitik 1933–1939, Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004. Grasskamp, Walter. ‘Die Einbürgerung der Kunst: Korporative Kunstförderung im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Ekkehard Mai, Peter Paret, Ingrid Severin (eds.), Sammler, Stifter und Museen: Kunstförderung in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Köln: Böhlau, 1993, pp. 104–113. Hardtwig, Wolfgang. ‘Privatvergnügen oder Staatsaufgabe? Monarchisches Sammeln und Museum 1800–1914’, in Ekkehard Mai, Peter Paret, Ingrid Severin (eds.), Sammler, Stifter und Museen: Kunstförderung in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Köln: Böhlau, 1993, pp. 81–103. Hartewig, Karin. Kunst für alle! Hitlers ästhetische Diktatur, Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2018. Hecker, Hans-Joachim. ‘Die Kunststadt München im Nationalsozialismus’, in Ulrike Haerendel, Bernadette Ott (eds.), München: Hauptstadt der Bewegung, exhibition catalogue, Stadtmuseum (München), München: Stadtmuseum, 1993, pp. 310–330. Jooss, Birgit. ‘Bauernsohn, der zum Fürsten der Kunst gedieh: Die Inszenierungsstrategien der Künstlerfürsten im Historismus’, Plurale, 5 (2005), pp. 196–228. Jooss, Birgit. ‘Ein Tadel wurde nie ausgesprochen: Prinzregent Luitpold als Freund der Künstler’, in Ulrike Leutheusser, Hermann Rumschöttel (eds.), Prinzregent Luitpold von Bayern: Ein Wittelsbacher zwischen Tradition und Moderne, München: Allitera, 2012, pp. 151–176.

Adolf Hitler: Reden zur Kunst- und Kulturpolitik 1933–1939, Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004, pp. 189–208.

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Köhn, Gerhard. ‘Die Kunstsammlung der Stadt Soest und ihre “Ausrichtung nach den Prinzipien nationalsozialistischer Kulturpolitik” ab 1936/37’, Soester Zeitschrift Heft, 118 (2007), pp. 162–176. Kuhrau, Sven. Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich: Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsammlerkultur, Kiel: Ludwig, 2005. Lenman, Robert. Die Kunst, die Macht und das Geld: Zur Kulturgeschichte des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1871–1918, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1994. Mair, Karl. ‘Der erste Ehrenbürger’, Oberbayerisches Volksblatt, 27 December 2013, p. 16. Meissner, Karl-Heinz. ‘Der Handel mit Kunst in München 1500–1945’, in Rupert Walser, Bernhard Wittenbrink (eds.), Ohne Auftrag: Zur Geschichte des Kunsthandels, München: Walser und Wittenbrink, 1989, pp. 12–103. Möller, Susanne. ‘Kunsthandel und Kunstexport: Ein Markt für gehobene Schichten’, in Friedrich Prinz, Marita Krauss (eds.), München – Musenstadt mit Hinterhöfen: Die Prinzregentenzeit 1886–1912, München: C. H. Beck, 1988, pp. 248–252. Pilz, Michael. ‘Literatur und Bildende Kunst im Rosenheim der Zwischenkriegszeit’, in Michael Pilz, Manfred Treml (eds.), Rosenheim: Geschichte und Kultur, Rosenheim: Historischer Verein, 2010, pp. 419–436. Ruppert, Wolfgang. Der moderne Künstler: Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der kreativen Individualität in der kulturellen Moderne im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Schack-Simitzis, Clementine. ‘Artium Protector: Der Prinzregent und die Künstler’, in Norbert Götz, Clementine Schack-Simitzis (eds.), Die Prinzregentenzeit, exhibition catalogue, Stadtmuseum (München), München: Stadtmuseum, 1988, pp. 353–354. Schulz, Andreas. Lebenswelt und Kultur des Bürgertums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, München: Oldenbourg, 2005. Steffan, Felix. ‘vermacht, verfallen, verdrängt: Eine Ausstellungsidee und ihre historische Situiertheit’, in Christian Fuhrmeister, Monika Hauser-Mair, Felix Steffan (eds.), vermacht, verfallen, verdrängt: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus, exhibition catalogue, Städtische Galerie (Rosenheim), Rosenheim: Städtische Galerie, 2017, pp. 76–83. Thamer, Hans-Ulrich. ‘Autonomie, Selbstmobilisierung und politische Intervention. Museen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland In Zwischen Kulturgeschichte und Politik’, in Luitgard Sofie Löw, Matthias Nuding (eds.), Zwischen Kulturgeschichte und Politik. Das Germanische Nationalmuseum in der Weimarer Republik und der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum 2014, pp. 17–24. Wendemann, Gerda. ‘Die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar im Dritten Reich’, in Justus Ulbricht (ed.), Klassikerstadt und Nationalsozialismus. Kultur und Politik in Weimar 1933 bis 1945, exhibition catalogue, Stadtmuseum (Weimar), Weimar: Stadtmuseum, 2002, pp. 118–127.

Fig. 10.1

The new middle class as a rising elite. The successful Prague attorney Ladislav Jiří Weber (1893–1961) with his wife in the middle of their Czech modern art collection, 1920s–1930s, The Archive of the National Gallery Prague © The National Gallery Prague.

Chapter 10

Old vs. New Middle Class: Collecting Identity in Interwar Central Europe as a Study Concept Marcela Rusinko While referring to the social history of the elites between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, circa to the late 1930s, the art collecting phenomenon appears to be an essential part of modernist behavioural patterns and one of the most significant and complex attributes of the social elites’ lifestyle.1 Thanks to transnational efforts, we may list any amount of valid case studies on individual collectors, all of them within the limits of unique socio-economic-historical coordinates given. Although it is probably not quite possible to generalize the individual findings while staying methodologically framed clearly within the field of art history, a certain general ‘over the individual’ comparisons, links and analogies seem to always be some kind of common heading towards the distant horizon. Is there a way to systematize our findings, to make them a bit more ‘readable’ while juxtaposed and confronted, so as to give an additional reference value? In this chapter, I work with the sociological concept of the middle class and its differentiation. I try to emphasize its importance within the topic and period studied, as this social stratum appears to be essential for a deeper understanding of the process of constructing individual modernist collecting identity. Specifically, being aware of possible inaccuracy – I look to Peter Berger’s concept of two parallel middle classes2 – the old, traditional middle class and the new middle class, the knowledge class – applied to the indicated field. Whereas the sociological terminology promoted – even if emerging from European roots then developed essentially on American ground – has a more general wider validity, territorially as well as in terms of period, the background source research I conducted can be said 1 Cf e.g. J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds.), The Cultures of Collecting, London: Reaktion Books, 1994; R. W. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society, Abingdon: Routledge, 1995; S. M. Pierce, On Collecting. An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, Abingdon: Routledge, 1995; P. Blom, To Have and to Hold. An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004; J. Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 2 P.  L.  Berger, Capitalist Revolution. Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty, New York: Basic Books, 1986.

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to be related; namely, to the historical experience of Central Europe and the interwar collecting cultures in the Czech lands (Bohemia).3 In this sense, there is an assumption that differentiated perspectives can enhance, deepen and legitimize the concept in the future. Hence, referring to the specific phenomenon of quickly developing or newly emerging collections of businessmen, bankers, lawyers, attorneys, doctors; as well as publishers, architects or artists – representatives of the old and new middle classes (Fig. 10.1), we are in search of structural societal categorization that would facilitate to link certain behavioural collecting predispositions, attitudes and preferences to the identifiable social sub-segment more clearly.4 Such terminological ‘clarification’5 and the analytical tools that it opens could enhance our research of the modernism collecting phenomenon. Consequently, I try to describe the spheres of interest and further enquiry that should help to clarify the general tendencies in options, preferences and decisions specific for both ‘opposite and conflicting’ middle classes. As well I note – for these two middle classes – quite differentiated references to the nobility as definitely descending but admired and still influential stratum and lifestyle indicator. Additionally, I would like to point out how this way of interpretation could bring new aspects even to the post-Second World War collecting situation in the new geo-political reality.

Collecting Middle Class Differentiation

The bourgeoisie, the social stratum which adhered significantly to the phenomenon of collecting and artistic patronage already during nineteenth century, slowly little by little began to replace the position of aristocracy, traditional large landowners with long-standing pre-eminence in business, in many ways. What happened only subtly for decades, with the turn of the century quickly 3 Currently elaborated study by the author on ‘Constructing Social Status as a Collector in the interwar Czech Lands’ (unpublished). 4 As in a certain aspects pioneer study with unique collecting phenomenon analysis in the direct relation to social class, yet relating to different historical period. See B. Ronni (et al.), Class distinctions: Dutch painting in the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 2015. 5 The terminological comments needed point to the way we (art historians) often treat the terms bourgeoisie and/or middle class – for sociologists these are not understood as full synonyms and they are not describing one homogenous or monolithic social strata. Analogically, the term white-collar e.g. for Berger this is not meant to be a synonym for knowledge class. Actually, this etymological difference describes the post-industrial societal shift in the middle class stratification.

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gained a new dynamic. As the economic structure changed and the role of landed property declined sharply, middle class elites significantly gained up in numbers and differentiated.6 According to contemporary sociological definitions, a class could be defined as a group of people within a society who possess the same socioeconomic status. More historically, as a social group where all of its members have in common the same link to the means of production (Karl Marx) or a group of individuals who have in common an equivalent position in a market economy and as recipients of very similar economic rewards (Max Weber).7 Already Marx, but later on mainly Weber, operated as well with the term ‘petit (petty) bourgeoisie’, the small property owners in general.8 Thus, the class status in modern society is given mainly by the position on the labour market. Actually, the term “middle class” is believed to have appeared for the first time at the beginning of nineteenth century in England. Then it should designate a growing group of owners who differed from leisured aristocracy and rentiers due to their need to ensure an income by amassing their capital worth on their own. Thus, members of the traditional (lower) middle class, small merchants, private craftsmen, other small entrepreneurs, i.e. petty bourgeoisie, combine two main sources of income, labour and financial capital. Consequently, technological innovations and growing administration appended s. c. ‘the property-less white-collar workers (knowledge workers)’ to the middle class. The perception of this “white-collar revolution”9 was then widely reflected by the post-Second World War scholars, especially by Charles Wright Mills, whose position towards and response in Central Europe were rather special, as I reveal in the end of this chapter.10 Therefore, with the dawn of the post-industrial age, s.  c. “new middle class” enters the scene, understood as a stratum that operates with the “capital” in the much broader context of its meaning, i.e. primarily with human capital (Fig. 10.2).11 The typical 6 7 8 9 10 11

A.  Giddens, The Class Structure of Advanced Societies, London: Hutchinson, 1973, pp. 164–167. Giddens, The Class, pp. 23–52. See E. O. Wright, Class Counts. Student Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 43nn. See R. Boudon (et al.), A Critical Dictionary of Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Berger, Capitalist, pp. 56–57. C. W. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Class, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. According to Pierre Bourdieu, capital is able to produce profit and reproduce itself in the same or extended form; a capacity that is able not only to accumulate, but to change, convert and reproduce as well. P. Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood,

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Old and new middle class social and collecting stratification; collecting formative focuses and their range of values © Author

representatives of this new middle class are people with a higher education, eventually, in a broader context, with specific knowledge. American sociologist, political emigre Peter Berger, born in Vienna, argues that in advanced societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward social mobility. Like this, it actually replaced the position of family “point of origin”. Berger concludes that “Contemporary Western societies are characterized by a protracted conflict between two classes, the old middle class (occupied in the production and distribution of material goods and services) and the new middle class (occupied in the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge)”.12 Whereas in the past, there was just one horizontally stratified middle class – from upper-middle to lower-middle – within itself, now there are two middle classes instead of one, i.e. the old middle class – business 1986, pp.  241–258. See  P.  Matějů, ‘The Middle Class Formation in the Czech Republic’, Working papers of the research project ‘Social Trends’, 6 (1998), Praha: Sociologický ústav AV ČR, 1998, pp. 3–7. 12 Berger, Capitalist, p. 67.

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community – and the new one – knowledge class. So, analogically, like the old middle class, as well the new one is stratified within itself. There is upperknowledge class (intellectuals) and petty-knowledge class. There are tensions between these strata as well, but they also share common class interests and culture.13 Thus, for the most developed Euro-Atlantic societies, this trend linked to the dawn of post-industrial era is considered to correspond already with the interwar period.14 How this essential differentiation is mirrored in the middle class collecting community? The profession and related capital or knowledge seem to be among the clue variables that generated the social status of the individual and opened the predispositions for the art collecting behaviour as well. In this sense, the societal, cultural and economic climates of the early twentieth century and then mainly of 1920s and 1930s were fundamentally supportive in terms of quick formation and differentiation of the middle strata. Such development brought about also the new collecting professional and societal types or empowered some of those being marginal so far. Thus, among the professions that we without a doubt can relate to the modernist collecting, we can note those middle-class elites playing a significant role already during the nineteenth century. These are firstly top-end large entrepreneurs, businessmen or bankers sociologically referring to upper-middle-class – Baltzell’s term “business aristocracy”15 fits here for these nouveau riche very well – as well as smaller but successful & ambitious entrepreneurs, referring rather to lower-middle-class (petty-bourgeoisie). We can add to them various managers, officials and technicians, who can be considered as typical whitecollars. These are all traditional bourgeoisie representatives that could be in terms of the sociology linked to the above mentioned historically differentiated categories of the middle class. All these sub-segments refer in the terminology of Berger to the representatives of the old middle class. Hence, they all deal in their professions with material goods or services. On the other hand, we have those middle-class rising elites appearing as the new collecting representatives with the advent of modernism, but specifically after the First World War. Those were very often attorneys, lawyers, as well as various professors, but among them also doctors of medicine and not seldom notably various artistic professions themselves in general, i.e. architects, 13 Berger, Capitalist, p. 67 nn. 14 According to Colin Clark (1905–89), the Tertiary Sector, i.e. services, started to prevail in the most developed societies and USA already with the beginning of 1920s. The development of the service sector has led to ‘a massive shift in the labour force to service occupations’ and consequently as well to the emergence of the quaternary sector, i.e. the knowledge class. Berger, Capitalist, p. 57. 15 E. D. Baltzell, American Business Aristocracy, New York: Collier Books, 1962.

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designers, publishers, writes, visual artists16 or art agents.17 These relatively independent sub-segments deal conclusively primarily with non-material – symbolic knowledge. Thus, they create our new knowledge class, termed by Berger to be the new middle class.

Capital, Knowledge and Market Strategies

On this basis, we could identify the spheres of interest and further enquiry that should help us to deduce, denote and clarify some general tendencies in options, preferences and decisions that are likely to be specific or different for the above named opposite segments of old and new middle classes. With an appropriate level of abstraction, we could search for these ‘collectingformative focuses’ in those fields: concerning the general form and level of capital engaged; regarding predispositions for the art reception; with reference to inspirational models; with respect to prevailing art market strategies and finally, as regards general decision preferences in art segments. These are the suggested domains that could indicate and designate the differentiations of the opposite ‘conflicting’ classes; worth exploring closer and illustrating them on the case examples from the Bohemian interwar collecting milieu.18 The prevailing form of capital engaged seems to be a signal variable that essentially differentiates both classes. On the one hand, we wouldn’t have problem with identifying top-end collecting businessmen with the very high or practically unlimited level of financial capital available – in Bohemia firstly ambitious worldwide industrialist established in Prague Jindřich Waldes (1878– 1941), or regional industrial business owner Richard Morawetz (1881–1965). On 16 Historically, among the artists as cultural elites were always passionate collectors. Well, with the dawn of the modern era this phenomenon significantly intensified. See Künstlersammlungen. Objekte, Ordnungen, Programmatiken, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München, online conference 12–13 November 2021. 17 Actually, the art dealers, similarly to artists, represent a very special and influential sub-segment, definitely deserving a further research. The question whether this group deals with material or rather symbolic goods or services refers clearly to the essence of art itself. Obviously, the character of art seems to be predominantly material, but its essence is awarded by highly symbolic values. The objects of art, as part of the nonfunctional system, are then subject to anachronistic dimension and subjective discourse. See J. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, London-New York: Verso, 1996, pp. 71–84. 18 See synthetic study L.  Slavíček, ‘Sobě, umění, přátelům’. Kapitoly z dějin sběratelství v Čechách a na Moravě 1650–1939, Brno: Barrister&Principal, 2007. For selected collectors’ profiles linked to the objects preserved in state collection see in M.  Rusinko, V.  Vlnas (eds.), Sobě ke cti, umění ke slávě. Čtyři století uměleckého sběratelství v  českých zemích, Brno: Books&Pipes, 2019.

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the other hand, the knowledge class from its definition disposes primarily with the human capital. Actually, for many representatives of these sub-segments – artistic professions seem to be valid example – the fiscal options were clearly limited; how we learn from the original period collecting strategies of popular Prague photographer Josef Sudek (1896–1976) or regional printer and publisher Josef Portman (1893–1968), established in Litomyšl. Precisely this capital dispersion and actually also related to different class values and culture lie in the core of the potential conflict described by Berger. As well, we could assume there are some ‘border’ class sub-segments that dispose with relatively balanced level of both capital forms. Those could be professionally successful lawyers or white-collar managers, represented vitally e.g. by the ambitious Prague collecting attorneys František Čeřovský (1881–1962) and Ladislav Jiří Weber (1893–1961) or in region by the figures of Vladimír Kouřil (1902–1990) in Moravská Ostrava and František Steinfeld (1886–1952) in Hradec Králové. Also, the associated collector’s professional background and experience opened radically dissimilar predispositions for the art reception, particularly concerning old and new middle-class collectors. Analogically to the form of capital related to fiscal options or ‘knowledge’ options, this refers to other principal variables that could reveal more on the potential of individual representative or figuratively as well sub-segment. Herein we could associate the professional types for which the knowledge on the gathered items is predominantly passive and vague, thus generally clearly mediated. This caption, often typical for top-end business collectors or the old middle class in general, not seldom brings the objects of interest closer to a business commodity, as a material commodity is eventually everything that they are dealing with in their practice. The individual collector accesses such mediated or semi-mediated knowledge also in various forms of period elites’ lifestyle fashions and trends. Contrary to this, the comprehension object d’art for the knowledge class vary from at least intuitive or semi-professional to typically professional, active and confident, leading to a real connoisseurship as we can see on the example of the most significant internationally recognised Czech modernist collector, art historian and theoretician Vincenc Kramář (1877–1960) (Fig. 10.3). A subsequent question arises concerning inspirational models and values. Could they be generally comparable for both these conflicting middle classes, while disposing differentiated capital and comprehension? For centuries, the aristocracy as a privileged class had a long-established collecting tradition that served them as a significant tool of social legitimization, representation, selfidentification, as well as financial deposit. As expected, this pattern of a nobility lifestyle with the related collecting cultures created a strong ideal for old upper-middle class, collecting entrepreneurs, commercials or bankers, whose representatives not seldom alone strived to be additionally elevated. The most

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Art historian and theoretician Vincenc Kramář (1877–1960) with his famous early French Cubism collection in his Prague flat as a typical representative of the new middle class – knowledge class, 1932, Volné směry magazine (1932) © Public Domain

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ambitious individuals of these ranks with sufficient financial options even looked up to imperial collecting cultures.19 Not surprisingly, social ambitions were often demonstrated by the residential culture itself. Various late nineteenth century chateaux or residences built in pseudo-historic styles referred clearly to these models. Interiors of residence by the Czech-German top industrialist Heinrich Schicht (1880–1959) in Ústí nad Labem with clear references to the nobility standards could serve as an explicit example of such an old middle class collecting lifestyle (Fig. 10.4). Contrary to this, collections of the new middle classes decorated as a rule much more often various metropolitan, more or less spacious apartments or modern provincial villas, as represented by the documented period interiors with the modern art collections by František Dvořáček (1891–1967), Chairman of the Board of Technical Enterprise in Brno, or by physicians Otakar Teyschl (1891–1968) in Brno and Antonín Starý (1878– 1942) in Prague. After 1918, at least in Central Europe, the attractiveness of the image of the aristocratic lifestyle substantially weakened. The nobility played more and more often a role that was ‘outdated’ and rejected, however still admired. The same could hardly characterize the knowledge class collecting identities disposing primarily of knowledge options. Evidently, with the rolling decades of twentieth century, ubiquitously promoted modernist lifestyle applied to the middle classes in general, but specifically the dynamically growing white-collar and knowledge class. For these more instructed sub-segments the more personalized models and often rather intimate motivations would be legitimate to enquire after. Consequently, many can be derived on the basis of art market strategies and their analysis, as they are obviously linked to the above-noted predispositions and knowledge, we could definitely identify the characters and sub-segments acquisitions primarily via mainstream secondary market, typically anonymous art auctions. The specialized art galleries represent a more instructed and autonomous form. Contrary to this, the acquisition strategies of (semi)-professional market players (with often a limited budget) are distinctly more individualized and personalized, dealing via primary market or other direct personal exchanges to a significant extent. Such differentiated acquisition attitudes refer analogically to varied decision preferences. Not surprisingly, we could denote quite conventional imitative decisions towards the reasonably well-established or fashionable art segments or artists; as well those that are expressively independent, risky, experimental, and often exotic. Again, the former is assumed to be generally more typical for old middle classes, whereas the latter is an instructed new middle class disposing the privileged proficiency level. 19 See I. Ciulisová, Men of Taste. Essays on Art Collecting in East-Central Europe, Bratislava: VEDA, 2014.

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Fig. 10.4



‘Business Aristocracy’ old middle class collecting lifestyle. Interiors of residence of Czech-German top industrialist Heinrich Schicht (1880–1959) in Ústí nad Labem with clear references to the nobility standards, c. 1930, Museum of the City of Usti nad Labem © Museum of the City of Usti nad Labem.

The Intelligentsia as a Rising Power? On the Potential of the Concept

The assumed detailed enquiry on the basis of the above focuses should then point to only two essential middle class counterparts, linked by options, preferences and decisions. Instantly, it seems comprehensible that there is a category of old upper-middle class entrepreneurs, often with a more or less obvious tendency to ‘engage’ art promotionally, somehow also in their professional business life20 – typically again the above-mentioned Waldes but as well the bank house owner Ota Resch (1888–1929) established in Pardubice – versus the numerous categories of those who deal with art in their professional lives, like the collecting Prague avant-garde artists Emil Filla 20

This moment seems to be quite significant. It often emerges in various forms of company communication symbolic, as logotypes, visual promotional culture created by a favoured contemporary artist.

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(1882–1953) or Adolf Hoffmeister (1902–1973). All this related to a general tendency stemming from the more conventional and traditional strategies; over more non-conventional and riskier ones. Precisely, the dissimilar relation to fiscal and knowledge options; and figuratively also to a material ‘aspect’ as a whole, makes these two class identities essentially different. However, the real ambition of the concept endeavours to identify and describe individual subsegments, more comprehensively and consequently to trace their potential boundaries. As, effectively, the most ‘thrilling sphere’ seems to prevail somewhere in the middle where both oppositional collecting identities meet. In this sense, as well, we need to learn more about the general developments and shifts of these differentiated sub-segments within related territories and cultures. For instance, focusing especially on the category of entrepreneurs as typical old middle class representatives, we would probably notice even here a certain shift in priorities moving slowly towards less conventional sets of decisions and probably as well ‘inspirational’ models. As in Central Europe, this is obviously observable by the characters entering the scene after the economic crisis following the Great Depression, which affected also Europe, i.e. the younger generation of business collectors, whose taste often moved effectively towards a more habitual acceptance of still only partially recognised modern and avant-garde art manifestations. As such, in terms of further analysis it seems promising and functional if applied within the identical sub-segments, characters and types that are alike, i.e. professionally, socially and generationally comparable; and in a wider cultural and territorial context. As such, there ought to be sub-segments that are obviously worth focusing on. For a Central European interwar context, this means namely, the sub-segment of top-end bourgeois entrepreneurs, i.e. high old middle class representatives, the captains of the industry disposing with the business activities widely exceeding the region. And, similarly, as well, the more contemporary old middle class business collectors entering the scene in the 1930s, and representing the transformation of points of view. Or, on the other hand, we definitely need to learn more about those art professionals,21 in whose collections, precious examples of European modernism, met various orientalism and exotic art manifestations, often hardly classifiable in terms of their origin and quality. Yet, of a very special concern appear to be various connoisseurs, art historians, and art dealers, not seldom helping with profiling those mainly old upper-middle class collections and then above that alone

21 See A. Emmerich, ‘The Artist as a Collector’, Art in America, 46 (1958), pp. 23–28.

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actively collecting!22 The complexity of this collecting new middle class model is embodied fruitfully by Prague aesthetician and modern art critique Václav Nebeský (1889–1949), Paris school collector and art dealer, established for more than one decade in the heart of Paris recent avant-garde life. To conclude, it appears that just this new knowledge class – notably its upper-middle segment – intelligentsia – appears to be the crucial factor that expressly enters the collecting cultures during the interwar period, to stay here as a significant and influential cultural phenomenon at least for the rest of the twentieth century but practically till the present days.23 A sort of fascination by this social layer appears to be – à propos – the red line that links seemingly distant horizons of American sociological theory with the Central European reality. Whereas Mills’ post-war explorations of the knowledge class and American power elites had relatively limited relevance for this geopolitical context, it actually attracted surprisingly a lot of attention by publishers behind the Iron Curtain,24 as the author was perceived here as a progressive humanistic left-oriented critic of capitalist society. Mills perceived the initial role of the Central European intelligentsia, which was later further developed by Berger, who understood the new middle class as representing an alternative to the powerful capitalist business elites already in the late 1950s. Moreover, this all transpired on the basis of the real personal contacts and field research in state socialism countries.25 An important distinctive feature of social history in Central and Eastern Europe is the concept of the intelligentsia defined not only through the categories of the Marxian theory of labour, economy and capital, but also the ethos of the group, requiring socio-political commitment.

22 See B. Paul and N. Levis, ‘“Collecting is the Noblest of All Passions!”: Wilhelm Von Bode and the Relationship between Museums, Art Dealing, and Private Collecting’, International Journal of Political Economy, 25.2 (1995), pp. 9–32. 23 More systematically was the cultural phenomenon studied by Polish academicians, esp. in the volume M. Janowski, Birth of the Intelligentsia – 1750–1831, in series J. Jedlicki (ed.), A History of the Polish Intelligentsia, Vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main-Bern-Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2014. On the other hand, it seems to be the lack of a similar comparative cultural historical view on the Czech side, yet the topic is getting recent attention in popular receptions as the one of Pavel Kosatík. See P. Kosatík, Česká inteligence, Praha: Dita Hradecká, 2017. 24 Whereas the study White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) was translated and published in  Zagreb, Budapest or Warsaw, The Power Elite (1956) in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow, etc. 25 C. Wright Mills, The Marxists, New York: Dell Publishing, 1962; K. Mills (ed.), C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 241–243.

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As for art collecting – this is definitely a matter of further research, however specifically for the 1970s and 1980s26 in Czech lands (part of that time Czechoslovakia), it seems evident that the collectors disposing primarily symbolic knowledge – doctors of medicine, lawyers, professors, artistic professions and other cultural intelligentsia – constituted the only actively operating type which became much more numerous, genuine as well as systematic,27 whereas in the Western world the balance between both seemed significantly more in favour of the rich old middle class representatives.28 List of References Baltzell, Edward Digby. American Business Aristocracy, New York: Collier Books, 1962. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects, London-New York: Verso, 1996. Bauman Zygmunt. ‘Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change’, East European Politics and Societies, 1.2 (1987), pp. 162–186. Belk, Russell W. Collecting in a Consumer Society, Abingdon: Routledge, 1995. Berger, Peter L. Capitalist Revolution. Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty, New York: Basic Books, 1986. Blom, Philipp. To Have and to Hold. An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Boudon, Raymond, (et  al.). A Critical Dictionary of Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Forms of Capital’, in John Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood, 1986, pp. 241–258. 26 Giddens, The Class, pp. 223–254. See chapters ‘State socialism and class structuration’ and ‘Class and party in state socialist society’. 27 This could be explained as the consequence of totalitarian regimes’ systemic persecutions of the old middle class, which like a class practically disappeared under the statesocialism e.g. in Czechoslovakia. See M. Rusinko, Snad nesbíráte obrazy? Cesty soukromého sběratelství moderního umění v českých zemích v letech 1948–1965, Brno: B&P Publishing, 2018. M. Rusinko, ‘Sbírka jako prostor vnitřní svobody: Nová vlna soukromého sběratelství v Československu po roce 1970’, in J.  Petráš, L.  Svoboda (eds), Bezčasí: Československo v letech 1972–1977, post-conference volume, Československo v letech 1972–1977 (České Budějovice, State District Archive, 2017), Praha-České Budějovice: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů ČR – Jihočeské muzeum (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes of the Czech Republic-South Bohemian Museum), 2018, pp. 105–107. 28 The research for this article was conducted in the scope of the project Od van Gogha po Maneta: Mezinárodní obchodní aktivity a sběratelské ambice kritika Václava Nebeského jako vyslance českého umění v meziválečné Paříži funded by Masaryk University Brno (MUNI/ FF-DEAN/1776/2021).

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Braddock, Jeremy. Collecting as Modernist Practice, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Ciulisová, Ingrid. Men of Taste. Essays on Art Collecting in East-Central Europe, Bratislava: VEDA, 2014. Elsner, John. Cardinal, Roger (eds.). The Cultures of Collecting, London: Reaktion Books, 1994. Emmerich, Andre. ‘The Artist as a collector’, Art in America, 46 (1958), pp. 23–28. Giddens, Anthony. The Class Structure of Advanced Societies, London: Hutchinson, 1973. Janowski, Maciej. Birth of the Intelligentsia – 1750–1831, in Jerzy Jedlicki (ed.), A History of the Polish Intelligentsia, Vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main-Bern-Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2014. Kosatík, Pavel. Česká inteligence, Praha: Dita Hradecká, 2017. Matějů, Petr. ‘The Middle Class Formation in the Czech Republic’, Working papers of the research project ‘Social Trends’, 6 (1998), Praha Sociologický ústav AV ČR, 1998. Mills, Charles Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Class, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Charles Wright Mills. The Marxists, New York: Dell Publishing, 1962. Mills, Kathryn. Mills, Pamela (eds.). C.  Wright  Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, University of California Press, 2000. Paul, Barbara. Levis, Nicholas. ‘Collecting Is the Noblest of All Passions!: Wilhelm Von Bode and the Relationship between Museums, Art Dealing, and Private Collecting’, International Journal of Political Economy, 25. 2 (1995), pp. 9–32. Pierce, Susan M. On Collecting. An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, Abingdon: Routledge, 1995. Baer, Ronni (et  al.). Class distinctions: Dutch painting in the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 2015. Rusinko, Marcela. ‘Sbírka jako prostor vnitřní svobody: Nová vlna soukromého sběratelství v Československu po roce 1970’, in Jiří Petráš, Libor Svoboda (eds.), Bezčasí: Československo v letech 1972–1977, post-conference volume, Československo v letech 1972–1977  (České Budějovice, State District Archive, 2017), Praha-České Budějovice: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů ČR – Jihočeské muzeum (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes of the Czech Republic-South Bohemian Museum), 2018, pp. 105–107. Rusinko, Marcela. Snad nesbíráte obrazy? Cesty soukromého sběratelství moderního umění v českých zemích v letech 1948–1965, Brno: B&P Publishing, 2018. Slavíček, Lubomír. ‘Sobě, umění, přátelum’. Kapitoly z dějin sběratelství v Čechách a na Moravě 1650–1939, Brno: Barrister&Principal, 2007. Wright, Erik Olin. Class Counts. Student Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Part III Art and the Art of Collecting

Fig. 11.1

Albert Harlingue, Rodin among his antique collection, c. 1910–1912, gelatine-silver print, 12 × 17,2, Ph.00210, Musée Rodin, Paris © Musée Rodin, Paris.

Chapter 11

Auguste Rodin, a Pivotal Collector: in Search of Recognition and Filiation Bénédicte Garnier Auguste Rodin was neither a king, nor a nobleman, nor even a bourgeois. He was the son of an employee of the Paris Prefecture, with no personal fortune and no inheritance. From the age of fourteen, he attended the Petite École, which was based on the catacobservation and copying of Greco-Roman art. Despite this fact, Rodin failed three times to enter the Ecole de Beaux-Arts. He would also never win the Prix de Rome, which at the time guaranteed an artist’s career. Instead, his career took other, longer and more uncertain paths. He invented his own ‘imaginary museum’, bolstered by engravings, photographs and casts; and also by travel and visits to museums. This is not surprising for an artist of his time. But around 1890, an earthquake – becoming a bulimic collector – swept away the tranquil image of the sculptor, posing amongst antiquities.

A Mere Collector?

Rodin amassed, or more rather devoured, over 6,500 objects between 1890 and 1917, between the age of 50 and 77, which was a period of rising fame and and increased financial wealth (Fig. 11.1). He naturally collected antiques, following a line of collectors, kings and princes, from antiquity.1 Rodin, like Sigmund Freud and many other collectors, built a collection that mirrored his own work. 1 B.  Garnier, Rodin. Rodin. L’antique est ma jeunesse, Paris: Musée Rodin, 2002; B.  Garnier, Rodin intime: La villa des Brillants à Meudon, Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 2015; D.  Viéville, F. Blanchetière, B. Garnier (eds.), Rodin. Le rêve japonais, exhibition catalogue, Musée Rodin (Paris), Paris: Flammarion, 2007; D. Viéville, B. Garnier (eds.), La Passion à l’œuvre, Rodin et Freud collectionneurs, exhibition catalogue, Musée Rodin (Paris), Paris: Nicolas Chaudun, 2008; C. Farge, B. Garnier, Ian Jenkins, Rodin and the Ancient Greece, exhibition catalogue, British Museum (London), London: Thames and Hudson, 2018; P.  Picard (eds.), Rodin. La lumière de l’antique, exhibition catalogue, Musée de l’Arles Antique and Musée Rodin (Arles and Paris), Paris: Gallimard, 2013; C.  Horwitz  Tommerup, B.  Garnier, Rodin Displacement, exhibition catalogue, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhague), Copenhague: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2021; C. Chevillot, Viriginie Perdrizot (eds.), Picasso-Rodin, exhibition catalogue, Musée Rodin and Musée Picasso (Paris), Paris: Gallimard, 2021. © Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_012

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Rodin’s ‘genius’, if not his singularity, should not prevent him from being placed in his own historical context, a time of both archaeological discoveries and the history of the circulation of artefacts. Let us look at the collection from different angles and not reduce it to a single interpretation, whether psychoanalytical, historical, archaeological or comparative. The study of the collector also allows us to draw a portrait of the man in society, in his art and in his intimacy. Rodin also belongs to the category of artist-collectors, a genre in itself that transcends societal upheavals and the emergence of the bourgeoisie. And what did Rodin do with these objects of reality in the construction of his own fiction? The collection appears first of all as a primitive mental structure whose imprint can be found in all of Rodin’s places, starting with the studio of the Folie Payen that Rodin rented in 1888 in order to work there with Camille Claudel, when their relationship was at its most intense. This was also where, later, he began accumulating artefacts that seemed to replace their shared creativity and love, a practice he continued in Meudon after their separation in 1892. Rodin imposed the same – occasionally contradictory – obsessions upon visitors: observing, showing and concealing, amassing to excess, combining fragments of diverse origins, questioning life and artefacts and moving from the collection (regarded as an antechamber) to the creative spaces with an early blueprint for his future museums already in mind. In Rodin’s official studio at the Dépôt des Marbres, he exhibited masterpieces that were carefully selected and turned into fetishes in his own creative melting pot. Other accounts illustrate the artist’s solitude, in its mythical dimension, and give the image of a tumultuous dwelling, where the work and the collection mingle, in accordance with the iconography of the nineteenth century, from the Balzacian dwelling to the artist’s studio, and which would endure in the twentieth century, with Picasso for example. By mimicry, Rodin reproduced at the Villa des Brillants in Meudon a place similar in spirit to those of his friends Claude Monet or Edmond de Goncourt, adapted to the personality of the sculptor (Fig. 11.2). Between 1890 and 1917, pilgrimages to the great man fed the story of the same collection. From the beginning of the 1910s, the first collection, that of the house and studio assembled between 1890 and 1910, overflowed and was enriched in the future museum planned for the Hôtel Biron. The idea of a great whole guided the joint presentation, illustrating the spirit of the donation to the French State, in 1916. The collection became inseparable from the work and would outlive the man for posterity. Can Rodin’s role as a collector be solely put down to his passion for objects when the notion of profusion seemed so central to his life? This fondness for quantity, combined with comparison, was evident in other sorts of collections: his drawings and photographs of artworks and architecture, gathered together

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Fig. 11.2

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Franck Bal, Rodin in the painting studio of the Villa des Brillants in Meudon, c. 1905, gelatine-silver print, 19 × 27,8, Ph.07004, Musée Rodin, Paris © Musée Rodin, Paris.

in albums; the books in his library, or indeed his collection of drawings, prints and paintings by other artists. Added to which were the sketches, words and phrases that he jotted down in notebooks, as reminders and a means of comprehending art and the world. Then there was the mass of plaster figures and moulds, the tools used to make copies. Abundance, order and disorder surrounded him everywhere, not to mention recomposition in his work on assemblages between 1890 and 1914, the period in which the collection took shape. The latter mirrored his process of recuperating the plaster figures modelled in the main for The Gates of Hell in the 1880s: figurines and bozzetti now composed an archaeological collection of the colossal work, assembled in series and reassembled using the technique of marcottage. Collection that is reinforced and legitimised, often a posteriori, by the fragments of the collection; Rodin took this approach to the extreme by removing several beloved treasures and combining his disparate collections. Some of his plaster figures were thus seen emerging from antique vases, transforming the past into the present and turning an object from his collection into a material for a work in progress (Fig. 11.3). This dynamic, ongoing process that led him from idea to object and object to idea, questioned the whole concept of a fixed, static, or even complete collection.

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Auguste Rodin, Assemblage: Kneeling female torso in an Ionian cup, 1895–1910 and 2nd quarter of the 6th century BC for the cup, plaster and terracotta, 23 × 25,7 × 18,5, S.03611, Musée Rodin, Paris © Musée Rodin, Paris.

Reinterpreting Antiquity within the Artist’s Collection

Rodin’s collection questions the relationship with time, not only in the artist’s chronology, but also in that of the artefacts, from Antiquity and their creation to the early twentieth century, the time of their (re)discovery. Whatever the means at his disposal, he adopted the same approach. In the early phase of his collection, assembled in his house and studio, his choices were eclectic: works from Greece and Rome stood alongside those from Egypt, Asia and European Middle Age and Renaissance. But archives show that the acquisitions of medieval, Asian and Egyptian works sped up around 1910, when the idea of an encyclopaedic museum in hotel Biron was germinating in his mind, in the tradition initiated by Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc (1814–1879). Rodin used to mix original works of art with a series of casts, to which he added the fossils of sea urchins, shells and other natural forms, before Henry Moore did. He mounted them like his small antiquities and bestowed the status of artwork upon them. Rodin

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never parted with the works he purchased. He had no desire to give them away or exchange them in order to buy others. Although he received few presents. A large number of people ensured a lively circulation of artworks at this time: archaeologists and scholars, antique dealers, brokers and other gobetweens played a leading role in the assembling of collections, choosing what was best for each one, in accordance with the state of the market, the preferences and finances of the buyer. They were couriers transporting artefacts who created invisible links between collectors across the whole of Europe. Yet while he surrounded himself with a network of art dealers, Rodin refused the help of scholars: he preferred his own vision as an artist, able to distinguish between beauty and truth, and keen on the sensory experience dear to eighteenth-century philosophers. In that, he was different from the duets collector/scholar and broker partnership, in the tradition of Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall, Carl Jacobsen and Wolfgang Helbig or Valdemar Schmidt, or even Raoul Warocqué and Frantz Cumont. Out of the sculptor’s network of around a hundred antique dealers, a few key figures emerged in specialist fields: Élie Géladakis and Spiridon Castellanos in Greco-Roman art; Marius Tano and Joseph Altounian in Egyptian art. Such activities continued until the outbreak of war in 1914, which put an end to the circulation of artworks. Acting as veritable catalysts, antique dealers shared lots (composed of finds from excavations or items from former collections) between their different clients. They thus wove visible and invisible links between these personalities through objects. Thus similarities and antinomies arose between Rodin’s collection and those of his contemporaries. Rodin built up his collection among antiquarians during the heyday of archaeological discoveries and the sales of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections, following in the footsteps of aristocratic collectors and archaeologists; and being part of a long lineage. The sculptor bought mainly in Paris from antique dealers travelling around the Mediterranean. He did not leave Europe and did not visit Greece. Even in Italy, he seemed more absorbed in visiting museums and enriching his “imaginary museum” than in acquiring antiques. Straddling two centuries, this collection borrowed their codes, changing tastes and discoveries. In the late nineteenth century, Rodin took an interest in archaic art, and began collecting Cypriot and Iberian sculptures, like Picasso. He also invested a large part of his fortune in an extraordinary Egyptian collection, reflecting the changes in his way of thinking and his commitment to modernity. Although a contemporary of young artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, he did not go as far as they did along this path, only including so-called ‘primitive’ art in his collection parsimoniously (yet he never refused gifts that were given to him).

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Fig. 11.4

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Eugène Druet, The personal collection in the hôtel Biron, 1913, gelatine-silver print, 27.5 × 38.1, Ph.02427, Musée Rodin, Paris © Musée Rodin, Paris.

When building his collection, Rodin seemed to abolish space and time. In one portion of his life, a little more than two decades, he assembled artefacts from different horizons and eras, and placed them alongside his own works. At the Villa des Brillants, the earliest – prehistoric or ancient – pieces stood amongst extra-European Chinese, Japanese or Indian objects. All were regarded as “antiquities”, in the broadest sense of the term, and were often replaced by the words “treasures” or “goods” when Rodin spoke of them. These all-embracing names enabled Rodin to establish a comparative and egalitarian system of thought between geographical origins and eras. Like Picasso, he used his “antiquities” as transitional objects between the “Other” and his work, an unavoidable pathway to seeing and understanding what his sculpture brought to modernity. The ancient combined with the present and heralded the future, not as an inspiration but as a mirror and a gauge (Fig. 11.4).

The Sensual Pleasure of Collecting Sculpture

As a collector, Rodin aspired to be like his fellow collectors, artists, writers or industrialists, in his taste as in his practices and other rituals. The objectives

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of this collection were manifold. Rodin was also an artist and built his collection as an extension of his work. He developed it at the Villa des Brillants in Meudon, a place open to illustrious visitors, a workshop, a place of meditation, a place that nourished the mythology and discourse of the artist. He was inspired by the stories of Goethe and Diderot to stage the theatre of the collection, one that linked him to the collectors of the past, symbolizing both change and constancy. Written accounts and photographs of Rodin and his contemporaries drew on archetypal images from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when collections began to be assembled by the middle class; replacing the former royal collections, which would henceforth be housed in museums. They were full of the same rituals described in 1798 by Goethe in his essay The Collector and his Circle: the creation of order and identity, the formation of taste and feeling, curative and educational virtues, and elements of mediation. Collecting was not merely an accumulation of static objects but embodied numerous practices, as Walter Benjamin pointed out: “The collector makes the transfiguration of things his concern. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them”.2 However, Rodin was not satisfied with seeing the beauty of objects: whether consciously or not, he repeated clichés, gestures and words invented by others. Like Denis Diderot, writing about Pygmalion and Galatea, by Falconet, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1763, Rodin remodelled his antiques in his mind, retaining details and concealing the weakest parts with cloth. Artefacts aroused all his senses, but touch remained his preferred sense, through which the sculptor and the collector, at the peak of aesthetic emotion, merged with the object, becoming one sensual, living flesh. Rodin, as Rainer Maria Rilke, subscribed to the idea of D’Alembert: “Stone must be sensitive”,3 or Denis Diderot: “Flesh can be made from marble, and marble from flesh”.4 Rodin seized the body of the statue which appeared to respond to his ardour: “It is truly flesh!”, he said … “You would think it moulded by kisses and caresses … You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm”.5 There seemed to be an exchange of joy and pleasure between these objects and Rodin, who was captivated by their therapeutic charm. As if hallucinating, the collector mixed together live models, collector’s items and Nature. 2 W. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, Paris: Editions Allia, 2003, p. 47. 3 R. M. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Paris: Le Seuil, 1996, p. 392. 4 D.  Diderot in Le rêve d’Alembert (1769) and Galathée (Salon de 1763), themes taken up by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Histoire de l’art dans l’Antiquité (1764) or Johann Gottfried Herder in La Plastique (1778). 5 A. Rodin, L’Art: Entretiens avec Paul Gsell, Paris: B. Grasse, 1986, pp. 60–61.

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From Imaginary Museum to Actual Museum

Possession and being part of the collection metamorphosed the artefact and incorporated it into the sculptor’s biography. The collection took its place in extimacy, an expression indicating an intimacy henceforth visible to everyone. Rodin used the money he earned as an artist to acquire artefacts and to thus transform, in both a symbolic and real manner, the void left by his sculptures that had been sold through the acquisition of antiquities. Rodin did not inherit a collection, as did Gustave Moreau, Carl Jacobsen or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The collection brought him into another tradition, that of the artistcollector. Rejected by the Academy, Rodin nevertheless achieved social status and enjoyed the trappings of power. Last but not least, his antiquities used as propaganda tools, helped him to enhance the value of his own works. By donating the collection to the French state, followed by the creation of the two museums, Rodin’s concept of an artist-collector and his ‘imaginary museum’ would ultimately become fulfilled. Krzysztof Pomian wrote: “a collection is a universal reality coextensive in time with Homo Sapiens and attested to (albeit in rudimentary form) in all human societies. For they all communicate with the invisible and it is within such an exchange that collections are formed”.6 And it was within the realm of the invisible that Rodin’s collection was born, as is shown by both his own words and works. Picasso – another famous example of artist-collector mentioned before – made a distinction between his African statuettes and his other artefacts, by virtue of their magical powers. However, one could ask: Isn’t this magic at the heart of the very process of building any collection? List of References Benjamin, Walter. Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, Paris: Éditions Allia, 2003. Chevillot, Catherine. Perdrisot-Cassan, Viriginie (eds.). Picasso-Rodin, exhibition catalogue, Musée Rodin and Musée Picasso (Paris), Paris: Gallimard, 2021. Diderot, Denis. Galathée (Salon de 1763), Salons, Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Diderot, Denis. Le rêve d’Alembert (1769), Salons, Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Histoire de l’art de l’Antiquité (1764), Leipzig: Winckelmann et Jean Gottl. Imman. Breitkopf, 1781. Herder, Johann Gottfried. La Plastique (1778), Paris: Cerf, 2010. 6 K. Pomian, Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne. Venise-Chicago XII–XXe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 2003, p. 333.

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Farge, Celeste. Garnier, Bénédicte. Jenkins, Ian. Rodin and the Ancient Greece, exhibition catalogue, British Museum (London), London: Thames and Hudson, 2018. Garnier, Bénédicte. Rodin. L’antique est ma jeunesse, Paris: Musée Rodin, 2002. Garnier, Bénédicte. Rodin intime: La villa des Brillants à Meudon, Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 2015. Horwitz Tommerup, Christine. Garnier, Bénédicte. Rodin Displacement, exhibition catalogue, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhague), Copenhague: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2021. Picard, Pascale (ed.). Rodin. La lumière de l’antique, exhibition catalogue, Musée de l’Arles Antique and Musée Rodin (Arles and Paris), Paris: Gallimard, 2013. Pomian, Krzysztof. Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne. Venise-Chicago XII–XXe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Auguste Rodin, Paris: Le Seuil, 1996. Rodin, Auguste. L’Art: Entretiens avec Paul Gsell, Paris: B. Grasset, 1986. Viéville, Dominique. Blanchetière, François. Garnier, Bénédicte (eds.). Rodin. Le rêve japonais, exhibition catalogue, Musée Rodin (Paris), Paris: Flammarion, 2007. Viéville, Dominique. Garnier, Bénédicte (eds.). La Passion à l’œuvre, Rodin et Freud collectionneurs, exhibition catalogue, Musée Rodin (Paris), Paris: Nicolas Chaudun, 2008.

Fig. 12.1

‘Bauhaus Drucke. Neue Europäische Graphik. Erste Mappe: Meister des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar’, portfolio of four woodcuts, two etchings and eight lithographs, 1921, Bauhaus, Weimar, private collection © Sotheby’s.

Chapter 12

Collectible Object, Collecting Media: The Print Portfolio as Marker of Evolving Art Collecting Practices in Germany and Austria, 1880–1930 Fiona Piccolo As a dedicated medium to works of art on paper, the portfolio’s golden age occurred in parallel to the great print revival that swept across western Europe starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Alongside the print which evolved from a reproductive medium to its ‘original’ form with a new artistic status, the portfolio was itself reinvented by artists, publishers and dealers as an art form in its own right. A new market accordingly developed around the rising figure of the bourgeois collector, for whom the original print portfolio was more specifically intended. In German-speaking areas particularly, the phenomenon evolved and endured well into the 1930s and was invested with a special significance. Feeding into contemporary discourses surrounding the reassessment of national identity in general, the renewed interest in the print medium corresponded to the reappropriation of what was thought to represent a distinctly German artistic tradition.1 The portfolio, as one of the most widely collected art forms of the early twentieth century, constitutes a particularly interesting indicator of the prevailing trends of the period, poised between tradition and renewal. By essence, the portfolio is an object of collection. Whether it was used as a recipient for collected prints or as a collected object in and of itself, the concepts and practices of art collecting informed its fundamental purpose, function and value. In turn and most significantly, the portfolio became a means by which its producers, distributors and commentators invented, defined and categorised castes of collectors. From the great variety that was then produced, specific types of portfolios were matched with specific collecting practices thus serving as an identifying factor and marker. In this sense, the special case of the luxury ex libris portfolio playing with multiple understandings of the notion of identity, as shall later be discussed, makes for a most eloquent example.

1 R. Reisenfeld, The German Print Portfolio 1890–1933: Serials for a Private Sphere, London: Philip Wilson Publishers Limited, 1992, p. 22.

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The Print Portfolio in Turn-of-the-Century Bürgerkultur

Originally, the portfolio was a means of protecting, conserving, curating and classifying works of art on paper. Yet, by the turn of the nineteenth century, as artists reclaimed and dedicated it to the print series or suite, it became an artistic medium and even an art object in its own right. Rather than using it as a simple recipient or support for the print, artists intentionally created portfolios like they would paintings or sculptures, thereby giving the form an autonomous artistic substance and status. As such, the portfolio was distributed in artistic circuits, mainly through the art gallery and the art or amateurs associations. It was however also circulated via a literary network where it was produced and sold by publishers and booksellers specialised in so-called Schöne Bücher (beautiful books) and other limited editions – in this context it alternatively corresponded to a luxury editorial format. It can therefore be considered that the portfolio constitutes an amalgamated bibliophilic art object. From the great variety of portfolios that were then created, a basic formal typology emerges. Their presentation constitutes a first criterion from which to distinguish varying levels of sophistication. The materials used for portfolios thus ranged from the simple, plain cardboard sleeve to others covered in ornate papers, fabrics or finely wrought leather, while some were even decorated with an original print. In terms of their general constitution, there were two main types corresponding to the individual portfolio, containing the prints of a single artist, and the collective portfolio, created by artist groups or gathering prints by several independent artists. As for their contents, portfolios alternatively featured simple heterogeneous ensembles, constructed thematic series or suites, or properly narrative cycles. Remarkably, a large proportion of these portfolios also borrowed formal elements characteristic of the book format, such as the title page, colophon, table of contents and preface, among others. Yet the prints they contained were never bound to each other or to their cover, and it is mainly this characteristic which differentiates the portfolio from other forms like the book or the album. To such varying types of portfolios corresponded the specific art collecting practices of two main categories of collectors.2 Generally members of the upper middle class and so-called Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie), a more traditional type of collector used the portfolio as a curated print repository or artistic archive of sorts. Based on the model of the monarchical or 2 Such categorising remains very artificial and the situation was evidently often a lot more complex. It is meant here as a basis for reflection to fit the scope of this article which cannot accommodate more special cases.

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imperial Kupferstichkabinett (graphic art cabinet) and the nobility’s collecting habits, the portfolio was filled progressively, each print being carefully selected to fit an overall direction. Mainly focusing on Old Masters’ prints and luxurious reproductions of famous paintings, such collectors composed their portfolios as Galeriewerke, creating their own museum, as it were, thereby illustrating their connoisseurship.3 These print collections thus served as reflections of the owner’s social status and ambitions but also of their role as Kulturträger (culture bearer), for which the portfolio’s carrier purpose was a particularly adequate material parallel.4 The portfolio within this system corresponds to a collecting media, a medium for art, functioning not simply as a recipient, but also as defining structure, a support for a mindfully curated ensemble of prints.5 As artists progressively moved away from the reproductive print to experiment with so-called original creation, the market expanded beyond the niche of the connoisseur to involve the new rising middle-class collector. Both these modern creative and collecting practices alternatively popularised the portfolio as pre-filled, self-contained art form. Generally, the collectors of this type of portfolios belonged to the Besitzbürgertum (the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie). These collectors did not create their portfolios themselves by filling them, but rather acquired them in their finished form as complete artworks already composed by the artist and/or editor. Max Klinger’s famous portfolios mark the beginning of this trend in the German-speaking area and provided a model consistently used henceforth. The portfolios served as means and token of unity for the print cycles they contained, which, despite their multiplicity, were themselves intended as single, unified works. The frequent narrative nature of the cycles accordingly contributed to the completeness of the portfolio featuring an added readable function. Nevertheless, the portfolio’s specific constitution allowed to extract and exhibit the prints as paintings substitutes and thus equally to display the owner’s associated and relatively high social status. This collecting practice favoured a contemporary artistic production and was thus either by default or, more often, by choice the supporter of more modern, experimental work. Within this system the portfolio remains a

3 J. A. Clarke, The Construction of Artistic Identity in Tum-of-the-Century Berlin: The Prints of Klinger, Kollwitz, and Liebermann, PhD diss., Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 1999, p. 24. 4 For a detailed discussion of the Kulturträger concept see: M. I. Gaughan, German Art 1907– 1937, Modernism and Modernisation, Bern: Peter Lang, 2007, p. 15–22. 5 The plural “media” is used here as a reference to the intrinsic multiplicity of the portfolio which contains several prints, often in a variety of techniques.

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Ernst Barlach, Der Arme Vetter (The Poor Cousin), portfolio of thirty-four lithographies, 1919, Paul Cassirer Verlag, Berlin © Auktionshaus an der Ruhr.

collecting media, but above all it assumes the function and value of a collectible object in and of itself. This singular collectible quality is further accentuated by the fact that this type of pre-filled portfolio was often distributed and collected as part of a series. A notable example is the Bauhaus’ Neue Europäische Graphik (New European Graphic Arts), project consisting in a series of portfolios dedicated to gathering representative works of the European avant-garde (Fig. 12.1). This collectible quality is directly related and particularly suited to the habits of such collectors who viewed art as an investment and valued it as much for its material worth as its cultural and/or artistic value. Since in the context of this specific collecting practice the emphasis lay significantly less on connoisseurship and individual taste, the portfolio became a sign of belonging to an alternative, more general collecting, or art-buying, community which was developing beyond the stricter bounds of the intellectual specialist elite (Fig. 12.2).

To Each His Own and One For All: a Critical and Practical Identification of the Socio-Cultural Role and Place of the Print Portfolio Collector

As one of the most representative and popular artistic forms of the period, the portfolio inevitably attracted the attention of critics, art historians and other theoreticians who similarly used it to devise and define diverse collecting identities. In an article focusing on the market for prints in 1919, the German art historian Curt Glaser distinguished for example the Kenner

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(connoisseur) from the new Auch-Sammler (also-collector), interested rather in the material and socialising dimension of art and art collecting.6 To the rising numbers and demand of this “also-collector” he associated the overflowing production of such new forms as the collectible portfolio, symptomatic in his view of an imbalance in the market for prints focused less on quality than on massive quantities of presumably and paradoxically ‘rare’ originals. The same, although less critical, observations led the Austrian art historian Adolph Donath to differentiate in 1920 between the habits and preferred collected objects of the Spezialsammler (specialised and specialist collector) and the oppositely Universalsammler (the universal collector).7 While the first would focus on prints specifically, the interest of the second lay rather in the concept of the art ‘object’ more generally, resulting in his preference for such art forms as the collectible portfolio. These are only two examples amongst many which demonstrate how the portfolio’s classifying purpose exceeded the pure functionality of the object and took on a more symbolic character. The collected object effectively became a simultaneous means of identification and sign of belonging. The letter that the art critic, historian and editor Julius Meier-Graefe sent in 1917 to Gustav Pauli, curator of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, is particularly representative of these dynamics. Writing about the publication of his own series of portfolios, Meier-Graefe explained: Naturally, we must make use of the snobs. We cannot achieve anything without them, as little as without the Jews. The main thing is that something beautiful will come out of their usage, that in turn the general public can use. At best, I make the thing at 2000 marks for the bibliophiles, 3 marks for the rest.8

Meier-Graefe’s overall singular emphasis on the aspect of usability clearly reflects what particular interests were associated with bourgeois collecting practices, to which the portfolio as usable art object was indeed particularly suited. This statement illustrates quite clearly the associative process through 6 Cited in H.  Junge, Wohlfeile Kunst, die Verbreitung von Künstlergraphik seit 1870 und die Griffelkunst-Vereinigung Hamburg-Langenhorn, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1989, p. 91. 7 A. Donath, Psychologie des Kunstsammelns, (3rd edition), Berlin: Richard C. Schmidt & Co, 1920, pp. 17–18. 8 Cited in V.  Claass, Julius Meier-Graefe contre l’impressionnisme, PhD diss., Paris: Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017, p. 414: ‘Natürlich müssen wir den Snob benutzen. Ohne den geht bei uns nichts, so wenig wie ohne die Juden. Die Hauptsache [ist], daß durch diese Benutzung etwas Schönes zustande kommt, das der Allgemeinheit nutzt. Am liebsten mache ich die Sachen 2000 Mk für die Bibliophilen, 3 Mk für die anderen’.

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which the collectors were identified with their collected objects. The collectors’ ‘usage’ of the portfolio object makes them equally useful and usable to the editor, who in turn uses the portfolio as a defining tool of sorts, identifying the categories of the bibliophiles and the Jews, thereby indicating two further dominant types. What is common if implicit in those discourses is the seeming passivity of the middle class collectors. Indeed, it appears they were not considered as a social group to work with, but rather to cater for. Whereas the traditional collectors defined their own identity or collecting individuality through their choices, through a discriminating engagement with the medium, for the new collectors the mere act of acquiring and owning seemed to be a sufficient social marker. Yet, while there was a certain passivity in the collecting practice of the middle class, its relationship to art was rather marked by ambivalence. On one hand, the industrial bourgeois collectors did purchase art as they would commodities with a seemingly limited influence on creation. Yet on the other hand, they represented the main supporting group of modernist art, and their collecting practices even demonstrated at times a creative dimension. In 1918, the art historian and editor Paul Westheim created a series of collective portfolios called Die Schaffenden (The Creators) issued quarterly like a periodical in which he distributed prints by contemporary artists. In the series’ program, Westheim explained that “the intention [was] to offer an oriented overview of the contemporary graphic creation” and that “the portfolios [would] also be an excellent means of orientation for the collectors”.9 These portfolios were intended as and indeed constituted pre-curated and ready-touse collections, so to speak, that simultaneously served to promote the work of what were considered the best contemporary artists. This insistence on the need direct and educate collectors clearly identified them as passive, limiting their collecting activity to a simplified reception rather than corresponding to an individual pursuit and endeavour. Yet the collectors of these portfolios would effectively become the supporters of modernist art, thus demonstrating a form of ideological engagement. Similar dynamics underlay the creation of collective portfolios by artist groups. Not only was the portfolio used as a means of expression and distribution of their work, but also as a form of gift given to their regular collectors for their support, which was a practice they had borrowed from the Kunstvereine 9 B. Jahn-Zechendorff, Die Schaffenden: eine Auswahl der Jahrgänge I bis III und Katalog des Mappenwerks, Leipzig and Weimar: G. Kiepenheuer, 1984, p. 15: ‘Die Absicht ist, […] eine orientienrede Überschau über das graphische Schaffen des Gegenwart zu geben, die Mappen (werden) auch ein vorzügliches Mittel der Orientierung für den Sammler’.

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(amateur associations). Most famous are the portfolios that the German avantgarde Künstlergemeinschaft (artistic community) Die Brücke distributed each year to an extended list of their evocatively named “passive members”. The term was chosen to indicate the non-creative contingent of the community, or the collectors and supporters of Brücke art. It is regardless highly revealing of the status and overall purpose reserved for the middle class collector of prints. Yet, as an adequate foil for the educated bourgeoisie’s Kulturträger mission, this industrial bourgeoisie with purchasing power was considered a sort of cultural motor. Some went even further in their appreciation of the cultural role of the bourgeoisie, like the architect Hermann Muthesius who wrote in 1904 in Der Kunstwart that “the Bürgertum (sic) has become the basis of our economic, social and political life, […] it has reached such a height that it is able to determine the culture of our time”.10 This oppositely leading role of the bourgeoisie was reflected in the sociable context of art societies, of which the print portfolio was an especially representative art form, being distributed annually to the members of those clubs. Many such examples as the following demonstrate how middle class collecting practices were not only occasionally involved in forms of active participation, but also had an almost creative component: In order to satisfy the taste of the greatest possible number, a direct democracy was established in the Nuremberg Albrecht Dürer association through which potential annual portfolios were exhibited during several weeks in the premises and thus freely submitted to the vote of the shareholders’ assembly.11

Interestingly, this shows the intermediate character of the middle class approach to the portfolio, which was still situated between a traditional method, relying on a selective system and related to a striving for a kind of individuality, and a more modern inclination based on the communal elaboration of art becoming a symbol of a collective identity. In this sense, the specific constitution of the collective portfolio made it a singularly adequate form, 10 Gaughan, German Art, p. 18. 11 T.  Schmitz, Die deutsche Kunstvereine im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, ein Beitrag zur Kultur-. Konsum – und Sozialgeschichte der bildenden Kunst im bürgerlichen Zeitalter, Neuried: Ars Una Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001, p.  294: ‘Um ganz sicher zu gehen, den Durchschnittsgeschmack nicht zu verfehlen, entschloß man sich im Rahmen des Nürnberger Albrecht Dürer-Vereins zur Einführung der direkten Demokratie, indem potentielle Jahresgaben mehrere Wochen lang im Vereinslokal aufgehängt und zur Abstimmung durch die Aktionärsversammlung freigegeben wurden. […] Dies macht die Nietenblätter als Gradmesser des jeweiligen ästhetischen Bildungsstandes für die Sozialgeschichte der Kunst so interessant’.

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representative on one hand of multiplicity, containing multiple prints by multiple artists, and unity on the other, as a communal unifying work of art. Just as it could foster and represent a union of artists, here the portfolio became the token, the literal bearer of such associative practices of art collecting.

Collectors Collecting Collectors’ Identities – The Special Case of the Ex-Libris Portfolio

Rather significantly, there existed a type of collective portfolio specifically dedicated to the print ex libris or bookplate, a genre closely related to that of the emblem both formally and functionally. Traditionally, the ex libris were small prints placed on the inside cover of a book in order to indicate the name of its owner, whose personality or character was represented with a thematic, symbolical or allegorical subject. Starting from the first decade of the twentieth century, an art collecting trend developed which focused on this particular object. Now considered and collected independently from its former medium of the book, it was valued for its generally accepted artistic quality. This phenomenon was particularly strong in Vienna where it reached its height in the 1910s. According to the contemporary Viennese editor Artur Wolf, the ex libris became singularly representative of a new, modern and specifically bourgeois type of collecting. Wolf who specialised in luxurious limited editions, among which the so-called “Masters Ex Libris Portfolios”, declared in an interview on the subject that “the artists and the educated middle class – who were avid collectors – liberated the ex libris from its heraldic fetters and facilitated today’s wide variety of motifs!”.12 As it is described here, evocatively put on the same level as the artists with whom they regularly worked on a commission basis, the collecting activity of the bourgeoisie had a significant creative dimension, with an explicitly modernising influence. The middle class thus helped at once to produce new motifs and translate the traditional “heraldic” ex libris from a literary accessory of sorts, into the recognised art form of the so called “Luxury ex libris”, which was “collected and exchanged”.13 Paradoxically, just as the ex libris gained a new status, a new artistic identity as it were, it was divested of its primary identificational purpose and ceased to function as means of personalisation in order to become a collectible object. 12

C.  Thun-Hohenstein, K.  Pokorny-Nagel, Ephemera, die Gebrauchsgraphik der MAKBibliothek und Kunstblättersammlung, Vienna: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2018, p. 283. 13 Thun-Hohenstein, K. Pokorny-Nagel, Ephemera, p. 285.

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Although the ex libris portfolio corresponded to a sort of collection of multiple identities, the focus shifted from the names and the persons they were meant to represent onto the artistic quality of the subjects and motifs they depicted (Fig. 12.3). As the ex libris passed into the realm of the artistic and onto this semi-private circuit of exchange, it was commodified and therefore somewhat neutralised. This is especially well illustrated in this anecdote, again by Wolf, reporting that the ex libris were “(the collectors’) exchange currency – meaning that some people owned over 100 different ex libris in their own name”.14 Hence to this depersonalisation of the ex libris nonetheless corresponded an over-identification and enlarged circulation of the collector’s identity, which would consequently feature in the portfolios of several collections across their community, tied together by this circuit of exchange.

Fig. 12.3 Anonymous, Ex Libris Alice Wanke, XI. Jahrbuch österreichischer Exlibris Gesellschaft, 1913, Vienna © austria-forum.org.

The portfolio was an intermediate object, both artistic and bibliophilic, luxurious and useful. It was an open, free form which fostered the exhibition, exchange and circulation of its prints. At the same time, it comprehended a private dimension, a more intimate quality related in part to its readable function and the occasional small format of the prints. This intermediate quality was equally reflected in the various methods and approaches to collecting it allowed and that were practised alternatively, sometimes interchangeably, by traditional and modern collectors. As a popular collected art form among the German-speaking middle classes, the portfolio was particularly revealing of a 14 Thun-Hohenstein, K. Pokorny-Nagel, Ephemera, p. 285.

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bourgeois relationship to the art object, or art as object, at once personal and impersonal, individual and communal. In this sense, it was representative of a person’s artistic education, their aesthetic values and merits of their financial investment, ultimately serving as symbolical and material markers of social identity and status with a significant emphasis on usability. List of References Clarke, Jay  A.  The  Construction of Artistic Identity in Tum-of-the-Century Berlin: The Prints of Klinger, Kollwitz, and Liebermann, PhD diss., Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 1999. Claass, Victor. Julius Meier-Graefe contre l’impressionnisme, PhD diss., Paris: Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017. Donath, Adolph. Psychologie des Kunstsammelns, (3rd edn.), Berlin: Richard C. Schmidt & Co, 1920. Gaughan, Martin Ignatus. German Art 1907–1937, Modernism and Modernisation, Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Jahn-Zechendorff, Beate: Die Schaffenden: eine Auswahl der Jahrgänge  I bis III und Katalog des Mappenwerks, Leipzig and Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1984. Junge, Henrike. Wohlfeile Kunst, die Verbreitung von Künstlergraphik seit 1870 und die Griffelkunst-Vereinigung Hamburg-Langenhorn, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1989. Reisenfeld, Robin. The German Print Portfolio 1890–1933: Serials for a Private Sphere, London: Philip Wilson Publishers Limited, 1992. Schmitz, Thomas. Die deutsche Kunstvereine im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, ein Beitrag zur Kultur-. Konsum – und Sozialgeschichte der bildenden Kunst im bürgerlichen Zeitalter, Neuried: Ars Una Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001. Thun-Hohenstein, Christoph. Pokorny-Nagel, Kathrin. Ephemera, die Gebrauchsgraphik der MAK-Bibliothek und Kunstblättersammlung, Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2018.

Fig. 13.1

Honoré Daumier, The Connoisseur, c. 1860–65, pen, ink, wash, watercolor, lithographic crayon, and gouache over black chalk on wove paper, 43.8 × 35.5, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Chapter 13

A Passion for Dessins: Reputation and Rivalry in the 1879 L’École des Beaux-Arts’ Exhibition of Drawings from Private Collectors Debra DeWitte In Honoré Daumier’s Connoisseur (Fig. 13.1), a wealthy collector sits in his Victorian chair, surrounded by furniture and objects that, in his view, represent the epitome of taste and success. He admires a small replica of the Venus de Milo, who is sensually twisted even more than the original, her head turned to look back at her owner. Behind him is an ancient bust (or a copy of one); the head tilted downwards so that its gaze also falls upon the erotic nude. In this refined environment, the collector is also surrounded by drawings, which can be seen on the wall directly behind Venus and on the ground beside him in a portfolio he has only just finished perusing. His hands are crossed contentedly as he sinks comfortably into his chair. He is self-satisfied, a hallmark of refined elegance and cultured aestheticism. Daumier’s portrayal captures the reputation of Parisian nineteenth-century collectors as being sophisticated and knowledgeable, if somewhat selfregarding. Collectors frequently did not simply enjoy their treasures privately, but made their holdings known to the public, and composed the objets d’art in their homes in order to build their reputations as intellectuals and tastemakers.1 Arrangements of private art collections were carefully considered in terms of juxtapositions and visual harmony. In fact, tropes associating artworks to a bouquet of flowers or a piece of music were common, using descriptors such as harmonies, symphonies, or ensembles.2 Collections were also often described in terms of their ability to inspire conversation, both between one another and viewers. In the literature of the period, collectors themselves were frequently

1 The interiors of collectors’ homes were frequently shown in local papers. For a comparison between the organization of artworks in museums (chronological and geographical) in France as opposed to in the homes of private collectors, which inspired comparative and visual thinking, see V.  Mendelson, ‘Metaphors of Collecting in Late Nineteenth Century Paris’,  Open Library of Humanities, 2.1 (2016):  https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.71 (accessed 2 May 2020). 2 Mendelson, ‘Metaphors’.

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depicted as eccentric and obsessed with their objects.3 This romantic discourse idealized collectors as being passionately driven not only due to their love of objects, but due to their singular vision for building and curating their collections.

The Exhibition

A keen interest in collecting drawings became apparent when, in 1879, almost 700 drawings owned by dozens of collectors were exhibited at L’École des Beaux-Arts.4 In the preface of the catalogue the curators – both collectors themselves – art critic Charles Ephrussi (1849–1905)5 and Gustave Dreyfus (1837–1914),6 discuss their motivations to make the public more familiar with the beauty and importance of drawings, and to acknowledge the collectors of these works. While the French could claim an ancestry of collectors who cherished drawings, with the catalogue featuring names such as Eberhard Jabach (1618–1695), Pierre Crozat (1665–1740), Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774), Marquis de Lagoy (1764–1829), and Frédéric de Reiset (1815–1891), the curators argued that a broader audience should be able to appreciate the necessity of knowing an artist’s drawings so as to better understand their initial spark of genius.7 In the preface to the 1879 exhibition, Ephrussi and Dreyfus described the unique power of drawings to bring an audience closer to the artist’s original 3 Consider, for example, Des Esseintes’ obsession with his jewel encrusted turtle in J. K. Huysmans, Á Rebours (1884), Paris: Fasquelle, 1965. 4 To learn more about which artists exhibited, see D.  DeWitte, ‘Drawings on View in State-funded Venues and Artists Societies in Paris, 1860–1890: A Data-Driven Study’, Master Drawings, 55.2, 2017, pp. 226. 5 Charles Ephrussi: A collector himself from a family of Jewish bankers, was an art critic, editor, and owner of Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the influential Parisian journal. Ephrussi was passionate about the Italian Renaissance as well as the work of Albrecht Dürer, writing a catalogue of drawings by the German artist. He collected and wrote favorably on many works by the Impressionists. Always having a broad and eclectic taste, he later passionately collected Japanese objects along with Empire furniture. Notably, he was often concerned with promoting national collections and activities, especially those at the Louvre. 6 Gustave Dreyfus: Collected mostly Renaissance works, including paintings and sculptures, and is perhaps best known for his approximately 700 medals and 450 plaquettes (small bronze relief sculptures). The dealer Joseph Duveen purchased his collection from his heirs and dispersed the works between New York and London collectors. Although Captain Alfred Dreyfus (the Dreyfus Affair) was not related to Gustave, documents show that Alfred did hide in one of the Gustave’s properties, as noted by Tom Stammers’ review of Alice Silvia Legé’s book on Gustave Dreyfus: T. Stammers, Review of ‘Gustave Dreyfus, collectionneur et mécène dans Paris de la Belle Époque’, Journal of the History of Collections, 32.2 (2020), p. 401. 7 C. Euphrussi, G. Dreyfus, Catalogue Descriptif des Dessins de Maitres Anciens Éxposes a L’École des Beaux-Arts, Paris: L’École des Beaux-Arts, 1879, p. 1.

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impulse and considered it their duty to build an appreciation of drawings over paintings, rather than the “sacrifice of the pencil to the brush”.8 During this last quarter of the nineteenth century, the English and French were engaged in a rivalry of tastes. Ephrussi and Dreyfus acknowledged that the English had preempted the French, being the first to hold large-scale drawing exhibitions, which took place in 1878 and 1879 at London’s Grosvenor Gallery and The Royal Academy respectively.9 1879 was also the year that the Société des Aquarellistes Français held their first exhibition, but it was noted in the press and by the artists themselves that the English already had an organization devoted to the making and exhibition of watercolors.10 That said, the British and the French could boast an equal number of exhibited drawings at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair, with each outnumbering other countries’ entries in this area 20 to 1.11 Given the competitive nature of the World’s Fairs, this nationalistic dominance in works on paper gave collectors of drawings an opportunity to be applauded by their countrymen.

The Collectors

The four collectors who contributed the most drawings to the L’École des Beaux-Arts exhibition were the Duke of Aumale (180), Edmond de Goncourt (110), a M. Malcolm (76), and the Marquis de Chennevières (36).12 The Duke of Aumale, Henri d’Orléans, owned over 3,000 drawings, which are still kept 8

9 10 11 12

Euphrussi, Dreyfus, Catalogue, pp. 1–2: “Les dessins d’un grand artiste ont cet avantage de nous montrer sa pensée dans toute sa fraîcheur, au moment même de l’éclosion; nous y saisissons peut-être la personnalité du créateur avec plus de sûreté et de précision que dans les œuvres de longue haleine, remaniées avec la patiente défiance du génie.’… ‘Aucune exposition temporaire, consacrée exclusivement aux dessins, ‘a encore eu lieu à Paris; la curiosité se portant de préférence vers les œuvres de la peinture, les organisateurs ‘expositions, par une complaisance naturelle pour le goût dominant, ont toujours sacrifié le crayon au pinceau, le dessin au tableau, la pensée intime de l’artiste aur manifestations plus official les de son talent … De nos jours seulement, ce côté délicat de ‘art est en voie de conquérir l’attention et l’estime générales’”. Euphrussi, Dreyfus, Catalogue, p. 2. Known today as the Royal Watercolour Society, the institution changed its name several times since its inception in 1804. DeWitte, ‘Drawings’, pp. 231–232. M. Malcolm is probably John Malcolm of Poltalloch, whose collection of drawings and prints were sold to the British Museum in 1895. The donors Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Mitchell are both noted as being abroad and entrusting the curators with their drawings: “MM. Malcolm et Mitchell, toujours ouble es lorsqu’il s’agit d’une entreprise artistique ouble d’une bonne action, nous ont confié, sans craindre les tempêtes du détroit, leurs plus beaux dessins de maîtres italiens et allemands”. Euphrussi, Dreyfus, Catalogue, p. 6.

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in the collection of the Château de Chantilly (Fig. 13.2). Of these, over half were from the nineteenth century, approximately 750 were eighteenth century works, 350 were from the seventeenth century, and 40 were made in the sixteenth century. A third of the drawings were watercolors, which is unsurprising with the growing interest in colored drawings in the nineteenth century.

Fig. 13.2

Duke d’Aumale’s collection of drawings kept in portfolios in the Olréans Room in the Château de Chantilly, late nineteenth century, Château de Chantilly © 2022 All Rights Reserved Friends de Chantilly, Inc.

The Goncourt brothers – Edmond (1822–1896) and Jules (1830–1870) – were known not only for their writings and eccentricities, but also their interest in both Japanese and eighteenth-century French art, especially drawings. Edmond de Goncourt recorded his views that art could not be appreciated by the public in the same way that they would be cherished by a collector like himself: My wish is that my drawings, my prints, my curiosities, my books – in a word these things that of art which have been the joy of my life – shall not be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum, and subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by; but I require that they shall all be dispersed under the hammer of the Auctioneer, so that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of

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them has given me shall be given again, in each case, to some inheritor of my tastes.13

This request, written in his will, was reproduced in the catalogue of the posthumous auction devoted solely to Goncourts’s eighteenth-century French drawings. Three hundred and seventy-seven drawings filled three rooms at the auction house Hotel Drouot with an extraordinary diverse media represented: ink, pencil, aquarelle, gouache, sanguine, charcoal, pastel, and, of course, aux trois crayons.14 Within the catalogue, the Goncourts’ appreciation of drawings was discussed as being integral to their ability to understand the nature of artists. The collectors were linked to earlier artist biographers – Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574); Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1697); and Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694– 1771) – in effect strengthening the attributions of their drawings, while also enhancing their reputation as connoisseurs.15 Fortuitously, photographs do survive of Edmond in his home surrounded by his prized collection. In the one shown here (Fig. 13.3), he is lounging, in charge of his domain, not unlike Sardanapolis in Delacroix’s famous painting. Behind him, drawings and prints cover the wall each framed in gold using passepartout, in which an opening is cut in the mat for the paper, itself is bordered with thin gold. Thirty-six of the drawings in the 1879 exhibition were borrowed from Marquis Charles-Phillip Chennevières. The marquis claimed to have nearly 4,000 drawings in his collection, over 500 of which were identified for the 2007 exhibition at the Louvre Museum (Fig. 13.4).16 He viewed himself not just as an impassioned collector, but also as responsible for recording and sharing the history of art, especially French art. He started working in art museums in his midtwenties and within a decade was responsible for organizing the official Salon. Held in Paris, this exhibition was regarded as the most important and influential in Europe. Before his fiftieth birthday he was appointed Assistant Curator at the Louvre. Six years later, he became a Director of Fine Arts, in which he inventoried and assessed works of art held in public and private collections 13 Collection des Goncourt: Dessins Aquarelles et Pastels du XVIII Siècle, auction catalogue, Paris: May & Motteroz, 1897, p. IX. 14 Aux troix crayons is a technique (using red, black, and white chalk) that was very popular in the eighteenth century. 15 Collection des Goncourt, p. XIX. 16 L. Prat, La Collection Chennevières, exhibition catalogue, Louvre Museum (Paris), Paris: Louvre Museum, 2007. Quite fittingly, Jean Restout’s Purification of the Virgin, once part of Chennéviéres’s collection, is now owned by one of the curators of the Louvre 2007 exhibition.

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Fig. 13.3

Our Contemporaries at Home – M. Edmond de Goncourt, c. 1890s, charpentier after photograph by Paul Dornac, wood engraving © Image courtesy CMA Archives.

throughout France. He was also responsible for public art projects, such as the competition for paintings designed for within the Pantheon. His passion, though, was centered on the moments of an inventive spark that he believed drawings captured; and he saw himself as preserving these very moments. My poor beloved collection – you know what it’s like. I began it in Aix forty-seven years ago. Today, it comprises nearly four thousand fine works by French artists. It is the whole history of French art through original drawings. No one could ever again build (and this is what I’m proudest of), no one in this day and age could ever build a collection like this one (I defy even the most ardent of our connoisseurs), even with the utmost patience and a vast amount of money. Moreover, I challenge anyone to amass a comparable collection of drawings by artists from the provinces-artists about whom I’m particularly knowledgeable and whose works none of our regional museums can claim to possess in such depth.17

The Marquis de Chennéviéres wrote a series of articles that were published in L’Artiste between 1894 and 1897 in which he used his own collection as a history of art. He also reviewed the 1879 exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts in a series of five articles in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts co-owned by Charles Ephrussi.18 17 18

L. Prat, M. Ascher, ‘The Marquis de Chennevières and His Collection of French Drawings’, Master Drawings, 38.2 (2000), p. 118. This series of articles from 1879 (June  1, 505–535; July  1, 5–34; August  1, 121–134; September 1, 185–211; October 1, 297–308) in Gazette des Beaux-Arts were all written by

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Fig. 13.4

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Ferdinand Delamonce, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, c. 1700–1750, pen and ink wash, 19.6 × 15.1, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Previously in the collection of the Marquis des Chennéviéres.

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The Reviews of the Marquis de Chennevières

The Marquis’ reviews of the 1879 exhibition were clearly intended to align with comments made in the preface of the catalogue and to promote the collectors who had donated. The first article was designed to inspire artistic superiority over the British, not only in terms of the French artists, but also with regard to the collections produced in France. Perhaps in their disdain for the British, the curators Charles Ephrussi and Gustave Dreyfus only exhibited three drawings from the English School out of a total of 674 works of which 229 were Italian, 9 Spanish, 39 German, 91 Dutch, 45 Flanders, and 254 French. The second in the five-article series described German artworks as, “tangled, complicated, rough and awkward” whereas French drawings were described as being “elegant” and “clear”. The third article in his series assessed the curators’ selections, which he acknowledged were made as much due to the desired recognition of certain collectors as to the artists or quality of the drawings. He emphasized that a more holistic view of art should be built from the example of this exhibition. It is this desire to create a complete history of artistic talent that drove Chennéviéres’ selections for his own collection. In the fourth article, the Marquis discusses Watteau, Boucher, and other Rococo masters, and praised Edmond de Goncourt’s understanding of these eighteenth-century artists. Goncourt’s generosity and knowledge of the art of Ancien Régime was also highlighted in the introductory essay to the catalogue. When defending the dominance of eighteenth-century drawings presented over other periods, the curators demonstratively and rhetorically asked, “Are we not French?!”.19 The effusive praise by Chennéviéres towards Edmond de Goncourt in the 1879 exhibition is significant because it is unusual. Although friends, the Goncourts and Chennéviéres frequently criticized each other’s tastes and Marquis de Chennéviéres. Notably, in the same issue as this first article is another article on Michelangelo drawing studies owned by Chennéviéres. I am not aware of any other reviews of the 1879 L’ École des Beaux-Arts exhibition. 19 Euphrussi, Dreyfus, Catalogue, p.  4: “Peut-être trouvera-t-on quelques disproportions dans ce choix. Peut-être le XVIII° siècle français semblera-t-il occuper une trop large place dans notre exposition. Mais ne sommes-nous pas en France, et le siècle dernier n’est-il pas le plus intimement français de tous? Ne donne-t-il pas mieux que les autres la note vive, spirituelle et gaie du génie national? Ajoutons que tous ces morceaux nous ont par si également charmants qu’il eût été cruel d’en éliminer aucun”. The great majority of French works in the exhibition were from the collection of M. de Goncourt and, secondarily, the Duke of Aumale. It is likely the curators were careful not to exclude many works offered by these two collectors.

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discernments. Chennéviéres collected more from the seventeenth century, particularly from those areas situated outside of Paris; and while Chennéviéres admired Watteau, he generally disdained the style and culture of the Rococo. “The eighteenth century weakened us, spoiled us, corrupted us, and ultimately killed us. What I mean is, it weakened and corrupted the people of that time; and a mere handful of enthusiasts has succeeded in reintroducing that corruption into our taste, into our national art, and thus in spoiling and rotting us in our own turn”.20 In contrast, he argued, “The seventeenth century was a vigorous broad-shouldered century – and age in which, from beginning to end, all of the artists, even the gentle ones, were manly”.21 The Goncourts, whose obsession with eighteenth-century art is legendary, had their own things to say about Chennéviéres, whom they described in their journal as, “a fantastic devotee of obscure provincial artists devoid of talent, almost without any works to their names”.22 It was not until the final article that Chennéviéres offered a more complete breakdown of all the works in the exhibition, hailing it as triumphant; one that had surely pleased art enthusiasts and the public alike. Following Chennéviéres’ final piece in the series, was a ten-page essay by Charles Ephrussi, praising Chennéviéres for his knowledge of the arts and highlighting the works which he’d lent to the 1879 exhibition. These articles indicate that there had been a choreographed plan to promote an image of the lenders of works to this exhibition as being remarkable connoisseurs.

The Singularity of the 1879 Exhibition

In 1884, another exhibition of drawings, also held at L’École des Beaux-Arts, was used to raise funds for struggling artists and their families. This exhibition combined past masters with living artists; and drawings had been donated by artists, a few collectors, and the dealers Albert Goupil and Georges Petit. Goncourt contributed seven drawings out of the 1,003 that were exhibited. Marquis de Chennéviéres did not lend any works, nor did he review the show. It is likely he disagreed with the display of contemporary artists near past masters.23 During February of that year, the same month the exhibition opened, 20 21 22 23

Prat, Ascher, ‘The Marquis’, p. 120. Prat, Ascher, ‘The Marquis’, p. 120. Prat, Ascher, ‘The Marquis’, p. 120. To learn what was in the 1884 exhibition see DeWitte, ‘Drawings’, p. 226–229.

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the Marquis wrote an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts reviewing an eighteenth-century exhibition at George Petit’s gallery. He concluded by critiquing the display of Monsieur Goncourt’s sketches that were “haphazardly hung in the long entrance hall with insufficient light” before referring back to the 1879 exhibition, where Goncourt’s drawings were ‘consecrated’. No mention was made of the concurrent drawing exhibition taking place at L’École des Beaux-Arts, which was almost twice as large as the one from 1879. Analysis of the 1879 exhibition at L’École des Beaux-Arts exemplifies the passion with which the French claimed dominance over the English in various walks of life. The exhibition itself, as well as reviews of it written by the Marquis, were orchestrated to demonstrate a nationalistic superiority. At the same time, another rivalry was occurring within. Curators of the exhibition had to carefully preserve the unique vision created by each of the donors within their individual collections. By the end of the nineteenth century, interest in drawings had more to do with not only a desire to capture the inspiration that fuelled artists, but to bolster the reputation of collectors as arbiters of taste. List of References Bielecki, Emma. The Collector in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Representation, Identity, Knowledge, Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2012. Collection des Goncourt: Dessins Aquarelles et Pastels du XVIII Siècle, auction catalogue, Paris: May & Motteroz, 1897. DeWitte, Debra. ‘Drawings on View in State-Funded Venues and Artists Societies in Paris, 1860–1890: A Data-Driven Study’, Master Drawings, 55.2 (2017), pp. 225–248. Euphrussi, Charles. Dreyfus, Gustave. Catalogue Descriptif des Dessins de Maitres Anciens Éxposes a L’École des Beaux-Arts, Paris: L’École des Beaux-Arts, 1879. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Á Rebours (1884), Paris: Fasquelle, 1965. Launay, Elisabeth. Les frères Goncourt collectionneurs de dessins. Paris: Arthena, 1991. Labbé, Jacqueline. Bicart-Sée, Lise. ‘Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville as a Collector of Drawings’, Master Drawings, 25 (1987), pp. 276–281. Mendelson, Valerie. ‘Metaphors of Collecting in Late Nineteenth Century Paris’, Open Library of Humanities, 2.1 (2016): https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.71 (accessed 2 May 2020). Prat, Louis-Antoine. La Collection Chennevières, exhibition catalogue, Louvre Museum (Paris), Paris: Louvre Museum, 2007. Prat, Louis-Antoine. ‘The Marquis de Chennevières and His Collection of French Drawings’, Master Drawings, 38.2 (2000), pp. 117–123.

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Stammers, Tom. Review of ‘Gustave Dreyfus, collectionneur et mécène dans Paris de la Belle Époque’, Journal of the History of Collections, 32.2 (2020), pp. 400–401. Warner, Pamela. ‘Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast in Edmond de Goncourt’s Aesthetic Interior’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 15 (2008), pp. 36–64.

Part IV Art and Acculturation: Jewish Collectors

Fig. 14.1

Bernard (on the left), Józef (sitting), Abe (on the right) Gutnajer, Warsaw, early 1930’s, private collection. Courtesy of Anne Hayden Stevens © Anna Hayden Stevens.

Chapter 14

Between Art Dealing and a Collector’s Passion: Abe and Bernard Gutnajer’s Activity in Interwar Warsaw Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz The importance of the art trade and art dealers in the history of modern collecting is immense. Many art dealers were companions and patrons of significant artists, and became the promoters of new art movements – art dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, Daniel Kahnweiler and Paul Rosenberg in Paris or Paul Cassirer and Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin of the Weimar Republic. In interwar Poland 1918–1939, practically there were no art dealers consistently involved in the promotion of contemporary modern art. This was done directly by the artists, their art groups and together with critics and patrons through associations such as the Institute of Art Propaganda (Instytut Propagandy Sztuki) or the Jewish Society of Promoting Fine Arts (Żydowskie Towarzystwo Krzewienia Sztuk Pięknych). The Warsaw art market was dominated, as in fact everywhere in the first half of the twentieth century, by traditionalists who in their antique shops, art salons, and galleries offered renowned arts and crafts as well as antiquities. The capital of such art dealers, apart from their knowledge, intuition, entrepreneurship and professional contacts, was (and still is) determined by their circle of regular clients; and particularly prominent art collectors. They were as much a guarantee of the quality of the art dealer’s offer as of the trust they enjoyed. At the same time, an art dealer’s ranking of artists quite often influenced the profile of their collections. This kind of feedback was also the case in prewar Warsaw, where the community of art dealers, collectors of various fields, museum curators and conservators was relatively small, linked socially and professionally, and even topographically, in a quarter of the streets in the elegant city centre. Jewish art dealers and Jewish collectors played a great role in this circle. This is evidenced by exhibition catalogues of the time, museum inventories, newspapers, memoirs etc. Two brothers Gutnajer: * The current article is based largely on my study published in Polish ‘Habent sua fata libelli. Okupacyjny rynek sztuki w Warszawie a własność  żydowska’, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały, 10.1 (2014), pp. 185–208; English version ‘The Demise of the World of the Guntajers: the Warsaw Art Market in World War II’, Holocaust Genocide Studies, 33.3 (2019), pp. 333–350. © Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_015

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Bernard (Baruch; 1880–1942) and Abe (Abel; 1888–1942) (Fig. 14.1) were until September 1939 among the most prominent actors of the Warsaw art market.1

Abe Gutnajer: the Art Dealer Per Se.

The family business of the Gutnajers began by trading in old things – a specialty dominated by Jewish merchants – in the neighbourhood of a flea market, the first sieve in the selection of antiques. It was in this part of Warsaw that the Gutnajers’ patriarch, Ludwik (Eleazar), opened an antique shop in the 1880s in a small one-storey house. From the end of the nineteenth century, his widow, Lea ran the shop with the help of her adolescent sons, Abe and Bernard.2 “You came in through the kitchen, which was full of copper pots. After crossing the kitchen, you walked into a fairly large room with cupboards and beds, which were arranged as if it were a private home, and behind these cupboards and beds, and also on the walls, were lots of paintings. But what quality paintings!” – one of the Gutnajers’ long-time customers recalled.3 The first own antique store of Abe Gutnajer, opened before 1914, was still a little shop similar to a junk store. Two years later, Abe moved into larger and more elegant place and looked to specialise mainly in paintings. In 1917, Abe organized the first group exhibition of several Polish painters, already accompanied by a catalogue. In 1920, he transferred his salon to representative rooms on the second floor of a building at ul. Mazowiecka, one of Warsaw’s most fashionable streets. A visitor to the new Salon of Art (Salon Sztuki) confirmed this qualitative leap when he went to see an exhibition of paintings by the best Polish painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and strolled around the rooms, which were exquisitely appointed. It was one of two exhibitions opened at Abe Gutnajer’s Salon in 1924, which featured several canvases by famous Polish landscape painters; a number of 1 The third one, Józef, the youngest specialized in selling antique furniture, had achieved a much more modest status. 2 Information about the Guntajers and their antiqueshops, unless otherwise stated, are mention in S. Bołdok, Antykwariaty artystyczne, salony i domy aukcyjne. Historia warszawskiego rynku sztuki w latach 1800–1950, Warszawa: Neriton 2014 pp. 220–238; and from the restitution claims of the heirs of Abe and Bernard Guntajer submitted in the late 1950s in (West) Berlin compensation offices (Wiedegutmachungsämter), now in the Berlin State Archive (Landesarchiv Berlin): claims of Abe Gutnajer heirs, archival reference: 34 WGA 525–26/60 and 34 WGA2553/59; claims of Bernard Gutnajer heirs: 22/45WGA3561-62/59 and 22/25 WGA 8040–41/59. 3 K.  Lasocki, Wspomnienia malarza, typescript from 1949, Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk w Warszawie (Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw), Special Sources, Inv. No. 46, p. 657.

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which had been bought by Abe from the Fournier Collection in Paris. Whereas over a hundred items hailed from the legendary collection of paintings owned by the Polish count Ignacy Korwin-Milewski who had died abroad two years later. However, Abe had acquired in Vienna the greatest part of this collection. As an indicator of the quality of these works, it is enough to say that a significant part of these exhibited works was later purchased from Abe by the Warsaw National Museum and to this day they are considered to be the most outstanding works of their authors, who remain highly regarded in Poland. Abe Gutnajer’s Salon of Art operated primarily as a gallery of paintings. Even though he did not shun old European masters, Russian painters and even icons, it was nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Polish painting that took pride of place. He acquired such works domestically from the collections of impoverished aristocratic families – in addition to antique items of various crafts – or bought them abroad like those already mentioned or – to give other important example – he purchased a large number of paintings from former tsarist and private collections, which had been nationalized by the Soviet government and put on Russian auctions (Russische Kunstauktionen) at Lepke Kunsthaus in Berlin in 1928 und 1929. In 1934, Abe organized their sale exhibition in his Warsaw Salon. Its catalogue (Katalog wystawy obrazów pochodzących z rosyjskich państwowych oraz prywatnych zbiorów) listed 431 canvases, the majority of which were by Polish artists, among them highly regarded as Jan Matejko, Jacek Malczewski, Aleksander Gierymski, Aleksander Orłowski. But there were also works by Iwan Ajwazovski, Wassilij Wiereszczagin and other Russian painters, as well as Western European artists: J[an] de Heem, [Willem] van de Velde among Dutch and Flemisch pieces, but also A[ngelika] Kaufmann, [Jean-Baptiste] Greuze and even Nude by [Edgar] Degas.4 Many of those items, which he did not sell in Warsaw, Gutnajer showed three years later at an exhibition organized in Łódź, enriching his offer with, among others single works of more modern painters Władysław Ślewiński and Olga Boznańska, as well as twenty sculptures, among them two by Jewish contemporary artists Henryk Kuna and Henryk Glicenstein.5 Professional illustrated catalogues accompanied the majority of Abe’s exhibitions, and their openings were in turn announced in the newspapers. Needless to say, such openings were society events. For his best clients Gutnajer organized occasionally special auctions. For the less demanding and 4 S. Galbart, Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer, Katalog wystawy obrazów pochodzących z rosyjskich państwowych oraz prywatnych zbiorów, exhibition catalogue, Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer (Warszawa), Warszawa: Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer, 1934: https://rcin.org.pl/dlibra/publication/ 166682/edition/143982/content (accessed 30 July 2022). 5 See Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer, Salon Sztuki Abe Gutnajera z Warszawy, exhibition catalogue, Łódź: (publisher unknown), 1937.

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more modest clientele he opened in the mid-1920s virtually vis-à-vis his Salon an antique shop (antykwarnia) with etchings and decorative art objects (furniture, tapestries, porcelain, silver, old jewellery, etc.). In the late 1930s in addition he organized several large commercial shows outside Warsaw, not only in Łódź but also in Katowice. To promote his business, Abe donated several paintings to the National Museum in Warsaw and he would often loan paintings which he owned to prestigious public exhibitions. Early on in his ambitious pursuit of foreign works, Abe would take out bank loans to buy what interested him, but as he became prosperous, loans became unnecessary. Abe Gutnajer was well-liked in Warsaw’s cultural and collector circles. He was respected for his knowledge, his competence in acquiring items, and the high standards he maintained in dealing with customers. His clientele included museums and government offices, as well as tycoons and the prosperous intelligentsia of the free professions, many of whom he inspired to collect art, especially the works of Polish masters. In the 1930s, the conservative nature of his business, dictated mainly – although not only – by the market, gave Warsaw society an ironic neologism for conservative tastes “Abegutnajerism” (abegutnajeryzm).6 In artistic circles, some people were surprised that “Gutnajer, a Jew, did not touch modern art”.7 Even though he travelled frequently to Paris and Berlin, where modern art became increasingly de rigueur, it never really sparked his interest. His exhibitions strongly influenced the definition of the canon of Polish painting, which for many years became a guideline for many art collectors. In fact, this canon has remained largely relevant to this day, which testifies to the culture-creating significance of Abe Gutnajer’s activity and the rightness of his professional assessment. Only a small number of foreigners were among the clients of Abe’s Salon and antique shop, and they most often bought antiques and jewellery. It is possible that Gutnajer, who was knowledgeable about many art and handicraft genres; and who was also aware of the limitations of the Polish art market, thought about moving his business to Berlin; or about opening a branch there. This speculation is supported by his purchases of several investment properties there, and even more by the fact that between 1933 and 1936 he was spending most of his time in the German capital. Even if he had such plans, he ultimately dropped them in the wake of Nazi pressure on Jews to ‘Aryanise’ their property. From 1937, Abe Gutnajer focused on his business in Poland. As well as running the salon, putting on exhibitions and auctions (the last auction took place in June 1939, when the collection of Henryk Loewenfeld went under

6 The poet and wit Antoni Słonimski (1895–1976) coined this term. 7 K. Lasocki, Wspomnienia, p. 657.

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the hammer), he visited manor houses and palaces, even in remote areas, in search of interesting objects. People remembered this very handsome and elegant gentleman, examining furniture with a flashlight and a magnifying glass or climbing ladders to touch a tapestry in order to inspect its weave.8 Very little is known about Abe Gutnajer’s private collection apart from the fact that the family’s apartment above his gallery boasted paintings, antique furniture, tapestries and other valuable objects.9 It should be stressed in this context that Abe practically bought all the paintings, at least those acquired abroad, to be a part of his own private collection. Anyhow, just prior to the outbreak of World War II, he deposited several dozen of his most precious paintings in the bank vault of one of Warsaw’s banks (unfortunately it is not known what paintings and which bank). The rest he was to entrust to a Polish acquaintance before escaping in early September 1939 to Lviv (Polish Lwów). In the summer of 1941, after Lviv was occupied by the Germans, he returned to Warsaw and went straight on to the ghetto. He perished there in 1942, not knowing what had happened to the works collected in his Salon of Art, antique shop and home. It was all gone in unknown circumstances. The works of art that Abe Gutnajer dealt with reflected the tastes of his clientele, which consisted of the Polish upper and middle upper classes, a significant percentage of whom were Polish Jews. The fact that he dealt mostly with Polish artists indirectly proves the level of acculturation of his Warsaw Jewish customers oriented towards Polish art. Notable exceptions were two Jewish sculptors whose works he presented at his show in Łódź in 1937. Indeed, the only known his sale of works by Jewish – moreover contemporary! – painters, namely Marc Chagall and Jankiel Adler, was not to a Varsovian but a Jewish musician from Łódź,10 a city where the Jewish milieu culturally more selfcontained and less tied to Polish art; something which Gutnajer obviously well understood. 8

In an interview with the author, Teresa Herse-Górska remembered the recollection of her parents, who had been Gutnajer’s clients (Konstancin, 6 June 2014). 9 Abe Gutnajer’s name appears twice in the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage publications about wartime losses: M.Romanowska-Zadrożna, T.  Zadrożny (eds.), Straty wojenne. Malarstwo obce/ Wartime Losses. Foreign Painting, Poznań: Bogucki Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2000: Still Life by Jean Baptiste de Fontenay (No. 11, p. 96) and Young Man Reading by Pieter de Grebber (No. 85, p. 175). The latter painting appeared at a Christie’s auction in London in 2006 and was returned to the family of Abe’s son, Ludwik, and sent to the United States. 10 David Cender restitution claim 11/13 WGA 16449–51/59, Landesarchiv Berlin. In January  2022, French authorities returned Chagall’s painting Le Père (1911) from the collection of the Paris Museum of Jewish Art and History, to Cender’s heirs. See ‘Un Chagall spolié va sortir des collections nationales pour être restitué’, Le Figaro, published online 25  January  2022: https://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/un-chagall-

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Bernard Gutnajer: the Compulsive Art Collector

The way Abe’s older brother Bernard understood and conducted his business was different. Although he was the president of the Association of Polish Art Dealers (they were usually called: art antiquarians) and was regarded as the richest among them, he was much less popular and expansive than Abe. Unlike his younger brother, Bernard had no interest in achieving a public position. Bernard’s target clientele was relatively small, focused on the rich collectors in Poland and abroad. Bernard’s customers included the US diplomat and businessman Averell Harriman, the writer Sholem Asch, the German minister Eberhard von Pannwitz and the Third Reich ambassador in Warsaw until 1939 Hans-Adolf von Moltke, as well as Polish government ministers Stanisław Patek and August Zaleski, not mention Polish industrialists and prominent collectors.11 Bernard Gutnajer had assumed responsibility for the family antique business, which at the turn of the twentieth century still resembled a junk shop. When Poland became independent in 1918, he moved it to a street-level retail space in the English Hotel (Hotel Angielski), across the street from the palace occupied by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bernard’s Salon of Art and Antiquities (Salon sztuki i antykwarnia) was a relatively small room, where the owner dealt mostly in old silver and china. According to contemporary accounts, it resembled a treasure-filled bric-a-brac shop, with its “few paintings, most of them in the window for advertising”.12 Striking was that “it always held splendid objects, which his visitors knew intimately, since to the amazement of those not in the know the display was not changed for years”.13 The reason for this strange business strategy was that the older of the Gutnajer brothers was more of a collector than an art dealer. Setting inflated, prohibitive sale prices on the art on offer in his Salon, he tried not to part from with collection. Symptomatic in this regard is the fact that he did not care to sell the art objects he owned to the major Polish museums or even lend them to prestigious temporary exhibitions.

spolie-va-sortir-des-collections-nationales-pour-etre-restitue-20220125 (accessed 30 July 2022). 11 BADV WGA 2–3561/59, Vol. I, files 52, 97, 114,115, 70, 6, 28. 12 K. Lasocki, Wspomnienia, p. 658. 13 K.  Uniechowska, Uniechowski opowiada czyli tajemnice mafii antykwarskiej, Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1975, p. 348.

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His collection, most of which was stored in his family’s spacious apartment not far from his antique shop, would become the stuff of legend, having accumulated it over the course of decades at home and abroad. He was known among art dealers even abroad as not only a connoisseur and business partner but as a passionate buyer, who was not daunted by high prices. He could afford them, after all; since apart from managing his Salon of Art and Antiques (Salon Sztuki i Antykwarnia) he traded in both rough and cut diamonds, which he imported directly from Amsterdam and Antwerp. His collection grew considerably in the late twenties and early thirties thanks to his attendance at Russian art sales, which took place not only in Berlin but also in Vienna and Paris, which Bernard visited equally often as the capitol of the Weimar Republic. Unlike his younger brother, he did not limit himself to buying paintings from the collections nationalized by Soviets and sold en masse abroad, but was obviously fond of acquiring objects so prized in Tsarist Russia. Apart from Fabergé pieces and over 75 eighteenth-century precious snuffboxes (many of which had been purchased at an auction in 1930 of the collection of the late Edward Nepros, who had been Bernard’s neighbor and client), Gutnajer owned at least 140 silver items made by famous European manufacturers, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century goblets produced in Augsburg and Nuremberg, and a collection of antique jewellery.14 Bernard’s collection of paintings included some Dutch and French masters (among them Isaac von Ostade or Hubert Robert), vedute by Canaletto, numerous icons, and even a canvas by Moïse Kisling. The largest part of his collection were Polish painters. In the later 1950s, Stanisław Gebethner, the longstanding one-time curator to artistic handicrafts in the Warsaw National Museum, described Bernard’s private apartment as seeming to surpass: in quality and quantity the things that could be found in his store overflowing with works of art […] Apart from several hundred Polish paintings, Bernard Gutnajer owned a large number of decorative art objects. Outstanding among them was furniture, Polish as well as foreign, most importantly enormous Gdańsk wardrobes and other seventieth- and eighteenth-century ones, sculpted or with intarsias and gold-plated, some mahogany and smooth. Antique hanging mirrors and chandeliers put the finishing touches on the interior of this large apartment. Furthermore, Bernard (…) owned a huge number of rugs, mostly old Persian ones and later Oriental, also from the Caucasus and Turkey. Some lay on the floor, and the most valuable ones, such as the silk, gold-threaded Persian 14

From the statements by H. and J. Gutnajer for the compensation lawsuit. Dom Sztuki, Licytacja LXVI. Katalog zbiorów Edwarda Neprosa, Warszawa: ‘Dom Sztuki’, 1930, https:// polona.pl/item/katalog-zbiorow-edwarda-neprosa,NDE4NTkxNDM/0/#item (accessed 17 July 2022).

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Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz ones, hung on the walls. Most lay in stacks on the floor or inside the large antique wardrobes. Apart from other textiles, such as valuable tapestries, he also owned a large number of kontusz15 sashes interwoven with gold and silver thread. Finally, Bernard (…) had a very large collection of old foreign silver from the best manufacturers, as well as Polish silver. Outstanding among his metalwork was an enormous collection of Jewish silver made both in Poland and abroad. Several hundred ceramic objects were a discrete, sizeable part of the collection. Apart from the valuable foreign porcelain objects from Meissen and Vienna, the largest collection, some of it very valuable, was of Polish origin. Just prior to the outbreak of the war, Bernard brought 12 plates belonging to the so-called Sultan’s service (Service turque) from Paris.16

The Sultan plates of the Tsarist provenance had been purchased at the À la vieille Russie shop in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. After the war, its owner, Léon Grinberg, confirmed that “the [Bernard] Gutnajer company was regarded as the most important in this specialty in Poland”, and that as such “it maintained extensive commercial connections with the largest antique dealers and collectors in Europe”.17 Bernard Gutnajer’s entire collection disappeared soon after September  1939 confiscated by the German occupiers. Bernard himself, like his younger brother Abe and their family members, perished in the Warsaw Ghetto.18 As an art dealer Bernard seemed more old-fashioned than Abe. But he also clearly didn’t care about competing in this regard with his younger brother or other Warsaw art dealers. Nevertheless he had a circle of faithful clients. Among them an exceptional position was occupied by Mieczysław Zagajski (1885–1967; after 1945 Michael Zagayski), a successful industrialist, who was not only a long-time client of Bernard and a friend of the family but who also shared with Bernard a passion for collecting Judaica. Bernard was the owner of some 200 fifteenth–eighteenth-century ceremonial Judaica, making him one of the biggest Judaica collectors in pre-war Poland. A lot speaks for the 15 Kontusz – outer garment, a type of coat or waistcoat; an element of the Polish national costume, a characteristic element of the attire of the Polish nobility in the seventieth and eighteenth centuries. 16 Gebethner’s statement was written for the compensation trial. Cited from S.  Bołdok, Antykwariaty, pp. 235–36. Bernard’s Warsaw bookkeeper, Moshe Borten, testified in Tel Aviv on 14 November 1958: ‘the number of objects in the inventory ranged from 4,000 to 5,000. Their value was around four–five million Polish zlotys (ca. US$ 900,000 at that time). The values of individual objects topped 100,000 zlotys. The Persian rugs numbered at least 600. The total weight of the antique silver in the inventory was over several hundred kg’, WGA 2–3561/59, Vol. I, file 8. 17 Léon Grinberg’s statement of 7 August 1963, BADV WGA 2–3561/59 BADV file 89. 18 On the circumstances of Bernard Gutnajer’s death, see N. Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, ‘Śmierć antykwariusza na Chłodnej’, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały, 1.12 (2016), pp. 262–278.

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fact that Bernard Gutnajer was Zionist or at least remained less called upon to assimilate than his younger brother. It is conceivable that their different stances and opinions caused them to part ways in the early 1930s. As an art collector, Bernard seemed to be a compulsive gatherer of high quality works of arts and crafts of many kinds, that he jealously hid from unauthorized eyes. It is an open question what was the Bernard’s motive of creating such collection: a desire for material security, a predilection for objects of superior quality or sense of the aesthetic. However, it was certainly not a kind of collecting in modern sense of the word.

Conclusion

Bernard was, as one could see, the complete opposite of his younger brother Abel. Nevertheless, both of them, by introducing and promoting the canvases of Polish painters on the domestic art market, influenced strongly many prewar art collections in Warsaw and all over the country. It took the two brothers Gutnajer only several years to rise from the level of bric a brac merchants to leading Warsaw art dealers with a considerable national and international reputation. Their relationships with their clientele were manifold: they inspired, advised, set standards of artistic quality, and found sought after works. They also dictated prices, praised offered art objects, discounted their knowledge when confronted with their clients’ naivety or their overwhelming passion for collecting. Unless, like Bernard himself, they were slaves to this passion. List of References Bołdok, Sławomir. Antykwariaty artystyczne, salony i domy aukcyjne. Historia warszawskiego rynku sztuki w latach 1800–1950, Warszawa: Neriton, 2014. Bommelaer, Claire. ‘Un Chagall spolié va sortir des collections nationales pour être restitué’, Le Figaro, published online 25 January 2022: https://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/ un-chagall-spolie-va-sortir-des-collections-nationales-pour-etre-restitue-20220125. Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, Nawojka. ‘The Demise of the World of the Guntajers: the Warsaw Art Market in World War II’, Holocaust Genocide Studies, 33.3 (2019), pp. 333–350. Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, Nawojka. ‘Śmierć antykwariusza na Chłodnej’, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały, 1.12 (2016), pp. 262–278.

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Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, Nawojka. ‘Habent sua fata libelli. Okupacyjny rynek sztuki w Warszawie a własność  żydowska’, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały, 10.1 (2014), pp. 185–208. Claims of Abe Gutnajer heirs, Landesarchiv Berlin, archival reference: 34 WGA 525– 26/60 and 34 WGA2553/59; claims of Bernard Gutnajer heirs: 22/45WGA3561–62/59 and 22/25 WGA 8040–41/59, WGA 2–3561/59, Vol. I, File 8; David Cender restitution claim: 11/13 WGA 16449–51/59; Claims of Stanisław Patek and August Zaleski: BADV WGA 2–3561/59, Vol. I, Files 52, 97, 114, 115, 70, 6, 28; Léon Grinberg’s statement of 7 August 1963: BADV WGA 2–3561/59 BADV, file 89. Lasocki, Kazimierz. Wspomnienia malarza, typescript, 1949, Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk w Warszawie, Zbiory Specjalne (Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Special Sources), Inv. No. 46. Romanowska-Zadrożna, Maria. Zadrożny, Tadeusz. (eds.), Straty wojenne. Malarstwo obce/ Wartime Losses. Foreign Painting, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2000. Uniechowska, Krystyna. Uniechowski opowiada, czyli tajemnice mafii antykwarskiej, Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1975. Dom Sztuki. Licytacja LXVI. Katalog zbiorów Edwarda Neprosa, Warszawa: ‘Dom Sztuki’, 1930, https://polona.pl/item/katalog-zbiorow-edwarda-neprosa,NDE4NTkx NDM/0/#item. Galbart, Stefan. Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer. Katalog wystawy obrazów pochodzących z rosyjskich państwowych oraz prywatnych zbiorów, exhibition catalogue, Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer (Warszawa), Warszawa: Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer, 1934, https://rcin. org.pl/dlibra/publication/166682/edition/143982/content. Salon Sztuki Abe Guntajer. Salon Sztuki Abe Gutnajera z Warszawy, exhibition catalogue, Łódź: (publisher unknown), 1937.

Fig. 15.1

Bronisław Krystall (1884/1887–1983), c. 1912, The Archive of the National Museum in Warsaw © The National Museum in Warsaw.

Chapter 15

Seeking a Sense of Belonging: Warsaw Collectors of Jewish Origin and their Collections of Polish Art, 1880–1939 Milena Woźniak-Koch The history of Warsaw art collecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in other cities in Europe at that time, is a story of the local elites: the grand bourgeoisie and wealthy members of the intelligentsia (intellectual class; knowledge class). For the bankers, industrialists, physicians, lawyers and architects of the past, collecting was a way of establishing their recently acquired social status and, especially in the case of collectors of Jewish origin, a means of legitimising their national identity.1 Paintings by the era’s most celebrated Polish artists were sought after by members of potentate Warsaw clans such as the Kronenbergs, Blochs, Natansons, Bersohns, Lilpops, Lessers, Goldstands and Rotwands.2 Yet, at the same time, collecting and art patronage also represented civic and patriotic leanings, with those harbouring an active interest in supporting Polish art, often becoming members of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In many cases, what initially began as a private collection transformed into donations and bequests to various public institutions. The following article briefly presents three study cases of Warsaw collecting: Edward Reicher, Gustaw Wertheim and Bronislaw Krystall. These collectors belonged to a particular group of Polish-Jewish art enthusiasts, whose cultural activity should be considered, among other aspects, in terms of their acculturation strategies.

1 T.  de  Rosset, ‘Malarstwo polskie w polskich kolekcjach prywatnych’ in Muzealnictwo, 48 (2008), pp. 210–11. 2 J.  Hensel, ‘Mecenat finansjery warszawskiej w zakresie plastyki w drugiej połowie XIX wieku’ in R. Kołodziejczyk (ed.), Dzieje burżuazji w Polsce. Studia i materiały, Vol. 1, Warszawa – Wrocław: Instytut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), 1974, pp. 31–100. See also E. Chwalewik, Zbiory polskie: archiwa, biblioteki, gabinety, galerje, muzea i inne zbiory pamiątek przeszłości w ojczyźnie i na obczyźnie w porządku alfabetycznym według miejscowości ułożone, Vol. 1–2, Warszawa–Kraków: Wydawnictwo J. Mortkowicza, 1926–27.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_016

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Edward Reicher: A ‘Defender of the National Heritage’

The oldest of the discussed collectors was Edward Reicher (1852–1927), the owner of a grain exchange in Aleksandrów Kujawski. He moved, together with his entire collection to Warsaw in 1918, after Poland had regained its independence. Reicher primarily collected Polish paintings of the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition to works by Jan Matejko, Aleksander and Maksymilian Gierymski, Józef Chełmoński, Leon Wyczółkowski or Józef Pankiewicz, Reicher also owned works by Stanisław Wyspiański (including his famous self-portrait) and Jacek Malczewski. The most numerous group in Reicher’s collection were landscapes by Jan Stanisławski. In addition to genres typical of the art market of the time, such as mentioned landscapes, vedutas or historical scenes, the collection contained a vast group of self-portraits and portraits of painters. Those images of artists were to give a special character to Reicher’s collecting (he owned 43 paintings with likenesses of painters made in various techniques, of which 33 were self-portraits and 9 were portraits). However, the collection also contained works of painters of Jewish origin like: Maurycy Trębacz, Maurycy and Leopold Gottlieb, Samuel Hirszenberg, Stanisław Heyman, Szymon Buchbinder, Henryk Hochman. Mainly works by Maurycy Gottlieb, who was Jan Matejko’s student, were regarded as an ideological bridge between Judaism and Christianity, a symbol of reconciliation between Poles and Jews.3 Therefore, it is striking that the catalogue does not contain any reproduction of works referring to ‘Jewishness’. One of the paintings belonging to the non-reproduced ‘Jewish part’ of Reicher’s collection was Samuel Hirszenberg’s The Black Banner nowadays owned by the Jewish Museum in New York (Fig. 15.2). This poignant masterpiece, painted in 1905 as a reaction to the news about pogroms in Russia, was classified by Richard Cohen as one of the icons of Jewish painting depicting the nation’s tragic fate.4 The primary source concerning Edward Reicher’s collection is a catalogue by the collector himself published in 1918.5 The year of the catalogue’s publication is not accidental. The end of the First World War and the moment when Poland regained its independence prompted Reicher to show his collection to the world through the catalogue. It was also the time of the national debate on the need to protect Polish cultural heritage (including contemporary art 3 A.  Yass-Alston, ‘Żydowscy kolekcjonerzy dzieł sztuki międzywojennego Krakowa. Adolf Schwarz, Rudolf Beres, Seweryn Gottlieb – postaci, które odeszły w niepamięć historii’ Krzysztofory. Zeszyty naukowe Muzeum Historycznego Miasta Krakowa, 35 (2017), pp. 271–284. 4 R. I. Cohen, Jewish Icons. Art and Society in Modern Europe, Berkeley: University of California, 1998, p. 224. 5 (Rejcher, Edward). Katalog zbiorów Edwarda Rejchera, Vienna: Józef Gerstmayer, 1918. See also E. Chwalewik, Zbiory, Vol. 1, p. 2; vol. 2, p. 420.

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Fig. 15.2

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Samuel Hirszenberg, The Black Banner, 1905, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 205.7, The Jewish Museum, New York © The Jewish Museum, New York.

collections), triggered by the summary of post-war losses, to which Reicher explicitly referred in the introduction to the catalogue of his collection. This introduction became a personal statement unambiguously defining the civic character of his activity. Seen as a whole, Reicher’s collecting practice was not merely an accentuation of material status or – as it is often dismissively referred to – a nouveau riche whim. On the contrary, it was an element of a declaration of national belonging and an expression of Riecher’s assimilationist aspirations to participate in the mainstream of Polish culture.

Gustaw Wertheim’s ‘Aristocratic’ Art Collecting

One of the most representative collections of interwar Warsaw belonged to Gustaw Wertheim (1878–1939), who was a deputy director of a state-owned ammunitions factory ‘Pocisk’. Gustaw and his wife Julia, née Kramsztyk, owned a magnificent modernist villa in Konstancin Jeziorna, near Warsaw, which was the meeting place of the elites, frequented, among others, by the famous pianist Artur Rubinstein. The villa housed an exquisite art collection highlighting the family’s high social standing and deep acculturation. In the Wertheims’ family archive survived an album entitled Zbiór obrazów Gustawa Wertheim w Warszawie i ‘Julisinie’ (Gustaw Wertheim’s Collection of Paintings in Warsaw and ‘Julisin’), the only source allowing the collection’s content to be clearly identified.6 Analysing the album, one can deduce that a considerable part of the Wertheims’ collection consisted of Polish paintings of 6 Zbiór obrazów Gustawa Wertheima w Warszawie i Julisinie (Gustaw Wertheim’s Collection of Paintings in Warsaw and ‘Julisin’), photo album, c. 1935, Warszawa – Konstancin Jeziorna, Wertheim’s family archives, Warszawa.

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Fig. 15.3

Milena Woźniak-Koch

Gustaw Wertheim (1878–1939), c. 1935, Warszawa – Konstancin Jeziorna. Courtesy of the Wertheim family © The Wertheim family.

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the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It contained works by the most esteemed artists: Aleksander Orłowski, Piotr Michałowski, Jan Matejko, Leon Wyczółkowski, Stanisław Wyspiański, Józef Mehoffer, Józef Chełmoński or Aleksander Gierymski. What is remarkable is that the album begins with three photographs; one featuring Wertheim’s great-grandfather, Jakub; the second, his grandfather Aleksander and his wife Aleksandra Wertheim; and with the third probably showing Gustaw’s grandmother. These portraits establish the family’s history, showing its first ‘enlightened’ members who betrayed no connection with orthodoxy. Collecting and displaying portraits of ancestors belonged to sociologically recognised practices originating from the traditions of the landed gentry. It served above all to emphasise one’s lineage, the importance of the family and its long duration, and thus its social rootedness. The Wertheims also owned portraits of aristocrats, such as that of Marshal Michał Jerzy Mniszech, as well as a copy of the famous portrait of King Stanisław August Poniatowski with the bust of Pope Pius VI by Bacciarelli (Fig. 15.4), indicative of an appreciation for the age civic values of the Enlightenment with its reformatory spirit. It was during the session of the Great Sejm (the Great Parliament; Sejm Wielki, 1788–1792) that the first attempt in centuries to introduce political changes aiming the partial improvement of the situation of the Jewish community.7 Although the adopted reforms did not improve the circumstances sufficiently, the time of the Great Sejm and the figure of Stanisław August Poniatowski symbolised the beginning of changes; and thinking about Jews in modern terms of citizenship. Nevertheless, the acquisition of Stanisław August’s portrait should be regarded primarily as an expression of patriotism and loyalty towards the homeland, of which the monarch was a personification. Wertheim’s civic attitude was evidenced not only by the collection, as Gustaw participated as an expert on the Polish side during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles. As a co-founder and then commercial director, he managed the first state-owned ammunitions factory ‘Pocisk’. Occupying such a responsible position of authority in a country that had only just regained independence; and for which defense was a primary concern, can be seen as honorific and proof of acceptance from the Polish community. Unfortunately Wertheim’s case was an exception in the dominant trend which saw people of Jewish origin barred from holding of state positions.

7 J.  Ziółek, ‘Sprawa Żydów na Sejmie Czteroletnim’ in Teka Komisji Historycznej, 6 (2009), Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Akademii Rolniczej, p. 9.

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Fig. 15.4 Marcello Bacciarelli, King Stanisław August Poniatowski’s Portrait (copy), after 1789, oil on canvas, 50 × 100, (photography of the painting in Zbiór obrazów Gustawa Wertheima w Warszawie i ‘Julisinie’). Courtesy of the Wertheim family © The Wertheim family.



Bronisław Krystall and his ‘Collecting Philosophy’

Another prominent figure of the Warsaw art collecting scene was Bronisław (Beirach) Krystall (1884 or 1887–1983).8 Krystall studied philosophy and art history at the universities of Marburg and Sankt Gallen, completing his doctorate in Bern in 1908. His dissertation entitled Wie ist Kunstgeschichte als Wissenschaft möglich? (How is Art History Possible as a Science?) met with wide interest; and consequently, Krystall ended up being appointed a member of the Kantgesellschaft in Halle in 1911. By that time, he had already resettled in Warsaw, having returned in 1909. Krystall began purchasing art at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the commencement of his studies in Germany. However, it was during the interwar years that he would amass the most important art pieces of his collection. A crucial source concerning Krystall’s collecting activities and patronage is an unsigned article written by the collector himself published in the Yearbook of the National Museum in Warsaw in 1971.9 This article allows us to partially reconstruct the chronology 8 For more information on B. Krystall, see M. Woźniak-Koch, ‘Bronisław Krystall. Warsaw collector and patron of the arts’ in K. Załęski, K. Mączewska (eds.), Bronisław Krystall. Testament, exhibition catalogue, The National Museum in Warsaw, Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 2015, pp. 79–109. 9 (B. Krystall), ‘O działalności artystycznej i naukowej Bronisława Krystalla na podstawie rozmów i literatury’, Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, 15.2 (1971), pp. 223–77.

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of the building the collection, and ascertain the provenance of the preserved works. Another invaluable source is the set of personal archival materials, including the second part of Krystall’s memoir called Reflections on my art collecting, which have never been published and remain in manuscript form in the archives of the National Museum in Warsaw. The memoir offers an insight into the pre-war state of the collection, and is also a fascinating source of knowledge about Krystall’s collecting philosophy. Considering the scale of destruction of Warsaw’s archives during the Second World War, Krystall’s preserved documents are of unique value. Initially, Krystall collected mainly sculptures (for instance those of Xawery Dunikowski, and August Zamoyski), especially works associated with the artistic group called the Rhythm, founded by Władysław Skoczylas. Thus, Krystall’s collection differed from the common Romantic-patriotic model, which was dominated by historical or realist paintings of the second half of the nineteenth century. The national style expressed the country’s aspirations and promoted the same in the international arena (the Polish pavilion designed by Rythm’s artits at the Paris exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925, which was awarded a golden medal). Part of Krystall’s collection, consisting as it did of artworks of the new national style, can therefore be considered as an expression of affirmation for a Polishness in a modernized spirit.10 However, the profile of the collection evolved; and later on included also paintings. Krystall’s remembrances on the later period of his activity are contained in the already mentioned unpublished Reflections where Bronisław mentioned that he had come into the possession of drawings and paintings by Piotr Michałowski, Stanisław Noakowski, Stanisław Wyspiański, Stanisław Brzozowski, Jan Matejko, Józef Chełmoński, Józef Brandt, Leon Wyczółkowski, Wojciech Weiss, Julian Fałat, Jacek Malczewski, Jan Rosen, Juliusz and Wojciech Kossak, Władysław Czachórski, Stanisław Lentz, and Stanisław Podkowiński. An interesting part of Krystall’s collection were works by artists of Jewish origin: Adam Herszaft or Moses Kisling. He also owned sculptures by Elie Nadelman and Henryk Glicenstein. In addition to his valuable collections of decorative arts, he could also boast a book collection of about 6,000 volumes on art history and philosophy, including 500 valuable bibliophilic items.

10

H.  Anders, Rytm. W poszukiwaniu stylu narodowego, Warszawa: Arkady, 1972. See also A.  Chmielewska, W służbie Państwa, społeczeństwa i narodu. “Państwowotwórczy” artyści plastycy w II Rzeczypospolitej, Warszawa: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences), 2006; A. Chmielewska, Wyobrażenia polskości: sztuki plastyczne II Rzeczpospolitej z perspektywy społecznej historii kultury, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego (Univeristy of Warsaw Press), 2019.

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The Reflections have not only contributed to the knowledge of the original shape of the collection, but they are intertwined with musings on the essence and philosophy of collecting itself. Krystall perceived the ability to collect as a gift, and described it as a peculiar form of creativity, repeatedly using the term “collector’s artistry”, which: “[…] crystallizes in a combined knowledge fed by intuition and imagination. […] What protects the collector from eclecticism or infantilism is the inherent, or acquired, mental and intellectual culture”.11 Emphasizing the uniqueness of the collecting phenomenon, he even mentioned predestination, and characterized his own experience as an evolution which had transformed collecting into “a collecting activity conscious of its aims”.12 Dramatic experiences – the unexpected death of his wife and then his only son – turned Krystall’s attention to works of a religious nature – Fałat’s St Francis and Wyczółkowski’s Church in Dębno. He also collected sacral folk art and later acquired fifteenth-century statues of Mary with Child and Pieta, as well as Russian icons.13 What is more, in terms of religious art, the collection also included Judaica. In the context of the collector’s personal traumas, assembling art gained an additional therapeutic dimension and served to commemorate loved ones. This personal aspect of Krystall’s collecting is signalled not only in his memoirs but also by a photography depicting a special arrangement: an Old Russian travel triptych with the nineteenth-century Virgin Mary of Vladimir icon suspended above a chest of drawers, on which two silver cups and a terebinth are placed (Fig. 15.5). A painting by Jacek Malczewski (1854–1929) from 1890, Recollection of Youth hangs even higher. The photo shows a non-accidental arrangement of objects with a religious image of the icon at the compositional centre. The significance of the phenomenon of sacral pictures occurring in the context of private collections was analysed by Victor I. Stoichita in his book The Self-Aware Image. An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, where he traced the differences between Protestant Holland and Catholic Flanders; while examining the process of changing historical and cultural contexts and their impact on the perception of images.14 The picture of Krystall’s arrangement of objects is surprisingly analogical to the Antwerp model as described by Stoichita: “In the oldest cabinets there was 11

The Archive of the National Museum in Warsaw (ANMW), Bronisław Krystall’s Archive (BK Arch.), S-11/5, p. 85. 12 ANMW, BK Arch, S-11/5, p. 137. 13 ANMW, BK Arch, S-11/5, p. 138. 14 V. I. Stoichita, Ustanowienie obrazu, Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2011. For English edition, see V. I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image. An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Studies in Baroque Art), Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015.

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Fig. 15.5

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The interior of Bronisław Krystall’s apartment at 36 Aleje Ujazdowskie Street, Warsaw, c. 1927, The Archive of the National Museum in Warsaw © The National Museum in Warsaw.

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still a hierarchical arrangement that gave a great story (usually biblical) a central role. This main picture, of large size, was placed in the middle of the wall above the cabinet (desk, secretary …), which thus played the role of an altar. This was, of course, a formal-symbolic role, as the wardrobe usually contained a collection of various precious objects, (jewels, medallions, shells …). […] The presence of a central item of furniture (with a large historical painting above it) allows us to suppose that it was important for the first art collections to refer to a visual model that was borrowed from the sacrum sphere”.15 It is unlikely that Krystall, while planning the arrangement of his collection, consciously looked to the Antwerp style of displaying paintings. Instead, we may rather perceive Krystall’s approach to have been the perceptible regularity of the collector’s narrative: a trait of the universal characteristic of the phenomenon in which the collector, regardless of the historical and cultural contexts, creates a personal space of sacrum. Faith, confession, the divine absolute, religious cult, constitute important elements of the collector’s narrative”.16 Thinking upon the photography itself, it is impossible to avoid the impression that Krystall created his own private altar, one that was imbued with symbolic meaning. The painting by Malczewski, showing a shepherd guarding pigs, is a rather surprising juxtaposition with an Orthodox icon. However, for a person not brought up in the Christian culture, an icon did not have to be literally an object of worship; it could be of a religious nature, for which the collector had found the best illustration in an expressive Old Russian image of Mary with the Child. According to Krystall, such a meaning probably did not clash with Malczewski’s nostalgic canvas, which in this relation symbolised a human longing for the past and the lost carefreeness of childhood. Perhaps these two artefacts were even supposed to correspond with each other, building a personal reflection of an eschatological character. Finally, in its rudimentary dimension, the icon is an image of a mother with her child, i.e. an iconographic type which has already appeared in the collection in the form of mediaeval Madonnas and refers to a sense of mourning after the loss of a beloved wife and child. In 1938, Krystall donated a part of his collection, named after Izabela and Karol Krystall, to the National Museum in Warsaw. This gift initiated a longlasting relationship with the Museum, to which after his death in 1983 Krystall 15 V. I. Stoichita, Ustanowienie obrazu, pp. 138–139. 16 As Russel  W.  Belk aptly observes: “Perhaps the greatest benefit of collecting for most collectors is one they find very difficult to articulate: the benefit of gaining contact with the (self-transcending) sacredness or magic in their lives” in R. W. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society, London: Routledge, 2001, s. 83.

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bequeathed the bulk of his collection, together with his and a valuable real estate property located on Aleje Jerozolimskie Street.17 To evaluate Krystall’s collection is a challenge; mainly due to its diversity, which faithfully reflects the wide range of the collector’s interests. Krystall admitted that he did not rely solely on taste, but rather he was also driven by a need to provide support for artists and – as he put it – because of need to ‘document’ contemporary art in all its forms. Had Krystall focused his attention on a single area: for instance, a promising set of Polish sculptures, the final collection may perhaps have emerged as a more cohesive whole. This is one of many suppositions that accompany both the collection and the biography of the collector himself. It seems paradoxical that the ambitious, educated man, full of youthful vigour, did not continue his scholarly activities after having received his doctoral title. The decision to study in Marburg seems to have been by design. Jan Woleński, while analysing the contribution of Jews to the development of Polish philosophy notes that young Jews studied there en masse and had begun to practice professions connected with an academic education, such as law and medicine: “These processes did not bypass university circles, including those of philosophy. Hermann Cohen, a professor at the University of Marburg and founder of the neo-Kantian Marburg School, one of the most important trends in academic philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, became the symbol of the Haskalah as an emancipatory movement, but one that preserved Jewish identity”.18 Krystall’s statement about the academic conditions in Warsaw that did not meet his expectations seems at odds with his vivid interest in the matter of higher education expressed in his publications.19 Was it really nothing more than a personal choice, coupled with the experience of personal tragedies? One cannot forget and exclude the quite common difficulties which intellectuals of Jewish origin had to contend with when endeavouring to join an academic institution.20 Therefore, it is most likely that 17 ANMW, BK Arch, 320/13, pp. 8–9. 18 J. Woleński, ‘Żydzi w filozofii polskiej’, in M. Rembierz, K. Śleziński (eds.), Studia z Filozofii Polskiej, 5 (2010), Bielsko – Biała – Kraków: Scriptum, 2010, p. 15. 19 B. Krystall, Zagadnienia oświaty akademickiej. Wydział nauk wojskowych. Fakultet teologiczny. Estetykum, Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolff, 1917, pp. 195–218. 20 A. Landau-Czajka, Syn będzie Lech … Asymilacja Żydów w Polsce międzywojennej, Warszawa: Neriton, Instytut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), 2006, pp. 98–99. See also T. Hołówko, Kwestia narodowościowa w Polsce, Warszawa: Księgarnia Robotnicza, 1922 in C. Miłosz, Wyprawa w Dwudziestolecie, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011, pp. 276–277: “First of all, it is pointless to reject those Jews who consider themselves Poles. There are the intelligensia – often an intelligentsia with a high cultural and intellectual level. Absurd things take place – they do not receive chairs at faculties of mathematics, medicine, natural science, let alone legal,

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a combination of undisclosed circumstances and private dramas made collecting a centrality, providing also a sense of intellectual fulfilment. In other situations, such practice could have been merely an addendum. Bronisław Krystall clearly expressed this position in his Reflections, writing: Along with life, man comes into the world with an instinct and a need to gather things to himself. This phenomenon (this drive) may seem irrational (gathering for gathering’s sake), but over the years, with a deepening of one’s interests; and learning the essence of impulses and stimuli, it eventually becomes a form of channelling the energy arising from the life-giving process of joining the rhythm of the intellectual and social life, connecting the past with the future.21



Conclusion

Analysing the collections of Edward Reicher, Gustaw Wertheim and Bronisław Krystall, as well as their biographies, one can discern a close relationship between integrationist imperatives and Jewish collectors’ interest in Polish art. In order for the message ‘I am also Polish’ to be legible, a vehicle of national semantics was necessary. It was Polish art that enabled collectors-integrationists to participate in culture and social life. It is important to bear in mind the complexity of acquiring or commissioning art. The final purchase was preceded by a whole sequence of events – negotiations with artists, contacts with other collectors, art dealers, and attending vernissages and exhibitions. All those activities made it possible to become at least partially involved in the life of the sphere to which the integrationists desired access. Polish art, having been created in a post-Romantic paradigm, was an extremely attractive object of interest for representatives of the ‘third nation’ (as Anna Landau-Czajka puts it) suspended between two cultures; not part of the Jewish community, but simultaneously not admitted to Polishness. Jewish-Polish collections were not only the end result of an identity-making process, they also helped to establish a new self. In this way, the collections became a biographical object and a dual testimony not only to the flourishing of modern Polish art at the turn of the twentieth century, but also to an irretrievably bygone Polish-Jewish world from before 1939. historical and philological faculties, people of great knowledge, of European renown […] How often are professors not taking on young and promising assistants because they are Jewish?”. 21 ANMW, BK Arch, S-11/5, p. 131.

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List of References Anders, Henryk. Rytm. W poszukiwaniu stylu narodowego, Warszawa: Arkady, 1972. Belk, Russel W. Collecting in a Consumer Society, London: Routledge, 2001. Chmielewska, Agnieszka. W służbie Państwa, społeczeństwa i narodu. ‘Państwowotwórczy’ artyści plastycy w II Rzeczypospolitej, Warszawa: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences), 2006. Chmielewska, Agnieszka. Wyobrażenia polskości: sztuki plastyczne II Rzeczpospolitej z perspektywy społecznej historii kultury, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego (University of Warsaw Press), 2019. Cohen, Richard I. Jewish Icons. Art and Society in Modern Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Chwalewik, Edward. Zbiory polskie: archiwa, biblioteki, gabinety, galerje, muzea i inne zbiory pamiątek przeszłości w ojczyźnie i na obczyźnie w porządku alfabetycznym według miejscowości ułożone, Vol. 1–2, Warszawa–Kraków: Wydawnictwo Jakuba Mortkowicza, 1926–27. Hensel, Joanna. ‘Mecenat finansjery warszawskiej w zakresie plastyki w drugiej połowie XIX wieku’ in Ryszard Kołodziejczyk (ed.), Dzieje burżuazji w Polsce. Studia i materiały, Vol. 1, Warszawa – Wrocław: Instytut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), 1974, pp. 31–100. Hołówko, Tadeusz. Kwestia narodowościowa w Polsce, Warszawa: Księgarnia Robotnicza, 1922 Czesław Miłosz, Wyprawa w Dwudziestolecie, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011, pp. 276–277. Krystall, Bronisław. Zagadnienia oświaty akademickiej. Wydział nauk wojskowych. Fakultet teologiczny. Estetykum, Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolff, 1917. (Krystall, Bronisław). ‘O działalności artystycznej i naukowej Bronisława Krystalla na podstawie rozmów i literatury’ in Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, 15.2 (1971), pp. 223–77. Landau-Czajka, Anna. Syn będzie Lech … Asymilacja Żydów w Polsce międzywojennej, Warszawa: Neriton, Instytut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), 2006. (Rejcher, Edward). Katalog zbiorów Edwarda Rejchera, Wiedeń: Józef Gerstmayer, 1918. Rosset, Tomasz Feliks de. ‘Malarstwo polskie w polskich kolekcjach prywatnych’ in Muzealnictwo, 48 (2008), pp. 204–16. Stoichita, Viktor  I.  Ustanowienie obrazu, Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2011. For English edition see V. I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image. An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Studies in Baroque Art), Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015.

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Woleński, Jan. ‘Żydzi w filozofii polskiej’ in Marek Rembierz, Krzysztof Śleziński (eds.), Studia z Filozofii Polskiej, 5 (2010), Bielsko – Biała – Kraków: Scriptum, 2010, pp. 13–33. Woźniak-Koch, Milena. ‘Bronisław Krystall. Warsaw collector and patron of the arts,’ in Krzysztof Załęski, Katarzyna Mączewska (eds.), Bronisław Krystall. Testament, exhibition catalogue, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie 2015, pp. 79–109. Yass-Alston, Agnieszka. ‘Żydowscy kolekcjonerzy dzieł sztuki międzywojennego Krakowa. Adolf Schwarz, Rudolf Beres, Seweryn Gottlieb – postaci, które odeszły w niepamięć historii’ in Krzysztofory. Zeszyty naukowe Muzeum Historycznego Miasta Krakowa, 35 (2017), pp. 271–284. Zbiór obrazów Gustawa Wertheima w Warszawie i ‘Julisinie’ (Gustaw Wertheim’s collection of paintings in Warsaw and ‘Julisin’), photo album, c. 1935, Warszawa – Konstancin Jeziorna, Wertheim’s family archives, Warszawa. Ziółek, Jan. ‘Sprawa Żydów na Sejmie Czteroletnim’ in Teka Komisji Historycznej, 6 (2009), Lublin: Wydawnictwo Akademii Rolniczej, pp. 9–15

Fig. 16.1

Walker & Boutall after Maull, Mr. Reuben D. Sassoon as a Persian Prince, 1897–1899, 1931, 0724.187, The British Museum, London © The British Museum, London.

Chapter 16

Inventing a Secular Jewish Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century: Collections of Jewish Ritual Objects Shir Gal Kochavi This paper explores the expression of Jewish ethnographic scholarship as it was manifested in the collecting and studying of Jewish ritual objects between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three case studies of Jewish ritual objects collections amassed by Jewish figures, who were immersed in the societies of Paris, London, and the United States, demonstrate how secular Jewish members of society found ways to remain attached to Judaism. Their famed collections were exhibited in major international exhibitions such as the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition that opened in London in April 1887. Later, objects originating in these collections formed the basis of Jewish ritual object collections in important institutions such as the Cluny Museum, Paris and the Jewish Museum, New York.1 The interest in collecting Jewish ritual objects and interpreting them as works of art was the result of a process that grew out of key political and social changes taking place in Europe, which was the Haskalah movement, also called the Jewish Enlightenment.2 It led to the emancipation of European Jews, and in consequence to the process of granting Jewish equal citizenship rights, which was expressed in the efforts of the Jews to integrate into local societies and join the liberal professions. France was the first to grant Jews rights (1789), followed by Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (1858) and this 1 These and other items are now housed in the collection of the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. 2 Haskalah developed at the end of the eighteenth century as a result of the European Enlightenment movement. It offered an incorporation of Jewish culture and secular education with traditional talmidic studies – by so doing modernizing Judaism. As it promoted Jewish scholarship and literature, it assisted in incorporating Jews in modern western secular life. One of the key scholars identified with the Haskalah movement is Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher and scholar who published the first five books of the Old Testament in Hebrew characters between the years 1780– 1783. See ‘Haskalah’, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, published online 25 July 2017, trans. Jeffrey Green: https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/haskalah (accessed 23 November 2021).

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_017

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process continued throughout the nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. Several social processes are intertwined with both movements – urbanization that was expressed by the nineteenth century emigration from distant villages (shtetls) and isolated residential areas into cities, and secularization, which evidently was included in the Jewish effort to better the social and economic opportunities of Jews and to become integrated within society. A move towards an academic study of Judaism took place in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement (Science of Judaism) in Germany; considered as a direct outcome of the Haskalah as it applied academic practices to study and research Judaism.3 Methods that were used for textual study and the interpretation of Christian, Greek and Latin texts were transferred to understand Jews and Jewish history. Among the scholars who led this movement were writer and critic Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) and Leopold Zunz (1794–1886). Prior to the academic exploration of the Jews, a fascination with the ethnographic research of minority groups evolved throughout Europe. This interest grew out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism, and served as an opportunity for the members of so-called ‘civilized’ societies to observe a variety of populations. The questioning of religious groups and other minorities shaped what later became cultural anthropology. Russian and Yiddish writer, ethnographer, and activist Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, known as S. Anski (1863–1920), led ethnographic expeditions between 1912–1914 in order to study Jewish ethnography and folklore at the Pale of Jewish Settlements, territories of the Russian Empire in which Jews were allowed to settle (today, the area of Belarus). His collection of over eight hundred items from approximately seventy Jewish communities was displayed at the exhibition History and Culture of the Jewish people of the Territory of Russia at the Russian Museum of Ethnography, predecessor of the Jewish Museum in Saint Petersburg, in 1917 and 1923.4 In parallel to these social changes, and perhaps despite certain efforts of the Jewish upper classes to assimilate in society, this period was saturated with 3 D. Sorkin, ‘What was the Wissenchaft des Judentums?’, Leo Baeck Institute – New York/Berlin for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture, published online 25 March 2015: https:// www.lbi.org/de/news/what-was-wissenschaft-des-judentums/ (accessed 23 November 2021). 4 He saw this as a national timely mission to record oral relics such as songs, traditions, and local legends before they became extinct due to processes of secularization and urbanization, which were already taking place. Anski was also interested in material culture, and during his visits documented synagogues, Jewish ritual objects, documents, marriage contracts (Ketubot), and gravestones. See  B.  Lukin, ‘An-ski Ethnographic Expedition and Museum’, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, published online 25  July  2017: https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/an-ski_ethnographic_expedition_and_museum (accessed 8 November 2021).

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a growing antisemitism leading up to the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), when a French Jewish military captain was falsely accused of treason and sentenced to life in prison. The Antisemite League of France was founded by the French writer and journalist Eduard Drumont in 1889, provoking demonstrations and antisemitic propaganda. Drumont was also the founder and editor of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole (1892).5 In 1903, the fabricated text of the socalled Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared in the Russian press. The text describes a fabricated Jewish conspiracy to take control of the entire world.6 Reviewing the processes mentioned above, beginning with the Haskalah and the Jewish Emancipation, will serve as a basis to understanding the development of Jewish ritual object collecting at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The Collection of Isaac Strauss

In her book The Jewish Museum: History and Memory, Identity and Art from Vienna to the Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem, Natalia Berger describes the Strauss collection as “the first Judaica collection presented as a collection of Jewish art”.7 Strauss was born in Strasbourg in 1806 and joined his brother in Paris at the age of 21. In Paris, he played the violin and composed music for dancing to entertain King Louis-Phillipe, who appointed Strauss the director of the royal orchestra in 1848.8 Strauss was an avid art collector – his collection presented in his Vichy home, built in 1858, was composed of eighteenthcentury paintings and decorative art, as well as Jewish ritual objects. He collected these items throughout his travels in Europe, primarily in Germany. Collecting material culture was a fashionable European endeavour, and although Strauss was part of a larger group of Jewish ritual objects collectors, he is considered the first example of a collection of exquisite Jewish ritual objects that was not only put together for the purpose of aesthetic collecting but also was the first to be publicly displayed. 5 T.  Stammers, ‘Allies of the Republic?: Inside the Sale of the Century (C.1870–1895)’, The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890, Cambridge: University Press 2020, pp. 248, 284. 6 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC. ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, in Holocaust Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion (accessed 8 November 2021). 7 N. Berger, The Jewish Museum: History and Memory, Identity and Art from Vienna to the Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem, Leiden: Brill, 2018, p. 41. 8 L. Schnapper, Strauss, Isaac (1806–1888), Institut Européen des Musiques Juives: https://www. iemj.org/en/strauss-isaac-1806-1888/ (accessed 8 November 2021).

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Strauss’s remarkable collection was presented in the prestigious Palais du Trocadero as part of the 1878 Exposition Universelle that lasted for six months in Paris. The exhibition celebrated the Third French Republic and marked France’s recovery from the Franco-Prussian war that had ended in the spring of 1871. Throughout the exhibit, various electric innovations were showcased alongside new machines such as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, David Edward Hughes’ microphone, and Thomas Edison’s phonograph. By the time of its closing, sixteen million paid visits had been recorded.9 The Trocadero Palace, where Strauss’ collection was displayed, was divided into two large wings connected to a central rotunda where musical performances were held. An exhibition of ethnography and French monuments was held in one of the wings alongside Strauss’ collection. The preface to Strauss’ exhibition catalogue describes his collection as a unique display of examples of rich craftsmanship for Jewish communal and private use, objects that are equal in their beauty to Christian ritual objects. It describes Strauss’ collecting as a form of conscientious research that attracts great interest and a rare opportunity to study Jewish art.10 The preface continues to depict a selection of objects exhibited, explaining their usages during Jewish holidays and festivals, while implying their European origins. The interaction between Christian makers and Jewish patrons is stressed by a fifteenth-century contract recounting the order of a Torah Crown by members of the Jewish community of Arles, France, from a Christian silversmith. A total of eighty-two objects was exhibited, including a Torah ark and a Teyva (the place where the cantor recites and sings the prayer in the synagogue), lamps for the celebration of Hanukkah, Havdalah spice boxes, Ketubot (Marriage contracts), Torah shields, and Torah pointers, to name a few. Strauss also put his collection on display nine years later in 1887, at the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition in London. This exhibit aimed: “1. To promote a knowledge of Anglo-Jewish History; to create a deeper interest in its records and relics, and to aid in their preservation. 2. To determine the extent of the materials which exist for the compilation of a History of the Jews in England”.11 Artefacts illuminating this history, together with religious art and 9

Bureau International des Expositions, Expo 1878 Paris: https://www.bie-paris.org/site/ en/1878-paris (accessed 23 November 2021). 10 G. Stenne, ‘Préfacier’, in Description des objets d’art religieux hébraïques exposés dans les galeries du Trocadéro à l’Exposition universelle de 1878, Paris: Poissy, 1878, pp. I–XII: https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5650011m/f10.item (accessed 8 November 2021). 11 Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition London, England, Catalogue of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, 1887: Royal Albert Hall, And of Supplementary Exhibitions Held At the Public Record Office, British Museum, South Kensington Museum, London: Clowes, 1887.

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miscellaneous antiquities, were placed on public display, and a series of lectures was given. The exhibit included Hebrew deeds (sheṭarot) relating to the transactions of the early English Jews, portraits of Anglo-Jewish men, ancient Jewish coins, and a collection of exhibits from the Beni Israel community of India. The exhibition prompted a renewed sense of interest in the history of the Jews in England, as well as a taste for beautiful objects of Jewish ritual art. Alongside antiquarian remains illustrating the history of the Jews in England, two private collections of Jewish ritual art and other Jewish antiquities were displayed, that of Strauss and of Reuben David Sassoon, which attracted much interest. The exhibition endeavoured to equate Jews artistically and aesthetically to Christian members of ‘civilized’ Western society, a concept already expressed in the Strauss exhibition catalogue of 1878. By stressing that Jews were long-time members of English society, the exhibition text was staking a claim that recognised Jews as rightful loyal British subjects. Strauss died in 1888, and in 1890 a sale of his collection was held in Paris. Charlotte de Rothschild (1825–1899), wife of Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812– 1870), entrusted the art dealer Charles Mannheim (1833–1910) as an agent, to purchase one hundred and forty-nine Jewish ritual objects. While Charlotte kept a few of the objects, the majority was donated to the French nation. The objects were deposited with the Musée de Cluny in 1890 in a room named after ‘Nathaniel de Rothschild’, Charlotte’s late husband. Today, the objects are located at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris.12

The Collection of Reuben David Sassoon

Born in Baghdad, Reuben was born in 1834 (Fig. 16.1), the fourth son of the Sassoon family which had migrated to India. At the age of thirty-three, upon the passing of his father, Reuben was called to join his brothers in London.13 After this transition, in 1867, he began collecting Jewish ritual objects avidly. Similarly to Strauss, Sassoon managed to quickly climb the social ladder. He became a member of the social clique called the Marlborough House set, a group of men and women that revolved around Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, son of Queen Victoria and heir to the throne, who had established the

12

The Rothschild Archive, ‘Judaica’, https://www.rothschildarchive.org/family/family_ collections/judaica (accessed 8 November 2021). 13 Sotheby’s, ‘Reuben David Sassoon’, published online 10  November  2020: https://www. sothebys.com/en/articles/reuben-david-sassoon (accessed 8 November 2021).

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Marlborough Club in his residence in 1869.14 Upon Albert Edward’s coronation, as King Edward VII in 1901, Reuben and his brother were appointed Members of the Royal Victorian Order. The basis for Sassoon’s famed Jewish collection of ritual objects was purchased in 1867 at the Philip Salomons collection sale. Salomons (1796–1867) collected both modern and historic European Jewish ritual objects and was considered “one of the first serious buyers of antique Judaica”. His collection was uniquely displayed in his rooftop synagogue in Hove. Built as an octagonal edifice inspired by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, it was admired by his contemporaries.15 After Salomons’ death, the synagogue was turned into a museum dedicated to Jewish history. Even twenty years later, his collection was mentioned at the Anglo Jewish Historical Exhibition catalogue in the introduction to Sassoon’s display. Sassoon continued growing his collection with important examples of Jewish art from England, Germany, Galicia, and Italy, which he kept at his private synagogue in his home at 95 Lancaster Gate, on the north side of Hyde Park. After his passing in 1905, his great-niece and sister-in-law Flora Gubbay Sassoon inherited the collection.16 The following year, 1906, many of the items were lent to the Whitechapel Art Gallery Exhibition Jewish Art and Antiquities, where they were publicly displayed together for the last time. Whitechapel gallery was located in the heart of the Jewish East End community. The exhibition was organized in support of local Jewish societies and originally planned for 1905 to mark the revision of the Aliens bill passed in response to persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe and their migration.17 It was open to the public for six weeks and visited by over one hundred and fifty thousand people. Objectives expressed in the 1887 Anglo-Jewish exhibit were also set out in the 1906 exhibition catalogue: 1. To gather together “the rare costly and beautiful Appurtenances from the synagogues in London” in addition to their many beautiful exhibits associated with domestic devotion from private owners would be on view. 14

15 16 17

J.  Ridley, ‘Marlborough House set’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 27  May  2010: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128. 001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-53154;jsessionid=A9FE56BDD957719595E5E884DE 62B207 (accessed 8 November 2021). Sotheby’s, ‘Philip Salomons’, published online 10 November 2020: https://www.sothebys. com/en/articles/philip-salomons (accessed 8 November 2021). Sotheby’s, ‘Reuben’. J. Steyn, ‘The Complexities of Assimilation in the 1906 Whitechapel Art Gallery Exhibition Jewish Art and Antiquities’, Oxford Art Journal, 13.2 (1990), Oxford University Press, pp. 44–50, (p. 45): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360337 (accessed 8 November 2021).

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2.

To show rare manuscripts and books for the delectation of all by especially for scholars and bibliogists. 3. To illustrate by a selection of portraits and prints the history of the Jews in England since the protectorate of Cromwell (began 1653). 4. To exhibit examples of works by mainly English artists; but to include the pictures of some foreigners – “notably by the Nestor of Dutch art – the illustrious Jozef Israels”.18 The catalogue emphasised Jewish history in the United Kingdom and the positive involvement of Jews in European culture and aesthetics. Jewish identity was asserted through concepts such as assimilation and moral values; and the emergence of Jewish art in the nineteenth century was celebrated alongside ritual art. The image of the Jew described in the exhibition catalogue expresses an intellectual, artistic, emotional, and socially mobile individual capable of being assimilated.19 In the past two decades, items from the Sassoon collection have been put up for auction, culminating in the December 2020 Sotheby’s New York auction ‘Sassoon: A Golden Legacy’ which celebrated the Sassoon family and their collection. The auction, of sixty-eight exquisite Jewish ritual objects, reached fivemillion USD and is considered one of the highlights of Jewish ritual objects sales over the last decade.20

The Collection of Hadji Ephraim Benguiat

This third collection of Hadji Ephraim Benguiat (c. 1852–1918) conveys how the phenomena of collecting material culture as well as Jewish ritual objects took place beyond Europe. Benguiat, a Turkish Jewish antique dealer from the port city of Izmir expanded his collection throughout his travels across Europe, to the Middle East and to North Africa. He collected decorative art, paintings, tapestries and Jewish ritual objects. As an observant Jew, Benguiat also made use of the ritual objects in his collection in the celebration of Jewish holidays. Towards the turn of the nineteenth century, he expanded his business to the United States, establishing shops in Boston, New York, and San Francisco.21 18 Steyn, ‘The Complexities’, p. 45. 19 Steyn, ‘The Complexities’, p. 48. 20 Sotheby’s. ‘Sotheby’s Auction of Sassoon: A Golden Legacy Achieves $5 Million in NY’, published online 18 December 2020, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/sothebysauction-of-sassoon-a-golden-legacy-achieves-5-million-in-ny (accessed 8 November 2021). 21 Scenes from the Collection: Masterpieces and Curiosities, exhibition catalogue, The Jewish Museum (New York), New York: The Jewish Museum, 2018.

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Fig. 16.2

The Benguiat Art Museum, Exterior View of the Pavilion Containing the H. Ephraim Benguiat Museum Collection and the Historical Damascus Palace, Paris, 1904, Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Washington DC © Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Washington DC.

His diverse and sizable collection was brought to the United States to be displayed in two world fairs: first in the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which celebrated the four hundredth year of Columbus’ voyage to the continent, and later in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, where Benguiat lavishly displayed his collection at the “Damascus Palace” as part of the foreign pavilions among Germany, Morocco, Jerusalem, Japan, and the Philippines, to name a few. The 1904 St. Louis exhibition showcased electric innovations alongside new machinery and displays of liberal art and various manufacturers. The Benguiat exhibition catalogue offers an extensive description of the magnificent interiors of the Damascus Palace, as well as provide a list of various objects in the collection. The list includes: Separate Subsidiary Collections of European and oriental specimens of embroideries, laces, textiles, velvets, tapestries, Indian and Persian shawls, costumes, rugs, ecclesiastical vestments and relics, Church paintings, embroidered pictures, porcelain, tiles, gold and silver objects, sanctuary lamps, Jewels, ivories, bronzes,

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arms and armor, metal objects and wood carvings, also some relics of two wars, being ‘Turko-Greek’, looted textiles and ‘Spanish-American’ ecclesiastical treasures from the Philippine Islands. Also the Original Historical Damascus Palace, the Byzantine Carved Altar Front from the Copaida Temple, the Spanish Silver Canopy, the Satsuma Vases, the Renaissance Altar Frontal, Egyptian Mummy Cloths [sic] and the King of Silk Rugs.22

Subsequent to the 1904 grandiose collection display, the Jewish ritual objects in Benguiat’s collection were loaned to the Smithsonian Institution. There, the curator and librarian Cyrus Adler (1863–1940) published a detailed catalogue of the items, which remained on loan until 1918, upon Benguiat’s death. In 1924, after taking on the position of president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Adler managed to purchase the objects for the Jewish Museum in New York. The acquisition took place in 1925 with the support of Jewish philanthropist Felix Warburg (1871–1937), whose mansion became in the 1940s the new home for the Jewish Museum collection.

Conclusion

As a result of the process of secularization and urbanization experienced by many European Jews in the nineteenth century, those material objects representing tradition and a former way of life became collectible. While Jewish communal life, Jewish texts, and folklore were being studied and interpreted in academic settings, a growing interest in Jewish art and artisanship developed as part of a social effort to present Jews as contributing members of ‘civilized’ societies. Despite the significant rise in antisemitism taking place at the time across Europe, and perhaps as a way to oppose it, Jews chose to publicly display Jewish ritual objects and communal records for the first time, starting with Strauss in 1878. This situation in which non-Jews and Jews alike could study and learn about items and issues that until then had been mostly private Jewish traditions, was coined by the historian Richard Cohen as “self-exposure”.23 Later, the London based Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition and the Jewish Art and Antiquities exhibition stressed the role of culture and aesthetics within the Jewish community of the United Kingdom; and by so doing emphasized 22 Benguiat Art Museum, Fine art portfolio, Paris: The Benguiat Art Museum: https://doi. org/10.5479/sil.457813.39088007591977, p. 3. 23 R.  I.  Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 187.

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the place of Jews in local history. These two exhibitions, as explored by Steyn, were presented in reaction to key political events surrounding the formation of the Committee of Alien Immigration and the revision of the Aliens Bill in the British Parliament. By exhibiting and studying Jewish ritual objects, these collectors were using ritual art to shape a secular Jewish identity and encourage the view of an educated assimilated Jew.24 For these and other collectors of Jewish ritual objects of the period, such artefacts were understood as ethnographic and artistic tools, interpreted through a secular, cultural, and aesthetic lens. Jewish communities became interested in cultivating a national consciousness while manifesting achievements and contributions in industry and arts and crafts. Following the main two exhibitions discussed, the 1878 Paris International Exposition, in which Strauss’s collection was displayed at the Trocadero Palace and in 1887, the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition held in London, Jewish museums emerged. The Jewish Museum in Vienna was opened in 1895, followed by the Jewish Museum in Prague in 1906. Both institutions focused on displaying Jewish contributions to local society.25 In the case of other early Jewish museums, such as the St. Petersburg Jewish Museum (1923– 1929), the Warsaw Jewish Museum (established in 1910 as the Mathias Bersohn Museum of Jewish Antiquities) and the Budapest Jewish Museum (1909), the desire to learn about Jewish folklore and ethnography was displayed through objects, photographs, books and documents.26 List of References Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition London, England, Catalogue of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, 1887: Royal Albert Hall, And of Supplementary Exhibitions Held At the Public Record Office, British Museum, South Kensington Museum, London: Clowes, 1887. Benguiat Art Museum. Fine art portfolio, Paris: The Benguiat Art Museum https://doi. org/10.5479/sil.457813.39088007591977. 24 25 26

Steyn, ‘The Complexities’, p. 45. Berger, ‘The Jewish Museum’, pp. 95–99. M. Woźniak-Koch, ‘Kolekcja i Muzeum Starożytności Żydowskich z daru Mathiasa Bersohna w Warszawie (Collection and Museum of Jewish Antiquities donated by Mathias Bersohn in Warsaw)’, in Muzeum Pamięci. Muzeum w polskiej kulturze pamięci (do 1918 r.) (Museum of Remembrance. Museums in Polish Culture of Remembrance [till 1918]): http://muzeumpamieci.umk.pl/?p=5332 (accessed 10 May 2022).

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Berger, Natalia. The Jewish Museum: History and Memory, Identity and Art from Vienna to the Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem, Leiden: Brill, 2018. Bureau International des Expositions, Expo 1878 Paris: https://www.bie-paris.org/site/ en/1878-paris. Cohen, Richard I. Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Etkes, Immanuel. ‘Haskalah’, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 25 July 2017, trans. Jeffrey Green: https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/haskalah. Leff, Lisa Moses. Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Leff, Lisa Moses. ‘The Jewish Oath and the Making of Secularism in Modern France’, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 58.1 (2013): https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/ybt008. Lukin, Benyamin. ‘An-ski Ethnographic Expedition and Museum’, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, published online 25 July 2017: https://yivoencyclopedia. org/article.aspx/an-ski_ethnographic_expedition_and_museum (accessed 8 November 2021). Ridley, Jane. ‘Marlborough House set’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 27  May  2010: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref: odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-53154;jsessionid=A9FE56BD D957719595E5E884DE62B207. Scenes from the Collection: Masterpieces and Curiosities, exhibition catalogue, The Jewish Museum (New York), New York: The Jewish Museum, 2018. Schnapper, Laure. Strauss, Isaac (1806–1888), Institut Européen des Musiques Juives: https://www.iemj.org/en/strauss-isaac-1806-1888/. Sorkin, David. ‘What was the Wissenchaft des Judentums?’, Leo Baeck Institute – New York/Berlin for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture, published online 25  March  2015: https://www.lbi.org/de/news/what-was-wissenschaft-desjudentums/. Sotheby’s. ‘Philip Salomons’, published online 10  November  2020: https://www. sothebys.com/en/articles/philip-salomons (accessed 8 November 2021). Sotheby’s. ‘Reuben David Sassoon’, published online 10 November 2020: https://www. sothebys.com/en/articles/reuben-david-sassoon. Sotheby’s. ‘Sotheby’s Auction of Sassoon: A Golden Legacy Achieves $5 Million in NY’, published online 18  December  2020: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/ sothebys-auction-of-sassoon-a-golden-legacy-achieves-5-million-in-ny. Stammers, Tom. ‘Allies of the Republic?: Inside the Sale of the Century (C.1870–1895)’, in Tom Stammers, The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020: https://www. cambridge.org/core.

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Stenne, Georges. ‘Préfacier’, in Description des objets d’art religieux hébraïques exposés dans les galeries du Trocadéro à l’Exposition universelle de 1878, Paris: Poissy, 1878, pp. I–XII, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5650011m/f10.item. Steyn, Juliet. ‘The Complexities of Assimilation in the 1906 Whitechapel Art Gallery Exhibition Jewish Art and Antiquities’, Oxford Art Journal, 13.2 (1990), Oxford University Press, pp.  44–50: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360337 (accessed 8 November 2021). The Rothschild Archive, ‘Judaica’: https://www.rothschildarchive.org/family/family_ collections/judaica. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC. ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, in Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/ article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion. Woźniak-Koch, Milena, ‘Kolekcja i Muzeum Starożytności Żydowskich z daru Mathiasa Bersohna w Warszawie (Collection and Museum of Jewish Antiquities donated by Mathias Bersohn” in Warsaw’)’, in Muzeum Pamięci. Muzeum w polskiej kulturze pamięci (do 1918 r.) (Museum of Remembrance. Museum in Polish Culture of Remembrance [till 1918]): http://muzeumpamieci.umk.pl/?p=5332.

Fig. 17.1

Jacek Malczewski, The Finished Song, 1919, oil on canvas, 149 × 85, The National Museum in Kraków © Public Domain.

Chapter 17

‘The Finished Song’ of Róża Aleksandrowicz: Emancipation Through Art Collecting Tomasz Dziewicki Skończona pieśń (The Finished Song), an outstanding work by Jacek Malczewski from his late period (Fig. 17.1), has belonged to the collection of the National Museum in Kraków since 1950. The painting was previously owned by the person it represents – Róża Aleksandrowicz (1886–1973), the owner of a store with stationery and art supplies and a collector from Kraków. Aleksandrowicz is known mainly through the work of Malczewski; and in general is absent in historical and artistic research, as well as in the history of Polish collecting. This was partially redressed by the exhibitions and publications of Aleksander  B.  Skotnicki, which constitute the basic reference in the source literature; and established a body of knowledge and basic facts about the life and collecting of Róża Aleksandrowicz.1 The following analysis of her own works of art selected texts and biographical facts show the unique nature of Róża Aleksandrowicz’s collection, being on the one hand the happy result of commercial contacts with the artistic community, and on the other hand the result of her patronage. Needless to say, it represents an interesting example of Polish-Jewish collecting in interwar Kraków.

A Female Entrepreneur and Art Lover from Kraków

From 1877, the Aleksandrowicz family ran a thriving enterprise in their home city of Kraków, the aforementioned store with stationery and art supplies, 1 Two exhibitions on the Aleksandrowicz family inspired by Aleksander  B.  Skotnicki were curated in Kraków-based institutions: Powroty do Krakowa – historia rodziny Aleksandrowiczów, Stradom Centre of Dialogue, Kraków, 2013, curated by Paulina Najbar and Róża Aleksandrowicz – muza malarzy krakowskich, Museum of Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, 2021, curated by Małgorzata Sokołowska and Zofia Weiss. The basic publication on Róża Aleksandrowicz is A. B. Skotnicki, Róża Aleksandrowicz – muza malarzy krakowskich I połowy XX wieku, Kraków: Wydawnictwo AA, 2020. This publication contains two basic texts of similar, classificatory character, see ‘Historia rodziny Aleksandrowiczów od papieru’ (pp. 5–8) and a memoir by Róża Aleksandrowicz’s nephew, Sinai Aleksandrowicz (pp. 38–49).

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_018

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which provided papers and paints to many of the city’s artists. The popularity of the family business is evidenced by the stamps of the Aleksandrowicz company that are to be found on the backs of works of art in museums and private collections. From 1910, the store was to situated on the ground floor of the Dom pod Globusem (Hous under the Globe), a prestigious modernist tenement house near both the Old Town and the Academy of Fine Arts. By offering paper and art materials, they created a network of outlets and warehouses throughout Poland.2 Róża Aleksandrowicz began working in her mother’s company in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I. She did not get married, choosing to devote herself to the co-running of the family business. She came to know all of Kraków’s great artists, and was herself known as a woman of great charm and intelligence; possessing a great personal warmth.3 Many recalled her kind character and here generous financial and material support for befriended artists, including her donation of art materials.4 As a token of their gratitude, the artists presented her with their works, which in turn allowed Róża to gather a gallery of paintings, mainly featuring her own portraits. Her collection consisted of over fifty oil paintings, drawings and etchings. Thirty-nine of them she would donate to the National Museum in Kraków in 1950,5 retaining for her estate over ten works. Róża’s collection can be analysed on several levels. The first is related to the names of the artists, among whom you can find the most famous Kraków artists, prestigious elite portraitists, and chancellors of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Jacek Malczewski, and from the interwar period: Teodor Axentowicz and Wojciech Weiss.6 Most of Róża’s works, however, were created by younger modernist artists, often her 2 The complex history of the company is described in Skotnicki, Róża, pp.  5–8, 15. On the Jewish elite’s business present in Kraków’s landscape see: Katarzyna Zimmerer, ‘Pełno ich nigdzie’, in J.  Purchla (et  al)., Świat przed katastrofą. Żydzi krakowscy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym / A World before a Catastrophe. Krakow’s Jews between the Wars, exhibition catalogue, Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury (International Cultural Centre) Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2007, p. 60 ff.. 3 See K. Zamorski, ‘Odeszli niezauważeni’, Wiadomości (18 November 1973), cited in Skotnicki, Róża, p. 36–37. 4 See the 1930–1932 letters by Tadeusz Makowski to Róża Aleksandrowicz preserved in the Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. All edited and published by Aleksander B. Skotnicki in Skotnicki, Róża, pp. 71–78. 5 A document from 12 August 1950 confirming a donation made by Róża Aleksandrowicz to the National Museum in Kraków, preserved in the Archive of the National Museum in Kraków. 6 See W. Ślesiński, Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie, in A. Wojciechowski (et al.), Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1915–1939, Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków-Gdańsk: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1974, pp. 515–518.

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peers. Due to the proximity of the Academy, their store proved to be a magnet for art students; and some of the artists represented in its collection are hard to find in the historical sources. Indeed, in Róża’s collection, the largest number of works came from young Kraków painters, such as Edward Baranowski and Jacek Mierzejewski. For sentimental reasons, some of the works of the younger generation of artists she would take to Israel in 1950; and some of the more unknown works by Tadeusz Makowski and Leopold Gottlieb, remained in the family collection until recently (Fig. 17.2).7 The only foreign artist in the Aleksandrowicz collection was Marcel Gromaire, represented by a single etching, probably donated to Róża by Gromaire’s Parisian friend Tadeusz Makowski. Despite her friendship with important artists of the École de Paris and the fact that in the late 1920s and 1930s Róża regularly visited France, she showed no interest in French art.8 The Aleksandrowicz store must therefore be perceived not only as a place of exchange, but also as a showcasing of Kraków’s modern art.

Fig. 17.2

Tadeusz Makowski, La Petite Famille, c. 1920, oil on canvas, 27 × 41, private collection © Auction House Tiroche.

7 Three pieces from Aleksandrowicz family collection were sold in Tiroche auction house on 23 June 2018: No. 1, Tadeusz Makowski, La Petite famille, oil on canvas, 27 × 41 cm; No. 2, Leopold Gottlieb, Bakers, mixed media on paper, 43 × 55 cm; No. 3, Leopold Gottlieb, Dead city, lithography, 27 × 37 cm. 8 École de Paris (The School of Paris) refers to the émigré Jewish artists from Central-East Europe who formed in Paris an international artist’s colony. Róża befriended renowned representatives of that circle, Moïse Kisling and Leopold Gottlieb. See postcards sent to Róża Aleksandrowicz by Kisling and Gottlieb and general remarks published in Skotnicki, Róża, pp. 89–91.

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The modernity of painting from the Aleksandrowicz collection is polyphonic and results from Róża’s contact with representatives of various groups. The most radical artistic propositions can be observed in the works of Tytus Czyżewski, the leader of the first avant-garde group called the Polish Expressionists (later Formists). The birth of the new classicism of 1910 is clearly visible in the works of Jacek Mierzejewski. On the other hand, an important component of this mixture of modern currents is the art of the colourists, who flourished in the mid-1920s and who are represented in Róża’s collection by the works of Czesław Rzepiński. As an art lover, Róża probably assessed art intuitively, referring more to her own acquaintance with artists than to their artistic affiliations. Indeed, her collection represents a panorama of Kraków’s artistic milieu in the years 1910–1940, excluding the most conservative products of the local art world, such as the popular paintings of Wojciech and Jerzy Kossak, or the politically engaged, communist avant-garde of the 1930s.

Róża and her Collection

The themes of the works included in the collection say a lot about the nature of Róża’s collection itself. When browsing the list of paintings donated to the National Museum in 1950, we find works featuring classic ‘bourgeois’ landscapes, still lifes, or representations of highlanders – a common theme of Polish modernism. Some of the works included in the collection are, however, separate and personal. Among them is Matka Boska Częstochowska (Our Lady of Częstochowa) by Zygmunt Waliszewski from 1921; also called The Black Madonna of Częstochowa, a religious object strongly connected with the history of the country (Fig. 17.3). This artist, who had come to Kraków from Tbilisi in Georgia and who had collaborated with the Kraków Futurists, created pastiches of Polish national images during this period. He refers here to this famous, miraculous painting and shapes the performance in a primitive, naive way, in line with the poetics of his art, which he was developing at that time.9 As an artist’s gift, this painting would be a magical and protective image of Róża and the only painting in the collection with a Christian theme. For Róża,

9 H. Bartnicka-Górska, ‘Teatr malarskiej wyobraźni’, in H. Bartnicka-Górska, A. Prugar-Myślik, Zygmunt Waliszewski 1897–1936, exhibition catalogue, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (National Museum in Warsaw), Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1999, p. 16.

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Fig. 17.3 Zygmunt Waliszewski, Black Madonna of Częstochowa, 1921, watercolour on cardboard, 67 × 49, The National Museum in Krakow © The National Museum in Krakow.

as a member of a fully assimilated Jewish family, it was also a symbol of her being a part of Polish culture.10 A reflection on the notion of an outsider’s identity is in the photographic portrait of Róża posing with a small reproduction of Maurycy Gottlieb’s painting Shylock and Jessica (fig. 17.4). Gottlieb, identifying himself with Jewish and Polish culture at the same time, was an artist of particular importance to the community of integrationists. As Agnieszka Yass-Alston has noted, the works of Maurycy Gottlieb, abundantly present in Kraków’s Jewish collections, provided an ideological bridge between Judaism and Christianity (including Jewish and Polish culture).11 Moreover, Gottlieb, the most celebrated nineteenth-century Jewish painter, had died in Kraków almost 30 years earlier. It was in this picture that he depicted the heroes of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which is symbolically interpreted as two approaches to Jewish tradition – on the 10 See the personal experience and memories of Róża Aleksandrowicz’s nephew, Dov Aleksandrowicz (1925–2018), related to his child’s everyday life in Kraków: A. D. Pordes, I.  Grin, Ich miasto. Wspomnienia Izraelczyków, przedwojennych mieszkańców Krakowa, Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2004, pp. 67–77. 11 A. Yass-Alston, ‘Żydowscy kolekcjonerzy dzieł sztuki międzywojennego Krakowa. Adolf Schwarz, Rudolf Beres, Seweryn Gottlieb – postaci, które odeszły w niepamięć historii’, Krzysztofory. Zeszyty naukowe Muzeum Historycznego Miasta Krakowa, 35 (2017), pp. 272–277.

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Fig. 17.4 Róża Aleksandrowicz in her apartment in Kraków, c. 1906, private collection © Public Domain.

one hand identifying with the same (Shylock), and on the other, by way of an assimilation to the culture of the country of residence; an inevitable rapprochement with Christianity (Jessica).12 In the presented photograph, as well as in the painting itself, of course, Róża plays the role of Jessica, embodying an integrationist stance. However, although Róża’s art collection was dominated by portraits of herself, it is uncertain under what circumstances they were created; although they were all most likely the result of gifts or commissions. Most often, Róża is depicted without the extravagance, and fashionable dresses and hairstyles from the 1920s. Instead she can be seen as a rather sedate and wealthy lady, belonging more to the fin de siècle than les années folles. Róża would compile a set of at least 16 of her own portraits, which shows her role as a causative ‘agent’ in Kraków’s modern art milieu. She was a friend of artists, but also the face of the family business, without which they could not have plied their artistic trade. So perhaps building a collection of one’s own portraits was also an element of the marketing strategy of the Aleksandrowicz family.

12

On Maurycy Gottlieb’s Shylock and Jessica, see N. Guralnik, In the Flower of Youth. Maurycy Gottlieb 1856–1879, exhibition catalogue, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishers, 1991, pp. 52–54.

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Jacek Malczewski’s Finished Song is one of his numerous paintings referring to the subject of death. Róża’s purple dress, a musical instrument – a balalaika – and a group of reapers are clear vanitas symbols. The musical instrument in combination with the poetic title was used by the artist to create an imaginary situation of the moment right after a musical performance. The old master of the Kraków art world, Malczewski, 65-years-old at the time, addresses in the portrait of the 33-year-old Róża the notions of the elusiveness of beauty and the creation of art. The picture here represented the continuation of a series of female portraits and allegorical compositions created by the artist in the second decade of the twentieth century.13 The Finished Song from 1920 corresponds to an earlier painting, Nike Legionów (Nike of the Legions) from 191614, mirroring as it does its compositional scheme. Nike of the Legions was a patriotic painting treating the sacrifice of the soldiers of the Polskie Legiony (Polish Legions, the Polish military formation founded by Marshal Józef Piłsudski) on the front line of World War I and the fight for an independent Poland. If Finished Song were to be regarded as a mirror, a symbolic reflection of the Nike of the Legions, Róża would be an allegory of the new Poland; and at the same time a symbol of dedication to national art, the face of artistic creativity at the crossroads. In this way, through the act of portraying Polish symbolism, all potential dilemmas of Róża’s identity disappear – as a Jewish woman acculturated to Polishness, she symbolically joined the Polish elite in celebrating the country’s regaining of independence. The identity aspect of this portrait is emphasised by the fact that models of Jewish origin are practically absent in Malczewski’s portraits. Apart from Aleksandrowicz, the portraits of antiquarian and collector Adolf Schwarz are an exception.15

Conclusion

The Aleksandrowicz household was perceived in Kraków as wealthy but also socialist oriented. Róża’s brother, Zygmunt, was politically active; with a seat on the Kraków City Council, and founded an organisation for Jewish orphans; and, as its president, supported the Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności 13 14 15

On Malczewski’s Polonia series, see A. Jakimowicz, Jacek Malczewski i jego epoka, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970, pp. 111–112. The painting reproduced and discussed in T.  Grzybkowska, Świat obrazów Jacka Malczewskiego, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Aleksandra i Marek Dochnal, 1996, p. 155. On Schwarz’s relationship with Malczewski, see A. Yass-Alston, ‘Żydowscy kolekcjonerzy’, pp. 272–277.

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Żydowskiej (Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population).16 Róża and her siblings belonged to the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (‘PPS’: Polish Socialist Party); they were also involved in the Zionist movement, and were active in a number of Jewish organisations, such as Beit Lech.17 At the same time, they engaged with the culture of the Polish intelligentsia through business; and their resulting contact with the world of art.18 Despite the fact that we do not know any written testimonies of Róża’s collecting, we can see her collecting as a socially engaged activity, which was an expression of her civic outlook.19 While running a family business, Róża became an art lover and collector. The proximity of the Aleksandrowicz store to the Academy of Fine Arts was the key to the financial success of the enterprise and the factor that shaped Róża’s collection to the greatest extent. When analysing the photos from Regina and Róża Aleksandrowicz’s apartment, we may note interiors with walls densely adorned with paintings.20 In one such photo, Róża ignores the photographer and turns to her works of art (Fig. 17.5). Here, the collector is fully associated with her living space and the ‘trophies’ that exist in it. Photography (which should be remembered as against today’s widespread availability of this medium in digital form), being a studied and not accidental frame, testifies to the fact that the idea of collecting works was an opportunity for the likes of Róża to meet artists in person and experience unique feelings towards individual works. Róża’s collecting efforts were an important element in the process of assimilation to the culture of the Polish intelligentsia, the best example of which is the representative portrait of Malczewski. The collector only owned contemporary art, acquired or received from living artists, which makes her collection exceptional. Most of the Polish collectors of the interwar period focused on the 16 Yass-Alston, ‘Żydowscy kolekcjonerzy’, pp.  5–6, 28, 38–39 and K.  Zimmerer, ‘Pełno ich nigdzie’, pp. 66–67. 17 Skotnicki, Róża, p. 5. See also J. Purchla (et al.), Świat przed katastrofą. Żydzi krakowscy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym / A World before a Catastrophe. Krakow’s Jews between the Wars, exhibition catalogue, Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury (International Cultural Centre), Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2007, p. 145. 18 Yass-Alston, ‘Żydowscy kolekcjonerzy’, p.  272. Compare also case of Zofia Minder (1894–1945) who ran in Kraków a fashion atelier and was painted by Józef Mehoffer and Xawery Dunikowski. 19 In particular, her relationship with Tadeusz Makowski and the surviving letters from 1930–1932 show Róża as interested in the mundane everyday life of the artist. Róża sent art materials, vinyl and even food to Paris, which provided vital assistance to the modestly living artist. On those letters see Skotnicki, Róża, pp. 71–78. 20 These photographies from the property of Aleksander  B.  Skotnicki are reproduced in Skotnicki, Róża, pp. 42, 49.

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Fig. 17.5

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Róża Aleksandrowicz in her apartment in Kraków, c. 1918–1939, private collection © Public Domain.

paintings of the Polish masters of the nineteenth century and famous artists of the “Young Poland” era, which would normally be purchased from the secondary market. Róża’s discernment was indicative of the integrationist aspect of Jewish collecting of that time.21 During the interwar period, there were over a hundred Jewish collections in Poland, in which the dominant role was played by the paintings of Polish modern art.22 Due to the magic of specific names, it was sometimes used – as Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz notes – as a form of ‘ennoblement’ in business practice, to take as an example the presence of a Jan Matejko painting in the haute couture salon of the Jewish Braciejewski family in Kraków.23 An important aspect of Róża’s collecting was also the feminist perspective. Although women were to be found in the milieu of collectors, they 21 See  K.  Kłudkiewicz, ‘Bardzo długie trwanie. O zainteresowaniach kolekcjonerów sztuką polskiego modernizmu w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym’, in T. F. de Rosset, A.  Kluczewska-Wójcik, A.  Tołysz (eds.), Kolekcjonerstwo polskie XX i XXI wieku. Szkice, Warszawa: Narodowy Instytut Muzealnictwa i Ochrony Zbiorów, 2015, pp. 40–51. 22 See N. Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, ‘Śladami nieznanych przedwojennych żydowskich kolekcjonerów i właścicieli dzieł sztuki’, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, 17 (2021), p. 490. 23 Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, ‘Śladami’, p. 488.

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were rather perceived as the wives or daughters of ‘good houses’ who rarely shaped art collections in accordance with their own ideas.24 Róża’s activity is therefore a unique phenomenon on the local scene, and the only comparable example is the case of Gabriela Zapolska, a well-known and respected playwright. Having taken her first steps in the Parisian milieu in the early 1890s, Zapolska would enter the circles of Paul Sérusier and les Nabis, and create a unique collection of post-Impressionist paintings, which she later sold off.25 Two events took place in the 1920s that redefined the collecting landscape of Kraków: Feliks “Manggha” Jasieński (1920) and Erazm Barącz (1923)26 donated their outstanding collections to the National Museum in Kraków.27 Róża would follow suit 1950, with the significant difference, being however that it was not a voluntary donation, but rather brought about by the post-war realities. The Aleksandrowicz family left Kraków before the outbreak of World War II. When the Germans were close to Lviv, Róża fled to Kazakhstan. She was the only one of her family to return to Kraków after the war and regain her family property. The Aleksandrowicz company would operate again in the years 1947–1949, and in 1950, in the realities of communism (Stalinism), it was nationalised and taken over by the state.28 On leaving for Israel so as to join her brother, Róża was forced to leave part of her collection in Poland (from 1946, works of art in private hands had to be officially registered). The list of 39 works of art preserved at the National Museum in Kraków is a very schematic document featuring as it does the names of authors, vague titles and dimensions of the works. Short words of thanks from the director of the Museum, with mistakes and abbreviations, emphasise the impersonal nature of the document. There is no clear hierarchy of the mentioned works in the list of paintings, nevertheless a significant list is opened by Malczewski’s Finished Song – the largest in size and still the most valuable painting to be found in Róża’s collection; representing in so many ways the chapter of a life which had been ended by Róża’s forced departure from her homeland.

24

Compare cases of Karolina Wereszczakowa (1861–1925), Alina Bondy-Glassowa (1865– 1935) or Józefa Krzyształowicz (1869–1960). 25 See I. Danielewicz, ‘The Collection of Gabriela Zapolska’, Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, 1–4 (1998), p. 114–135. 26 Both were portrayed by Malczewski: Jacek Maczewski, Portrait of Erazm Barącz, 1907, the National Museum in Kraków; Jacek Malczewski, Portraits of Feliks Jasieński, two paintings, both painted in 1903, the National Museum in Kraków. 27 See Kłudkiewicz, ‘Bardzo długie trwanie’, p. 43. 28 Skotnicki, Róża, p. 40.

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List of References Bartnicka-Górska, Hanna. Prugar-Myślik, Anna. Zygmunt Waliszewski 1897–1936, exhibition catalogue, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (National Museum in Warsaw), Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1999. Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, Nawojka. ‘Śladami nieznanych przedwojennych żydowskich kolekcjonerów i właścicieli dzieł sztuki’, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, 17 (2021), pp. 486–522. Danielewicz, Iwona. ‘The Collection of Gabriela Zapolska’, Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, 1–4 (1998), pp. 114–135. Grzybkowska, Teresa. Świat obrazów Jacka Malczewskiego, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Aleksandra i Marek Dochnal, 1996. Guralnik, Nehama. In the Flower of Youth. Maurycy Gottlieb 1856–1879, exhibition catalogue, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishers, 1991. Jakimowicz, Andrzej. Jacek Malczewski i jego epoka, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970. Kłudkiewicz, Kamila. ‘Bardzo długie trwanie. O zainteresowaniach kolekcjonerów sztuką polskiego modernizmu w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym’, in Tomasz de Rosset, Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik, Aldona  Tołysz (eds.), Kolekcjonerstwo polskie XX i XXI wieku. Szkice, Warszawa: Narodowy Instytut Muzealnictwa i Ochrony Zbiorów, 2015, pp. 40–51. Pordes, Anis  D.  Grin, Irek. Ich miasto. Wspomnienia Izraelczyków, przedwojennych mieszkańców Krakowa, Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2004. Skotnicki, Aleksander B. Róża Aleksandrowicz – muza malarzy krakowskich I połowy XX wieku, Kraków: Wydawnictwo AA, 2020. Ślesiński Władysław. Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie, in A. Wojciechowski (et al.), Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1915–1939, Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków-Gdańsk, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1974, pp. 515–518. Yass-Alston, Agnieszka. ‘Żydowscy kolekcjonerzy dzieł sztuki międzywojennego Krakowa. Adolf Schwarz, Rudolf Beres, Seweryn Gottlieb – postaci, które odeszły w niepamięć historii’, Krzysztofory. Zeszyty naukowe Muzeum Historycznego Miasta Krakowa, 35 (2017), pp. 271–284. Zimmerer, Katarzyna. ‘Pełno ich nigdzie’, in Jacek Purchla (et al.), Świat przed katastrofą. Żydzi krakowscy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym / A World before a Catastrophe. Krakow’s Jews between the Wars, exhibition catalogue, Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury (International Cultural Centre in Kraków), Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2007.

Part V Museums and Institutionalised Collections

Fig. 18.1

Heinrich Dohrn jun. (1838 Braunschweig–1913 Florence), 1869 The Pomeranian Library in Szczecin © The Pomeranian Library in Szczecin.

Chapter 18

Ancient Roots of Europe: Heinrich Dohrn Jr. and His Antique Collection for the City Museum in Stettin Dariusz Kacprzak Szczecin (previous German name: Stettin) is a Polish city with a German past. It is one of many paradoxical examples of a complex Central European history, the result of the post-Yalta reordering and the shifting of borders after 1945. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Szczecin developed into a major Prussian port and became part of the German Empire. The growing economic and political importance of the city, as well as its cultural aspirations, also due to its proximity to Berlin, were reflected in the flourishing of collecting and the establishment of museums. Originating from the late mediaeval and early modern collecting traditions of the dukes of Pomerania of the Griffin dynasty, established on the initiative and passion of the nineteenth-century Szczecin bourgeoisie, erected in 1878 and opened in 1913, the City Museum in Stettin (Museum der Stadt Stettin, Städtisches Museum Stettin, Stadtmuseum Stettin) was a huge Kunstkammer, housing works of art and archaeological, artistic and ethnographical artefacts, illustrating the past of Pomerania.1 A crucial role in * This article is a revised and extended version of a study published in an anniversary book dedicated to Professor Antoni Ziemba: D.  Kacprzak,  ‘Spełnione marzenie Heinricha Dohrna – kolekcja antyczna dla Museum der Stadt Stettin. Współczesne wyzwania badawcze’, in P.  Borusowski (et  al.), Ingenium et labor.  Studia ofiarowane Profesorowi Antoniemu Ziembie z okazji 60. urodzin, Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (National Museum in Warsaw), Uniwersytet Warszawski (University of Warsaw), 2020, pp. 339–346. 1 B. Kozińska, ‘Szczecińskie muzeum wczoraj (Das Stettiner Museum gestern)’, in S.P. Kubiak, D. Kacprzak (eds.), 100 lat muzeum w Szczecinie / 100 Jahre Museum in Stettin, Szczecin: Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, 2013, pp. 14–181; D. Kacprzak, ‘Historia i zbiory Muzeum Narodowego w Szczecinie’, in D. Kacprzak, L. Karwowski (eds.), Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, Warszawa: Arkady 2014, pp.  10–31; D.  Kacprzak, ‘Z dziejów szczecińskiego muzealnictwa: Museum der Stadt Stettin / Zur Geschichte der Stettiner Museen: Das Museum der Stadt Stettin’, in D.  Kacprzak., S.P.  Kubiak, L.  Kœrulf  Møller, B.M.  Wolska, Stettin/Szczecin – jedna historia. Sztuka XIX i XX wieku ze zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Szczecinie / Stettin/Szczecin – eine Geschichte. Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts aus dem Bestand des Nationalmuseums Stettin, exhibition catalogue, Bornholms Kunstmuseum, Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, Bornholm – Szczecin: Bornholms Kunstmuseum, Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, 2021, pp. 19–48; D. Kacprzak, ‘Muzeum Miejskie w Szczecinie (Museum der Stadt Stettin): historia

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the process of shaping the idea of the museum and its implementation was played by both the Positivist tradition of encyclopedism and the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic, which continued to thrive in Prussia. Historical and scientific societies, aimed at stimulating national awareness, patriotic attitudes and an interest in history, whilst also shaping an intellectual and aesthetic sensitivity, had a fundamental and causative impact on the creation of Szczecin’s museology.2 The Museum was seen as a monument of history, presented in a variety of its aspects ranging from geology to flora and fauna, and human activity. The ultimate accomplishment of the latter accorded with the humanistic vision of culture, and classical art. It was exemplified by a collection created by Heinrich Dohrn in the first decade of the twentieth century, composed of copies and reconstructions of ancient sculptures, and original minor works of visual art and ceramics, complemented with a set of nineteenth-century academic paintings. It highlighted the humanistic values of European culture in Pomerania.

Citizen and Collector

Born in 1838 in Braunschweig, Heinrich Wolfgang Ludwig Dohrn3 – a naturalist, entomologist, entrepreneur, politician, collector and patron of the arts, was a representative of the third generation of a family who had rendered Szczecin great service (Fig. 18.1).4 He was a grandson of merchant, Heinrich lokalna – historia uniwersalna’, in E. Barylewska-Szymańska (ed.), Teraźniejszość przeszłości. Gdańskie muzealnictwo i historiografia do 1945 roku, Gdańsk: Muzeum Gdańska, Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2021, pp.  188–213; D.  Kacprzak, ‘Museum der Stadt Stettin’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica.pl: http:// www.pomeranica.pl/wiki/Stadtmuseum_Stettin (accessed 10 July  2021); D.  Kacprzak, ‘Museum der Stadt Stettin’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – pomeranica.pl: http:// www.pomeranica.pl/wiki/Muzeum_Narodowe_w_Szczecinie (accessed 10 July 2021). 2 In the context of forming the idea of the museum, collecting exhibits and merging Szczecin’s dispersed collections, the following bourgeois social undertakings should be mentioned, in particular: the Society for Pomeranian History and Antiquities (Gesellschaft für pommersche Geschichte und Altertumskunde), established 1824; the Pomeranian Society for Fine Arts (Kunstverein für Pommern), established 1834, from 1910 acting as Pomeranian Society for Fine and Applied Arts (Pommerscher Verein für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe); the Entomological Society (Entomologischer Verein), established 1837; the Society for Research on Peoples and the Earth (Gesellschaft für Völker und Erdkunde), established 1897. 3 D. Kacprzak, ‘Heinrich Dohrn jun.’, in, Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – pomeranica.pl: http://www.pomeranica.pl/wiki/Muzeum_Narodowe_w_Szczecinie (accessed 10 July 2021). 4 K. Dohrn, Von Bürgern und Weltbürgern. Eine Familiengeschichte, Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1983.

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Dohrn (1769–1852), who arrived in Pomerania after having left Poznań and dealt in colonial goods;5 he was the son of naturalist, entomologist, prose translator and entrepreneur, Carl August Dohrn (1806–1892)6; he was also an elder brother of Felix Anton Dohrn (1840–1909), a scientist, entomologist and Darwinist, establisher of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, married in Warsaw to Maria Baranowska.7 After having graduated from Szczecin St. Mary’s Foundation School, Heinrich Dohrn studied natural science in Bonn and in Berlin. In March 1861, at The Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, he defended a thesis on freshwater broad-fingered decapod crustaceans, which was entitled Astaci fluviatilis, obtaining a doctoral degree.8 In the years 1864–1866, he travelled around West Africa, researching the local fauna. On his return, he continued in his family traditions, conducting lively scientific activity as an entomologist and naturalist, but he also dealt with business. He actively participated in the political and social life of Szczecin, of the Pomeranian province and of the German Empire. He owned tobacco plantations in Sumatra; he was also an owner and co-owner of several companies, dealing mainly in trade. In 1870, he founded Baltischer Lloyd travel society, which offered direct sea connections with New York. In 1872, he was among the founding members of the Society for Supporting Oversea Trade in Szczecin (Verein zur Förderung überseeischer Handelsbeziehungen). From 1913 until his death he was a member of the board of one of the first Prussian joint-stock companies, Prussian Sugar Refinery (Pommersche Provinzial-Zuckersiederei), established by his grandfather. Between 1873 and 1879, he was a member of the Prussian Land Parliament (Landtag) and from 1874 – of the city council of Szczecin. He was also a member of the German Parliament, representing the national-liberal fraction. 5 A.  Bielecka, ‘Heinrich Dohrn sen.’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica.pl: http://encyklopedia.szczecin.pl/wiki/Heinrich_Dohrn_sen. (accessed 10 July 2021). 6 G. Ronge, ‘Carl August Dohrn’, in Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Neue Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 4, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1959, p. 56. 7 T. Heuss, ‘Anton Felix Dohrn’, in Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Neue Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 4, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1959, p. 54–56; A. Bielecka, ‘Anton Dohrn’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica.pl: http://encyklopedia.szczecin.pl/wiki/Anton_Dohrn (accessed 10 July 2021). 8 H.  Dohrn, Astaci fluviatilis. Analecta ad historiam naturalem, Dissertatio inauguralis quam consensu et auctoritate amlissumi philosophorum ordinis in alma litterarum universitate Friderica Gulielma ad summos in philosphia honores rite capessendos die XXVII. m. martii a. MDCCCLXI. h. XII., PhD diss., Berlin: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, A.W.  Schade, 1861: https://ia902704.us.archive.org/11/items/analectaadhisto00dohrgoog/analectaadhist o00dohrgoog.pdf (accessed 10 July 2021).

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However, Heinrich Dohrn’s social activity, related to being a patron of art and a collector, seems to be of particular importance. During a national congress of naturalists held in Szczecin in 1863, Heinrich Dohrn’s father indicated him as his successor. In 1887, Heinrich Dohrn became the president of Entomological Society (Entomologischer Verein zu Stettin), which was established in Szczecin in 1837 as the third scientific society of this type in the world, following the ones that were created in Paris (1832) and London (1833). He also became the editor-in-chief of the society’s periodical Entomologische Zeitung, whose first issue was published in 1840, and in which he included works by famous European insect scientists, as well as his own research results. He also organised regular nature-related exhibitions. During this period, he enriched his family collection, obtaining, among others, rare specimens from the Gulf of Guinea and from Sumatra. During the National Congress of Naturalists, held in Szczecin in 1863, Dohrn proposed the opening of a natural history museum. With time, a concept of an institution combining natural and artistic collections emerged. Finally, multi-department City Museum in Stettin was established, housing the city’s archaeological, artistic and ethnographical relics concerning Pomerania. It also contained Dohrn’s precious collection of beetles and butterflies, which today remains beyond the scope of the museum’s research.9 By the decision of the city council of December 2nd 1912, Heinrich Dohrn was granted the title of an honorary citizen of Szczecin. In recognition of his services as a patron of art and a collector, the museum unveiled his bust carved by Ludwig Manzel, the creator of the monument of Sedina, which no longer exists, and of a sculpture Fight of Hercules with the Centaur; today located at an upper terrace of Wały Chrobrego street, where the museum’s building can be found. In 1938, on the anniversary of the collector’s birth, the Museum der Stadt Stettin held a posthumous exhibition in his memory.10 Both precious collections, the entomological and the artistic ones, which have survived to the present day, are unchangeably a lasting memory of the 9

L.  Krüger,  Festschrift zur Eröffnung des Städtischen Museums zu Stettin am 23. Juni 1913. Gewidmet vom Entomologischen Verein zu Stettin, Stettin: R. Grassmann, 1913, pp. 17–35. 10 Ausstellung zum Gedächtnis von Droku Heinrich Dohrn: geb. 16. April 1838 – gest. 1. Oktober 1913, exhibition catalogue, Städtisches Museum Stettin, 11–30 April 1938, Stettin: F. Hessenland, 1938; H.  Andres, ‘Dr. Heinrich Dohrn-Gedächtnis-Ausstellung. Das Städtische Museum ehrt seinen Gründer durch Pflege seines Vermächtnisses’, Nachrichtenblatt des Stettiner Verkehrsvereins, 12.8 (1938), pp. 1–4; ‘Dr. Heinrich Dohrn zum Gedächtnis’, Jahresbericht des Vereins zur Förderung Überseeischer Handelsbeziehungen zu Stettin e.V., 66 (1938); E.  Ackerknecht, ‘Heinrich Dohrn. Zur Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages am 16. April’, Nachrichtenblatt des Stettiner Verkehrvereins, 12.7 (1938), pp. 1–3.

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Dohrn family’s contribution to the metropolis by the River Oder. Today’s Szczecin is still marked by traces of their presence, including the family house at Ulica 3 Maja (former Lindenstrasse)11 – a three-storey building with characteristic rounded corner, which has retained its form from the time of its redevelopment, commissioned by Heinrich Dohrn in 1893; and a park in Osiedle Bukowe-Klęskowo (former Hökendorf), which are, unfortunately, only faded remnants of the park and arboretum near their summer house, the only surviving elements of which are foundations, with bushes growing over it, and some remains of a maintenance facility nearby.12

Antique Sculpture in Pomerania

In 1885, Heinrich Dohrn founded the Verein Pommersches Museum, and in the late nineteenth century he managed to win the favour and financial support of several Szczecin entrepreneurs, scientists and scholars for the idea of creating a collection of ancient art. He had been undoubtedly inspired by his visits to his brother Anton in Naples and to his zoological research station, which was a meeting point and workshop for scientists from various parts of the world, who had discussions not only on science, but also on philosophy, literature, music and visual arts.13 Heinrich Dohrn was interested in the results of the excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeii. He followed the research of his relative, Adolf Furtwängler, working as a Classics and Archaeology professor, first in Berlin, and then in Munich. It was certainly after one of his visits to Museo Archeologico Nationale di Napoli, when the idea emerged to commission copies of bronzes excavated from, among others, the Villa dei Pisoni in Herculaneum or the House of the Faun and the House of Popidius in Pompeii. Around c. 1900, original sculptures were meticulously selected and the task of creating their faithful copies was commissioned to the local foundry, Fonderia Artistica Cav. G. A. Laganà Napoli. Final galvanoplastic casts were chemically coated with patina in order to make them deceptively resemble the original bronzes. They were brought to Szczecin in 1902 (Fig. 18.2).14 In the introduction to a small catalogue of the collection, prepared by Johannes Sieveking and published in 1908, Dohrn wrote that he had initially 11

M. Łuczak, Szczecin. Śródmieście, Nowe Miasto / Stadtmitte, Neustadt, Szczecin: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Historyczne, 2015, pp. 125–127. 12 M.  Łuczak, Szczecin. Klęskowo, Kijewo (Hökendorf, Rosengarten bei Altdamm), Szczecin: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Historyczne, 2012, pp. 46–54. 13 T. Heuss, Anton Dohrn in Neapel, Berlin–Zürich: Atlantis, 1940. 14 Pommersche Zeitung, 14 Juni 1902.

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The City Museum in Stettin. View of the representative hall with an exhibition of bronze copies and reconstructions of ancient sculptures by Heinrich Dohrn, c. 1913, Archives of the National Museum in Szczecin © Archives of the National Museum in Szczecin.

intended for the Szczecin exhibits to make the same impression as that made by sculptures in the Italian museums, which had been totally impossible given the use of plaster casts borrowed from Berlin.15 Consequently, original sculptures were copied; and with all their damages, including wrongly joined elements and patina – light-green covering the objects excavated from Pompeii and a darker green to be found on the surfaces of those found in Herculaneum. Among the sculptures which arrived in Pomerania, there were: Resting Hermes, Drunken Satyr, Sleeping Satyr, Dancing Satyr, Satyr with Wineskin, Plato, Amazon (a herma), Norbanus Sorex (a herma), L. Caecilius Incundus, Mounted Amazon, two gazelles and a goat.16 Examples of works of applied arts were also ­copied, 15

(J. Sieveking), Verzeichnis der Nachbildungen antiker Skulpturen des Städtischen Museums zu Stettin, Stettin: R. Grassmann, 1908, p. 3. 16 See E. Pozzi (et al.), Le Collezioni del Museo Nazionale di Napoli. La scultura greco-romana, Le sculture antiche della collezione Farnese, Le collezioni monetali, Le oreficerie, La collezione glittica, Roma–Milano: De Luca Edizzioni d’Arte, Leonardo Editore, 1989.

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including a single-pan balance, a tripod candelabra, surgical instruments, a door knocker, several pitchers, buckets, a frying pan and a tripoded sacrificial table.17 They were supposed to depict the everyday life of Mediterranean civilisation ages ago and to stimulate the audience’s imagination. Soon after the works arrived in Szczecin, they were made available to the citizens in the rooms of Friedrich-Wilhelm-Schule at 51 Elisabethstraße (present-day Kaszubska Street). There were fifty of them – this number of exhibits may be found in the first part of the abovementioned catalogue created by Johannes Sieveking.18 Encouraged by the city of Szczecin great interest in the exhibition, the collector decided to acquire further objects. He had gained more experience by this stage, and was developing a network of contacts among archaeologists from Berlin and Munich. This time, however, the works had to be closer to the alleged original Greek forms of the sculptures. He described his intentions in the following way: Now the primary program could expand and go to the restoration of Greek originals, which have only been preserved in imperfect copies, mostly from the times of the Roman Empire. In particular, the assignment was to reproduce the bronze works from those marble copies, thanks to which in the heyday of Greece the character of unparalleled places of art was given to public buildings and squares.19

The implementation of this courageous project was undertaken by Adolf Furtwängler, a lecturer at Munich University and the director of the local Glypthotek.20 The initial task was the reconstruction of Athena Lemnia by Phidias: a marble torso from the Dresden Albertinum was combined with a female head from the collection of the Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna and supplemented with lacking attributes: a spear and a helmet (Fig. 18.3). In years 1904–1908, Furtwängler reconstructed Athena and Marsyas by Myron 17 See  O.  Ferrari (et  al.), Le Collezioni del Museo Nazionale di Napoli. I Mosaici, le Pitture, gli Oggetti d’uso quotidiano, gli Argenti, le Terrecotte invetriate, i Vetri, i Cristalli, gli Avori, Roma: De Luca Editore, 1989. 18 Sieveking, Verzeichnis, pp. 5–11. 19 Sieveking, Verzeichnis, p.  3: “Nun konnte das ursprüngliche Programm dahin erweitert werden, an die Wiederherstellung griechiescher Originale zu gehen, welche nur in unvollkommenen Kopien, meist aus der römischen Kaiserzeit erhalten sind. Insbesondere war die Aufgabe gestellt, aus den Marmorkopien die Bronzewerke wiederherzustellen, welche in der Blütezeit Griechenlands den öffentlichen Gebäuden und Plätzen den Charakter unöbertrefflicher Stätten der Kunst aufdrückten”. 20 M. Flashar (ed.), Adolf Furtwängler. Der Archeologe, exhibition catalogue, Archeologische Sammlung der Universität Freiburg, 2003, München: Biering&Brinkmann, 2003; see E. Straub, Die Furtwänglers. Geschichte einer deutschen Familie, München: Siedler Verlag, 2007.

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Fig. 18.3

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Reconstruction of Adolf Fürtwängler after Phidias, The Lemnian Athena, 1905–1908, bronze, cast (foundry: WMF – Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik, Abteilung für Galvanoplastik, Geislingen an der Steige), The National Museum in Szczecin © The National Museum in Szczecin, Grzegorz Solecki, Arkadiusz Piętak.

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with the use of the Roman copy of the figure of Marsyas (without an arm and the tail) owned by former Museo Profano Lateranense (present in the collection of Vatican Museo Gregoriano Profano), the torso of Athena from the Louvre in Paris and a head from the collection of the Albertinum in Dresden. He himself reconstructed the arms of both figures. The first of the Greek works of art reproduced in this way was placed in the Munich Glypthotek and was the model for a copy which was brought to Szczecin. In turn, for creating the copy of Westmacott Ephebe (Kyniskos) by Polykleitos Furtwängler used the marble torso of a young man from the British Museum in London and a head from the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The right hand reaching to the hair was a complement which later aroused controversy, as the Szczecin version is different from the London one, which does not have this element. In years 1904–1912, further reconstructions were undertaken, which were based on Adolf Furtwängler’s research and his discussion with his assistants and acolytes, most of all, with Johannes Sieveking, Ludwig Curtius, Walter Amelung and Walter Riezler (Fig. 18.5). The discussions and arguments often received contributions from Heinrich Dohrn. After the early death of Furtwängler, Sieveking, who in 1907 took up the position of director of the Antiquarium located in the Munich Royal Mansion, oversaw the works. Walter Amelung and Hans Everding were involved in work on the copy of Aphrodite of Knidos. Emil Epple worked on the marble copy of the Stele of Hegeso, made of the same material by an artist belonging to the circle of Agoracritus of Paros. Born in Szczecin, Walter Amelung took part in creating the casts of the so-called Aspasia by Calamis and the so-called Medusa Rondanini, according to the copies from the Munich Glypthotek. The bronze casts were made with the use of galvanoplastics21 and were chemically coated with patina at a branch of the Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (Württemberg Metalware Factory) foundry in Geislingen an der Steige, which specialised in this type of work.22 The Szczecin casts attracted attention for their quality and their precise chiselling.

21 22

J. Krause, J.A. Mróz, ‘Kopia konnego pomnika Bartolomea Colleoniego. Zagadnienie eksponowania kopii dzieł sztuki’, Wiadomości Konserwatorskie, 23 (2008), pp. 81–93. J.  Sieveking, ‘Nachbildungen antiker Kunstwerke im Städtischen Museum zu Stettin’, Museumskunde Zeitschrift für Verwaltung und Technik öffentlicher und privater Sammlungen, 1.5 (1909), pp. 129–135 (altered reprint attached to a publication advertising Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik in Geislingen an der Steige, manufacturing copies of ancient sculptures for commercial purposes, which contains price list of particular works).

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Fig. 18.4 Walter Riezler (1878 Munich – 1965 Munich), Pauly Family Private Collection, courtesy of Richard Brook, Carlsbad California © Richard Brook, Carlsbad, California.

The second part of the catalogue from 1908 included eighteen reconstructions and copies. It obviously did not mention several sculptures made at a later time; among others, Apollo Belvedere, donated in 1909 by Gustav Herrmann, Szczecin city councillor, or Charioteer of Delphi, commissioned in 1911 by Verein Pommersches Museum. The reconstruction of Doryphoros by Polykleitos, created in the years 1910–1912, is a particularly interesting object of the Szczecin collection.23 The original sculpture did not survive the fall of ancient Rome, and has been known only from descriptions and Roman marble copies, which are different from one another in detail and were identified as late as in 1862 by Karl Friederichs. Soon afterwards, at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Adolf Furtwängler reconstructed the original appearance of the sculpture, based on comparative analysis of the identified copies preserved in European museums. The works on the reconstruction were 23

D. Kacprzak, ‘Doryforos’ in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica.pl: http:// pomeranica.pl/wiki/Rze%C5%BAba_Doryforos_(Szczecin) (accessed 10  July  2021). See H. Beck, P.C. Bol, M. Bückling (eds.), Polyklet. Der Bildhauer der griechischen Klassik, exhibition catalogue, Liebieghaus, Museum alter Plastik, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zaubern, 1990.

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continued by Paul Wolters, and the final object was made by Georg Römer, a sculptor and a medallist who hailed from Wrocław. Römer cast the figure in bronze, probably by Gladenbeck in his family foundry in Friedrichshagen (present Berlin-Friedrichshagen). He used the lost wax technique, which was applied by the Greek artists of the 5th century B.C. for free-standing sculptures.24 Employing this traditional method, considerably more expensive than the galvanoplastics, was insisted on by Walter Riezler, who had wanted the Szczecin object to be a copy of its ancient original. Georg Römer, following the guidance of archaeologists, made the model based on three Roman copies: the so-called Pourtalès torso (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz), the statue from Pompeii (arms and legs; Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli) and the herm from the Villa dei Pisoni in Herculaneum (head; Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli). The original colours were intended to be reconstructed as well: the figure was coated with a dark patina, the lips were highlighted with carmine, the eyes were made of glass and enamel, the eye-lashes – of copper, and the lips and nipples – of copper coated with patina, covered with a thin layer of asphalt. The hair and the nails were covered with a thin layer of gold. Until 1939, the Doryphoros was holding a spear. It was an arbitrary reconstructing solution based on Friedrich Hauser’s hypothesis from 1909, according to which the Greek statue was supposed to represent Achilles. It is worth mentioning that another cast by Georg Römer following Adolf Furtwängler’s reconstruction was made later, which had been commissioned as a symbolic monument to commemorate the victims of the First World War. In years 1920–1921, the Munich Doryphoros, made on the basis of a mould taken off the Szczecin statue, was shown in a representative room of Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich. In 1944, the sculpture

24

The method consists in preparing a core of sand and clay or of plaster and then covering it with a layer of wax (the thickness of the wax coating corresponds to the thickness of the walls of the final bronze cast). The artist forms a wax statue, then the wax model made in this way is covered with a layer of thinned clay so that it adheres tightly to the wax and fills the details of the sculpture precisely shaped in wax. The model prepared in this way is covered with a thick clay coating. Then thin tubes are put into, the ends of which reach the layer of wax, passing through the outer layer of clay. In this form, the sculpture is fired – at the high temperature of the foundry furnace, the wax melts and flows out through sprues, while the clay is fired to form a sculpture. Liquid bronze (an alloy of copper and tin with additions of various metals) is poured into the mould prepared in this way. After the metal solidifies, the clay form crumbles and the sculpture is brought out. The lost wax casting method allows one to make one casting, as removing the bronze from the mould destroys the clay mantle. At the final stage of creation, the bronze is cold-chiselled.

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was damaged. Following its restoration, it was located in 1958 at the university again, where it may be found today.25 Heinrich Dohrn, frequently availing of the financial support of his brother’s wife Maria Baranowska’s, acquired the exhibits in the European antiquity market. During an auction in Kassel, at which A. Vogell’s ancient collection had been listed, he purchased numerous and valuable ceramic objects excavated by the Black Sea.26 The collection was supplemented with Roman glassware in 1910 on account of the funds raised among Szczecin’s citizens; and at the turn of 1911 and 1912, when eighteen Greek terracotta objects were acquired, probably originating from the legacy of Jean Paul Lambroso from Athens.27 As it has been mentioned above, only a small number of these objects has survived. The inventory records of Museum der Stadt Stettin have been preserved only partially. The book concerning the ancient collections has been lost. On the basis of other resources (documents, letters, old scientific and popular publications, press releases and museum guides), it has been possible to identify only some of the pre-war inventory numbers of the exhibits. The National Museum in Szczecin owns over one hundred objects originating from the pre-war ancient collection of Museum der Stadt Stettin: sculptures and minor works of visual art and ceramics (it is difficult to unambiguously determine the provenience of several of them). According to available archival resources, around fifteen sculptures and several dozen minor visual art and ceramics relics should be classified as lost (partially or probably irretrievably destroyed).

Heinrich Dohrn’s Collection: a Heritage of Antiquity and its Local Meaning

The opening of the City Museum of Szczecin in 1913 represented a crowning summation of Heinrich Dohrn’s legacy. He died on 1 October 1913 in Florence during his travels from Szczecin to Naples. 25 26

27

R.M.  Schneider, ‘Verehrt – verdrängt – vergessen? Der Speerträger der Münchner Universität’, Aviso. Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Kunst in Bayern, 3 (2004), pp. 10–17. M. Cramer, Griechische Altertümer südrussischen Fundorts aus dem Besitze des Herrn A. Vogell, Karlsruhe, Versteigerung zu Cassel in der Gewerbehalle, Friedrich-Wilhelmsplatz 6…, Cassel: Gebrüder Gotthelft, Kgl. Hofbuchdrucker, 1908. The copy available in The National Museum in Szczecin Library has handwritten notes on purchased relics. Compare: R.  Wołągiewicz, ‘Dzieje szczecińskiej kolekcji greckiej sztuki antycznej’, Przegląd Zachodniopomorski, 3(32).1–2 (1988), pp. 467. H.  Plötz, ‘Die Dohrnsche Antiken-Sammlung. Das Museum der Stadt Stettin’, Ostsee Zeitung, 22 Juni 1913, p. 3.

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Heinrich Dohrn’s antique collection recalls the ancient roots and humanistic values of European culture and is central to the history of the collecting idea in Pomerania. It is a lasting memory of the Dohrn family’s contribution to Szczecin museology and Szczecin itself. In the continental perspective, this meaningful bourgeois collection represents a valuable contribution to research pertaining to Haskellan artistic tastes on the part of the wealthy and educated bourgeoisie of Prussia and northern Germany at the mature stage of development of this social class.28 The collection is also important in terms of an analysis of the creation and development of museums in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.29 List of References Ackerknecht, Erwin. ‘Heinrich Dohrn. Zur Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages am 16. April’, Nachrichtenblatt des Stettiner Verkehrvereins, 12.7 (1938), pp. 1–3. Andres, Helmut. ‘Dr. Heinrich Dohrn-Gedächtnis-Ausstellung. Das Städtische Museum ehrt seinen Gründer durch Pflege seines Vermächtnisses’, Nachrichtenblatt des Stettiner Verkehrsvereins, 12.8 (1938), pp. 1–4. Ausstellung zum Gedächtnis von Dr. Heinrich Dohrn: geb. 16. April 1838–gest. 1. Oktober 1913, exhibition catalogue, Städtisches Museum Stettin, 11–30  April  1938, Stettin: F. Hessenland, 1938. Beck, Herbert. Bol, Peter Cornelius. Bückling, Maraike (eds.). Polyklet. Der Bildhauer der griechischen Klassik, exhibition catalogue, Liebieghaus, Museum alter Plastik, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zaubern, 1990. 28

29

J.  Kocka, U.  Frevert (eds.), Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, Vol. 1–3, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988; W. Plumpe, J. Lesczenski (eds.), Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus, Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2009; S. Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich. Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsammlerkultur, Kiel: Verlag Ludwig, 2005. B.  Deneke, ‘Die Museen und die Entwicklung der Kulturgeschichte’, in B. Deneke, R. Kahsnitz (eds.), Das kunst- und kulturgeschichtliche Museum im 19. Jahrhundert. Vorträge des Symposions im Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, München: Prestel, 1977, series: Studien zur Kunst des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Vol. 39, pp. 118–134; J.J. Sheehan, Geschichte der deutschen Kunstmuseen. Von der fürstlichen Kunstkammer zur modernen Sammlung, München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2002 (the following chapters in particular: ‘Das Museumszeitalter 1830–1880’, pp. 129–206; ‘Die Museen und der Modernismus 1880–1914’, pp. 207–275); H.-U. Thamer, Kunstsammeln. Eine Geschichte von Leidenschaft und Macht, Darmstadt: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2015 (in particular: ‘Die Blütezeit bürgerlichen Sammelns. Alte Meister und modre Kunst in Villen und Museen’, pp. 123–150).

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Bielecka, Anna. ‘Anton Dohrn’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica.pl: http://encyklopedia.szczecin.pl/wiki/Anton_Dohrn (accessed 10 July 2021). Bielecka, Anna. ‘Heinrich Dohrn sen.’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica.pl: http://encyklopedia.szczecin.pl/wiki/Heinrich_Dohrn_sen. (accessed 10 July 2021). Cramer, Max. Griechische Altertümer südrussischen Fundorts aus dem Besitze des Herrn  A.  Vogell, Karlsruhe, Versteigerung zu Cassel in der Gewerbehalle, Friedrich-Wilhelmsplatz 6…, Cassel: Gebrüder Gotthelft, Kgl. Hofbuchdrucker, 1908. Deneke, Bernward. ‘Die Museen und die Entwicklung der Kulturgeschichte’, in Bernward Deneke, Rainer Kahsnitz (eds.), Das kunst- und kulturgeschichtliche Museum im 19. Jahrhundert. Vorträge des Symposions im Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, München: Prestel, 1977, pp. 118–134. Dohrn, Heinrich. Astaci fluviatilis. Analecta ad historiam naturalem, Dissertatio inauguralis quam consensu et auctoritate amlissumi philosophorum ordinis in alma litterarum universitate Friderica Gulielma ad summos in philosphia honores rite capessendos die XXVII. m. martii a. MDCCCLXI. h. XII., PhD diss., Berlin: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, A.W. Schade, 1861. Dohrn, Klaus. Von Bürgern und Weltbürgern. Eine Familiengeschichte, Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1983. ‘Dr. Heinrich Dohrn zum Gedächtnis 1937’, Jahresbericht des Vereins zur Förderung Überseeischer Handelsbeziehungen zu Stettin e.V., 66 (1938). Ferrari, Oreste (et al.). Le Collezioni del Museo Nazionale di Napoli. I Mosaici, le Pitture, gli Oggetti d’uso quotidiano, gli Argenti, le Terrecotte invetriate, i Vetri, i Cristalli, gli Avori, Roma: De Luca Editore, 1989. Flashar, Martin (ed.). Adolf Furtwängler. Der Archeologe, exhibition catalogue, Archeologische Sammlung der Universität Freiburg, 2003, München: Biering&Brinkmann, 2003. Gałczyńska, Cecylia Zofia. ‘Walther Amelung (1865–1977). Mistrz identyfikacji i rekonstrukcji rzeźby greckiej’, Meander, 68 (2013), pp. 133–177. Heuss, Theodor. Anton Dohrn in Neapel, Berlin–Zürich: Atlantis, 1940. Heuss, Theodor. ‘Anton Felix Dohrn’, in Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Neue Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 4, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1959, pp. 54–56. Kacprzak, Dariusz. ‘Doryforos’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica. pl: http://pomeranica.pl/wiki/Rze%C5%BAba_Doryforos_(Szczecin) (accessed 10 July 2021). Kacprzak, Dariusz. ‘Heinrich Dohrn jun’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – Pomeranica.pl: http://encyklopedia.szczecin.pl/wiki/Heinrich_Dohrn_jun. (accessed 10 July 2021).

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Kacprzak, Dariusz. ‘Historia i zbiory Muzeum Narodowego w Szczecinie’, in Dariusz Kacprzak, Lech Karwowski (eds.), Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, Warszawa: Arkady, 2014. pp. 10–31. Kacprzak, Dariusz. Museum der Stadt Stettin, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – pomeranica.pl, http://www.pomeranica.pl/wiki/Stadtmuseum_Stettin (accessed 10 July 2021). Kacprzak, Dariusz. ‘Muzeum Miejskie w Szczecinie (Museum der Stadt Stettin): historia lokalna – historia uniwersalna’, in Ewa Barylewska-Szymańska (ed.), Teraźniejszość przeszłości. Gdańskie muzealnictwo i historiografia do 1945 roku, Gdańsk: Muzeum Gdańska, Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2021, pp. 188–213. Kacprzak, Dariusz. ‘Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie’, in Encyklopedia Pomorza Zachodniego – pomeranica.pl: http://www.pomeranica.pl/wiki/Muzeum_Narodowe_ w_Szczecinie (accessed 10 July 2021). Kacprzak, Dariusz. ‘Z dziejów szczecińskiego muzealnictwa: Museum der Stadt Stettin / Zur Geschichte der Stettiner Museen: Das Museum der Stadt Stettin’, in Dariusz Kacprzak, Szymon Piotr Kubiak, Lars Møller Kœrulf, Beata Małgorzata Wolska, Stettin/Szczecin – jedna historia. Sztuka XIX i XX wieku ze zbiorów Muzeum Narodowego w Szczecinie (Stettin/Szczecin – eine Geschichte. Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts aus dem Bestand des Nationalmuseums Stettin), exhibition catalogue, Bornholms Kunstmuseum, Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, Bornholm – Szczecin: Bornholms Kunstmuseum, Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, 2021, pp. 19–48. Kacprzak, Dariusz.  ‘Spełnione marzenie Heinricha Dohrna – kolekcja antyczna dla Museum der Stadt Stettin. Współczesne wyzwania badawcze’, in Piotr Borusowski (et al.), Ingenium et labor. Studia ofiarowane Profesorowi Antoniemu Ziembie z okazji 60. urodzin, Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (the National Museum in Warsaw), Uniwersytet Warszawski (University of Warsaw), 2020, pp. 339–346. Kocka, Jürgen. Frevert, Ute (eds.). Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, Vol. 1–3, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Kozińska, Bogdana. ‘Szczecińskie muzeum wczoraj (Das Stettiner Museum gestern)’, in Szymon Piotr Kubiak, Dariusz Kacprzak (eds.), 100 lat muzeum w Szczecinie (100 Jahre Museum in Stettin), Szczecin: Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, 2013, pp. 14–181. Krause, Janusz. Mróz, Janusz. ‘Kopia konnego pomnika Bartolomea Colleoniego. Zagadnienie eksponowania kopii dzieł sztuki’, Wiadomości Konserwatorskie, 23 (2008), pp. 81–93. Krüger, Leopold. Festschrift zur Eröffnung des Städtischen Museums zu Stettin am 23. Juni 1913. Gewidmet vom Entomologischen Verein zu Stettin, Stettin: R. Grassmann, 1913.

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Kuhrau, Sven. Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich. Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsammlerkultur, Kiel: Verlag Ludwig, 2005. Łopuch, Maria. ‘Małe Pompeje. Gabinet pompejański w dawnym Muzeum Miejskim w Szczecinie’, Ochrona Zabytków, 3 (2005), pp. 39–48. Łopuch, Maria. ‘Szczecińska Hellada’, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, 66.1–2 (2004), pp. 127–144. Łuczak, Marek. Szczecin. Klęskowo, Kijewo (Hökendorf, Rosengarten bei Altdamm), Szczecin: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Historyczne, 2012. Łuczak, Marek. Szczecin. Śródmieście, Nowe Miasto (Stadtmitte, Neustadt), Szczecin: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Historyczne, 2015. Piekarska, Delfina. ‘Szczecińska szczypta antyku. Kolekcja Heinricha Dohrna’, Przegląd Odlewnictwa, 3–4 (2011), pp. 128–132. Plötz, Heinrich. ‘Die Dohrnsche Antiken-Sammlung. Das Museum der Stadt Stettin’, Ostsee Zeitung, 22 Juni 1913, p. 3. Plumpe, Werner. Lesczenski, Jörg (eds.), Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus, Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2009. Pommersche Zeitung, (14 Juni 1902). Pozzi, Enrica (et  al.). Le Collezioni del Museo Nazionale di Napoli. La scultura grecoromana, Le sculture antiche della collezione Farnese, Le collezioni monetali, Le oreficerie, La collezione glittica, Roma–Milano: De Luca Edizzioni d’Arte, Leonardo Editore, 1989. Ronge, Grete. ‘Carl August Dohrn’, in Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Neue Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 4, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1959, p. 56. Sadurska, Anna. Kolekcja odlewów brązowych rzeźb antycznych w Muzeum Narodowym w Warszawie (tzw. Brązy szczecińskie), typescript, (undated), The National Museum in Warsaw, Archiv of the Ancient Art Department. Schmölder-Veit, Andrea, and Schröder-Griebel, Nele (eds.). Lebendiger Gips. 150 Jahre Museum für Abgüssse Klassischer Bildwerke München, exhibition catalogue, Museum für Abgüssse Klassischer Bildwerke (München 2019–2020), München: Germar Wambach, 2019. Schneider Rolf Michael. ‘Verehrt – verdrängt – vergessen? Der Speerträger der Münchner Universität’, Aviso. Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Kunst in Bayern, 3 (2004), pp. 10–17. Settis Salvatore. Anguissola Anna. Gasparotto Davide (eds.). Serial / Portable Classic. The Greek Canon and Its Mutations, exhibition catalogue, Fondazione Prada in Milano, Fondazione Prada in Venice (Milano and Venice 2015), Milano: Progetto Prada Arte, 2015. Sheehan, James. Geschichte der deutschen Kunstmuseen. Von der fürstlichen Kunstkammer zur modernen Sammlung, München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2002.

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(Sieveking Johannes). Verzeichnis der Nachbildungen antiker Skulpturen des Städti­ schen Museums zu Stettin, Stettin: R. Grassmann, 1908. Sieveking, Johannes. ‘Nachbildungen antiker Kunstwerke im Städtischen Museum zu Stettin’, Museumskunde. Zeitschrift für Verwaltung und Technik öffentlicher und privater Sammlungen, 1.5 (1909), pp. 129–135. Straub, Eberhard. Die Furtwänglers. Geschichte einer deutschen Familie, München: Siedler Verlag, 2007. Thamer, Hans-Ulrich. Kunstsammeln. Eine Geschichte von Leidenschaft und Macht, Darmstadt: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2015. Wołągiewicz, Ryszard. ‘Dzieje szczecińskiej kolekcji greckiej sztuki antycznej, Przegląd Zachodniopomorski’, 3(32).1–2 (1988), pp. 461–479.

Fig. 19.1

West facade of the Hamburg Kunsthalle on the Alsterhöhe and the Schiller Monument, c. 1900 © bpk-Bildagentur/Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

Chapter 19

Displaying Nation and Region: Bourgeois Foundations of Museums in Nineteenth-Century Germany Marina Beck The nineteenth century, in the states that comprised the German Reich, saw the construction of numerous museum buildings for the purpose of showing collections created by members of the bourgeoisie. These ‘bourgeois museums’ differed in their purposes from museums that held collections belonging to the nobility. The roots of these differences lay in the divergent contexts and foundations of the various collections. The collections held by noble and princely dynasties usually took shape over generations. A ‘bourgeois museum’, by contrast, often came into being at the instigation of a society or association like the fine art societies (Kunstvereine), or of an individual benefactor like Johann Friedrich Städel in Frankfurt am Main and Ferdinand Franz Wallraf in Cologne.1 The art associations or donors gave their collections to a city or state with the stipulation that they would be opened to the public. In many cases, further endowments allowed the museum collections to grow; as happened in the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg and Bremen.2 In numerous other instances, as in Frankfurt am Main, the endowment funds underpinned the augmentation of the collection.

1 For the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, see R.  Budde, ‘Das Wallraf-Richartz-Museum und seine Sammlungen’, in R.  Budde and R.  Krischel (eds.), Das Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. 100 Meisterwerke, Köln: DuMont, 2000, pp. 8–29; V. Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum 1790– 1870. Lage, Baukörper, Raumorganisation, Bildprogramm, München, Prestel, 1967, pp.  169– 175; S.  Schulze, Bildprogramme in deutschen Kunstmuseen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main, Lang, 1984, pp.  110–120; A.  Verbeek, ‘Das erste Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. Zum Gedächtnis seiner Eröffnung am 1. Juli 1861’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 23 (1961), pp. 7–36. 2 For the Kunsthalle Bremen, see K.  Schaefer, ‘Museen und öffentliche Kunstpflege’, in Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein (ed.), Bremen und seine Bauten, Bremen: Schünemann, 1900, pp. 293–299; Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum, pp. 160–164; R. Stein, Klassizismus und Romantik in der Baukunst Bremens, Bd. 1: Das Gebiet der Altstadt und der alten Neustadt, der Wall und die Contrescarpe, Bremen: Hauschild, 1964, pp. 126–128.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657795437_020

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Apart from the differences in the formation process of the museums, the bourgeois collections differed from the aristocratic ones in the focus of their amassments. The bourgeois collections that were transferred to museums often consisted of works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They included contemporary art and on rare occasions Old Masters before 1800. Due to the constant growth of the collections through new donations, gifts and acquisitions, the collection holdings in the bourgeois museums were also very heterogeneous and generally without any specific thematic foci. Alongside these aspects stands the didactic intention behind many of these museums, which frequently called for the creation of particular types of spaces. All these factors had a decisive influence on museum construction and design, particularly in relation to the number and arrangement of rooms and spaces, and the iconographic programs used both externally and internally. These factors will now be illustrated using the examples of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main and the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (Fig. 19.1). Some of the specific characteristics of museums that emerged on the basis of collections created by members of the bourgeoisie are also illuminated.

Städel Museum, Frankfurt

The Städel Museum’s life began as an endowment by the Frankfurter banker and merchant Johann Friedrich Städel, whose will, written in 1815, financed the foundation of an institute of art that would be based on his collection.3 This institution was to be governed by five administrators from among Frankfurt’s citizenry. The new foundation was to both maintain a public art collection and support the apprenticeships of emerging artists. Initially, the collection was housed in Städel’s former residence on the Rossmarkt, before moving in 1833 to the former postmaster’s villa in Neue Mainzer Street. Alongside a picture gallery and collections of casts, prints and drawings, the building housed an art school and a library. In 1878, the Städel Institute moved to a new building

3 For the Städel-Museum, see C.  Meyer, Die Geburt des bürgerlichen Kunstmuseums. Johann Friedrich Städel und sein Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, G+H, 2013; Städel Museum (ed.), … zum Besten hiesiger Stadt und Bürgerschaft. 200 Jahre Städel. Eine Festschrift, München: Prestel, 2015.

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constructed by Oscar Sommer at Schaumainkai Street that included separate buildings for the Museum and the School of Art.4 With the 1878 move, the Städel’s collection changed its focus a number of times. Städel’s bequest had comprised a total of 476 paintings, primarily works by Dutch, Flemish, German and Italian artists, supplemented with a handful of pieces by French and Frankfurt-based painters. Their subjects were predominantly landscape and history, alongside portraits and genre works. Of these 476 paintings, 404 were sold soon after Städel’s death, and the proceeds were used to fund the acquisition of other pieces deemed to be of higher quality and greater significance.5 Under its first director, the artist Philipp Veit (1830–1843), who had a close association with the Nazarene movement of German Romantics, the Städel acquisitions showed a preponderance of religious works of the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento, and paintings by the early Dutch artists.6 These purchases anchored the collection’s focus, being at the threshold of transition from the medieval era to the Renaissance in Germany and Italy, a fact of which visitors were apprised of as they entered the museum and saw busts of Dürer and Raphael flanking the steps that led to the museum’s first floor and three reception rooms.7 The purpose of these spaces was to prepare the public to meet and respond to the art featured in the collection. To this end, the first encounter of visitors was with the artistic ideal in the form of reproductions of Raphael’s Vatican frescoes. The rooms to the north contained the sculpture collections.8 The painting gallery (Fig. 19.2) was housed in the rooms to the south, the first of which showed 17th century Dutch and Flemish art. The second room 4 T. W. Gaethgens, ‘Das Städel in Frankfurt. Von der Stiftung eines Bürgers zu einer europäi­ schen Institution’, in Städel Museum (ed.), … zum Besten hiesiger Stadt und Bürgerschaft. 200 Jahre Städel. Eine Festschrift, München: Prestel, 2015, pp. 41–47. 5 Gaethgens, ‘Das Städel in Frankfurt’, p. 42. 6 Gaethgens, ‘Das Städel in Frankfurt’, pp. 43–44. 7 M. Thimann, ‘Raffael and Dürer. Ursprung, Wachstum und Verschwinden einer Idee in der deutschen Romantik’, in M.  Thimann and C.  Hübner (eds.), Sterbliche Götter. Raffael und Dürer in der Kunst der deutschen Romantik, exhibition catalogue, Göttingen, Kunstsammlung der Universität Göttingen, Rom, Casa di Goethe, Petersberg: Imhof 2015, pp. 8–41. 8 Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the Nineteenth Century, 1833 Neue Mainzer Strasse, Building: https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/neue-mainzer-strassehaus/1833/ (accessed 29 November 2021). The descriptions of the different rooms are found on the website under Rooms, 1833 Floor Plan of the first Floor: https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/neue-mainzer-strasse-raeume/ (accessed 29  November  2021); Verzeichniss der öffentlich, 1835, pp. 3–4.

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Floor plan, Reconstruction of the Exhibition,Städel-Museum, Neue Mainzer Street, Frankfurt am Main, 1833 (1. Dutch and Flemish Artists seventeenth and eighteenth century; 2. Early Netherlandish and German Artists; 3. Italian Artists; 4. Drawings by contemporary Artists; 5. eighteenth century Artists from Frankfurt and other Artists; A. Reception rooms) © Author.

exhibited so-called altdeutsche Meister, which included not only fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German Painters but also Early Netherlandish Painters. The third room exhibited Italian works. In so doing, this area of the museum juxtaposed and contrasted, in spatial and artistic terms, art works from ‘Germany’ and Italy. The wing facing the garden had a further room displaying Dutch and Flemish paintings (seventeenth and eighteenth century) and a space for drawings by contemporary artists which itself led to a third room with works by eighteenth century artists from Frankfurt, works by Earlier German painters and some painters from other countries (from the seventeenth to nineteenth century). The final room was presumably intended to hold future acquisitions. Parallel to the first and second rooms in this wing was the fresco room, which from 1836 was home to Philipp Veit’s mural The Arts being Introduced to Germany by Christianity.9 9 For the descriptions of the different rooms see Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1833 Neue Mainzer Strasse, Rooms, 1833 Floor Plan of the first Floor, https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/neue-mainzer-strasse-raeume/ (accessed 29 November 2021). The paintings that were in the different rooms are listed in the inventory from 1835. In the third room in the wing, German and French artists are still mentioned here. The Fresco Room is not yet listed here, see Verzeichniss der öffentlich, 1835. In the later inventories, the paintings are no longer assigned to the rooms. The artists are listed sorted by geographical collections, see J.  D.  Passavant, Verzeichniss der öffentlich ausgestellten

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As documented in watercolours painted by Mary Ellen Best in 1835 (Fig. 19.3), the exhibition rooms showcased paintings of the Nazarene movement. Portraits of canonical artists from the relevant eras adorned the vaults spanning the rooms that held the so-called altdeutsche and Italian collections. The portraits of Albrecht Dürer, Jan van Eyck and ten other artists, architects and sculptors10 were featured in the former, whereas Raphael, Michelangelo and six other artists, architects and sculptors were to be found in the latter.11 This effectively amounted to a visual representation of art history similar to that which had been planned just a few years earlier, beginning in 1825, by Peter Cornelius for Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, where between 1830 and 1840, the twenty-five cupolas over the loggia on the building’s south side were decorated with depictions of key events from the lives of specific artists. Twelve cupolas contained scenes of Italian artists, while a further twelve illustrated the development of fine art in Germany, France and the Netherlands. The central cupola was dedicated to Raphael. The exhibition rooms reprised and continued this theme; some of the ceilings even showed scenes from the lives of the artists whose works were featured on the walls below. Twenty-four sculptures of artists stood on the building’s outer balustrade above the loggia, rounding off this iconographic program.12  Kunst-Gegenstände des Städel’schen Kunst-Instituts, neu bearbeitet, Frankfurt am Main: C. Naumann, 1858. 10 Above the entrance were the architects Erwin von Steinbach and Anton Pilgrim. On the left were the sculptors Peter Vischer and Adam Kraft. Clockwise follows the most important German and Netherlandish Masters: Lukas Cranach, Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer and Jan van Eyck (above the entrance to the Italian room), ‘Master Wilhelm’ (Stefan Lochner), Jan van Scorel, Hans Holbein and ‘Hans Hemmelink’ (Memmling), Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the Nineteenth Century, 1833 Neue Mainzer Strasse, Rooms, 1833 Early German Room, https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/ neue-mainzer-strasse-raeume/altdeutsche/ (accessed 29  November  2021); Verzeichniss der öffentlich, 1835, p. 53. 11 Above the door were Bramante and Arnolfo di Cambio. On the left side were Giotto and Fra Angelico. On the right side were Donatello and Pisano. Above Städel’s bust on the most prominent section of the room were Michelangelo and Raffael, Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the Nineteenth Century, 1833 Neue Mainzer Strasse, Rooms, 1833 Italian Room, https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/neue-mainzer-strasseraeume/italiener/ (accessed 29 November 2021); Verzeichniss der öffentlich, 1835, p. 65. 12 For the Alte Pinakothek, see R. Baumstark, ‘Klenzes Museen’, in F. Dunkel, H.-M. Körner, H.  Putz, König Ludwig  I.  von  Bayern und Leo von Klenze. Symposium aus Anlaß des 75. Geburtstags von Hubert Glaser, München: Beck, 2006, pp.  9–14; P.  Böttger, Die alte Pinakothek in München. Architektur, Ausstattung, Programm, München, 1972; V. Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum, pp. 82–89; V. Plagemann, ‘Die Bildprogramme der Münchener Museen Ludwigs  I.’, Alte und Moderne Kunst, 15.112 (1970), pp.  21–22; S. Schulze, Bildprogramme in deutschen Kunstmuseen, pp. 55–63.

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Mary Ellen Brest, View of the Italian Room at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, c. 1838–1839, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Inv. No. 17945 (https:// sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/de/werk/der-italiener-saal-im-alten-staedelsch en-kunstinstitut-an-de) © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

As at the Alte Pinakothek, Raphael, who was regarded as the apogee of Italian art, had served as the artistic inspiration for the Städel Institute in its former seat at the Neue Mainzer Straße (Fig. 19.4). Upon its opening in 1878, the new Städel Museum at Schaumainkai Street changed the context of the collection, which had further expanded. The sculpture collection occupied rooms to the right of the entrance hall (west) on the ground floor, while the collection of prints and drawings and the library were on the left (east). The picture gallery was located on the upper floor. Having

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Fig. 19.4

281

First floor Plan, Reconstruction of the Exhibition, Städel-Museum, Schaumainkai, Frankfurt am Main, 1878 (1. Italian and French Artists; 2. Italian and Spain Artists; 3. Early Netherlandish Artists; 4. Early German Artists; 5. Dutch and Flemish Artists seventeenth century; 6. Dutch and Flemish Artists eighteenth century; 7. Frankfurt paintings and Artists; A. Prints and drawings by contemporary Artists and Reproductions from Raphael; B. Prints and drawings by contemporary Artists; C. Contemporary Artists) © Author.

ascended, the visitor entered an octagonal space surmounted by a cupola, which was dedicated to Johann Friedrich Städel, whose bust stood in a niche opposite the stairs.13 Also on the upper floor, the west wing housed works of art made prior 1800, and the east wing displayed nineteenth-century works. The only interruption to the collection’s chronological presentation occurred in the rooms attached to the north and south of the skylighted rooms. The cabinets to the north exhibited German and Dutch art, proceeding from west to east. Here the arrangement of the paintings was partly thematic and partly chronological. Two cabinets were reserved for Frankfurt artists. The galleries to the south, meanwhile, showed nineteenth-century sketches, copperplates and cartoons.14

13 Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1878, Schaumainkai, Building: https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/schaumainkai-haus/1878/ (accessed 29 November 2021). 14 Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1878, Schaumainkai, Building. The descriptions of the different rooms are found on the website under Rooms, 1878 Floor plan of the first floor: https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum. de/en/schaumainkai-raeume/ (accessed 29  November  2021). The floor plans can be found in Verzeichniss der öffentlich ausgestellten Kunst-Gegenstände des Städel’schen

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The new Städel Museum at Schaumainkai Street, like the museums founded by territorial sovereigns in Munich and Dresden, arranged the paintings in their collections according to the nationally based schools from which they had emerged. In this context, however, there was a fascinating change in the assessment evidently attached to these schools. The Neue Mainzer Straße Museum began to present its Italian Renaissance and the so-called ‘Old German Masters’ as its highlights, placing them in two adjoining rooms, with the images of Raphael and Dürer greeting visitors.15 At Schaumainkai, by contrast, the Old Masters found themselves placed in the west wing and their contemporary counterparts in the east wing. Here the older German art was juxtaposed and contrasted with contemporary art, whereas contemporary German art was also contrasted with Italian art. This can be seen in the juxtaposition of the small eastern and western skylight rooms, where Philipp Veit’s mural was juxtaposed with Italian art (between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries).16 The exterior of the building points to this new focus on German art, with the figures of Dürer and Holbein the Younger occupying either side of the entrance. In this altered view of the relative significance of art, works from the institution’s own country and period received higher esteem than had previously been the case; the sculptures that greeted visitors approaching the building and the manner of the collection’s presentation inside appear as statements of intent in this regard. Dürer and Holbein stood for the art of Germany as a nation, extending an invitation, in the period immediately succeeding the German Reich’s foundation in 1871, to identify with the emerging state.17 The emphasis now placed on contemporary art was likewise present in the exhibition spaces dedicated to these works, which were on the same floor of Kunst-Instituts, Frankfurt am Main, 1879. The paintings are not assigned to the different rooms. 15 Städel Museum, Time Machine, The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1833, Neue Mainzer Straße, Building. 16 Städel Museum, Time Machine, The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1878, Schaumainkai, Rooms, 1878, small eastern skylight room and small western skylightroom: https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/schaumainkai-raeume/kleiner-oberlichtsaal-2/ and https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/schaumainkai-raeume/kleiner-oberlichtsaalwest/ (accessed 29 November 2021). 17 Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1878, Schaumainkai, Location: https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/schaumainkai-ort/1878/ (accessed 29 November 2021). See also O.  Martin, Zur Ikonologie der deutschen Museumsarchitektur zu Beginn des zweiten Kaiserreichs. Bauformen und Bildprogramme der kunst- und kulturhistorischen Museen in den siebziger und achtziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts, PhD diss., Mainz: Universität Mainz, 1983, pp. 371–372.

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the museum as older pieces – a novel development in the layout of museums. Dresden’s Picture Gallery,18 which had served as the new Städel’s architectural model, had placed works from different epochs in different levels, with Italian and Netherlandish art juxtaposed and contrasted on the first floor and contemporary art as well as works considered to be of lower quality, on the second.19 This placing of Italian and Netherlandish or Dutch art in two separate wings of the building was an approach opposed to that of Munich’s Alte Pinakothek20, where the consecutive arrangement of artistic schools sought to represent an evolutionary course culminating in Italian art. Contemporary works found space in the Neue Pinakothek.21 The Städel’s innovation of showing older and contemporary pieces on the same floor underlined the significance of the latter.22 Another unusual feature of the new Städel Museum was the regional emphasis of its collection, with two of its exhibition spaces in the north of the building devoted to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painters from Frankfurt. This regional flavour appears to have become more distinct in the years that followed the museum’s opening. Other collections expanded likewise, particularly those featuring contemporary works.23 At the beginning of the 1900s, all Old Masters were hung in the west wing, with contemporary pieces claiming the entirety of the east wing, and Frankfurt-based artists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries were

18 For the Gemäldegalerie Dresden, see V. Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum, pp. 131–144. 19 Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1878, Schaumainkai, Building. For the presentation of the paintings on the various floors, see the floor plans in K.  Woermann, Katalog der Königlichen Gemäldegalerie zu Dresden, Generaldirection der Königlichen Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft, Dresden: Hoffmann, 1887. 20 R. an der Heiden, Die Alte Pinakothek, Sammlungsgeschichte, Bau und Bilder, München: Hirmer, 1998, p. 62; Verzeichniss der Gemälde in der königlichen Pinakothek zu München, München 1859, pp. 9–137. 21 For the Neue Pinakothek, see W. Mittlmeier, Die Neue Pinakothek in München, 1843–1854, Planung, Baugeschichte und Fresken, München: Prestel, 1997; V. Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum, pp. 127–130; H. W. Rott (ed.): Ludwig I. und die Neue Pinakothek, München: DuMont, 2003. 22 Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1878, Schaumainkai, Building. 23 Städel Museum, Time Machine, The Städel Museum in the nineteenth century, 1878, Schaumainkai, Rooms, 1878, Cabinet  8 and Cabinet  9, https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum. de/en/schaumainkai-raeume/kabinett-8/; https://zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/ schaumainkai-raeume/kabinett-9/ (accessed 29 November 2021). See also the floor plan of the first floor: Verzeichniss der öffentlich, 1879.

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exhibited in the two former southern galleries.24 This meant that contemporary art and regional artists were now taking up substantially greater space in the museum, reflecting an increased interest in contemporary and regional art that was to be found in analogous form in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle.

Kunsthalle, Hamburg

In 1817, Hamburg became the home of the first fine art society (Kunstverein) in the territory of today’s Germany.25 Subsequently, in 1848, this association proposed the establishment of a public collection of paintings, for which it provided a collection of forty largely contemporary works.26 After lengthy negotiations, the Senate, Hamburg’s governing body, agreed to fund the exhibition space.27 The Hamburgische Städtische Öffentliche Gemälde-Gallerie (Hamburg City Public Picture Gallery) opened on 13 March 1850 in the city’s Börsenarkaden. Further endowments and donations enabled the collection to expand rapidly; and as early as 1856, the museum lacked the space to exhibit all its holdings. In a process lasting from 1863 to 1866, the architects Georg Theodor Schirrmacher (1833–1864) and Hermann von der Hude (1830–1908) built the Kunsthalle as a new home for the collection, in a manner facilitating

24

L. Justi, ‘Die Neuordnung der Gemäldegalerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut’, Museumskunde, 1.4, (1905) pp. 206, 208–209, 210–212; H. Weizsäcker, Catalog der Gemälde-Gallerie des Städelschen Kunstinstituts in Frankfurt am Main, Erste Abtheilung: Die Werke der älteren Meister vom vierzehnten bis zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main, 1900; H. Weizsäcker, Catalog der Gemälde-Gallerie des Städelschen Kunstinstituts in Frankfurt am Main, Zweite Abhteilung: Die Werke der neueren Meister seit dem Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Osterrieth, 1903. A floor plan is printed in the second volume. The new hanging can be seen well here. 25 For the Kunsthalle Hamburg, see V.  Plagemann, ‘Die Anfänge der hamburgischen Kunstsammlungen und die erste Kunsthalle’, Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, 11 (1966), pp.  61–88; Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum, pp.  189–195; Schneede, Leppien (eds.), Die Hamburger Kunsthalle. Bauten und Bilder, Leipzig: Seemann, 1997. 26 Twenty-seven paintings came from the estate of Hartwig Hesse, 12 paintings were donated by members of the Kunstverein, and one painting was purchased by the Kunstverein. The list of the original inventory are reconstructed from Plagemann, ‘Die Anfänge’ (1966), pp. 65–70. 27 On the beginnings of the Kunsthalle Hamburg see Plagemann, ‘Die Anfänge’ (1966), pp.  61–88; V.  Plagemann, ‘Die Anfänge der hamburgischen Kunstsammlungen und die erste Kunsthalle’, in Schneede, Leppien, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle, pp. 9–19.

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future extensions to the exhibition space.28 The first such extension was built from 1884 to 1886. Subsequently, from 1914 to 1919, the Kunsthalle acquired an annexe.29 The arrangement of the collection in its new home was similar to that of Frankfurt’s Städel Institute (Fig. 19.5). The ground floor housed the sculpture and engraving collections. Paintings were displayed on the first floor. The heterogeneous nature of the donations made to the collection initially prohibited the use of one specific criterion for the paintings’ arrangement, a situation complicated by the fact that some donors had given sets of works they intended to be shown together in separate spaces within the museum.30

Fig. 19.5

Ground floor Plan (left) and first floor plan (right), Reconstruction of the Exhibition, Kunsthalle Hamburg, 1901 (Left: 1. Old Masters; 2. Collection of the history of painting in Hamburg; 3. Hudtwalcker-Wesselhoeft Collection; A. Vestibule; B. Engraving Collection; C. Library; D. Reading room. Right: 1. Nineteenth-Century Hamburg Artists; 2. German and foreign Artists; 3. Schwabe Collection) © Author.

28 Construction began in 1863. In 1866, work began on the interior. The building was completed in 1868. The Museum was opened in 1869, see V.  Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum, pp. 190–191. 29 Plagemann, ‘Die Anfänge’ (1997), pp. 13; U. Luckhardt, ‘… diese der edlen Kunst gewidmeten Hallen’. Zur Geschichte der Hamburger Kunsthalle anlässlich des 125. Jahrestages ihrer Eröffnung, Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1994, pp. 32–35. 30 U. Luckhardt, ‘… diese der edlen Kunst’, pp. 17–18.

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It was not until the tenure of Alfred Lichtwark (1886–1914) that the collection was rearranged and the institution adopted a more systematic collection policy.31 When Lichtwark took up his post, the Kunsthalle had a section of Old Masters, one of more recent works with a subsection of English pieces, as well as collections of sculptures, coins, drawings and prints, and a library.32 Lichtwark focused on two aspects of collection development. The first was the systematic acquisition of contemporary art. The second was the conscious and deliberate creation of collections with a direct link to the city of Hamburg, including works by artists from or working in the city; as well as pieces depicting scenes and subjects from Hamburg and its environs. In an analogous vein, Lichtwark collected Dutch paintings, whose motifs and themes tended to relate closely to Hamburg’s Hanseatic heritage.33 Having purchased primarily modern works that were Hamburg-themed, and which were of high artistic quality, Lichtwark wished the collections to serve the artistic edification of Hamburg’s population, presenting as they did themes that were recognisable from their everyday and local experience. In being able to compare the paintings of Hamburg they encountered with those on related themes or from similar chronological periods, visitors would also acquire an eye for art and a greater comprehension of its governing principles. Lichtwark also wanted to establish an art museum for Hamburg, which would be both popular and accessible. Additionally, it is likely that he sought, in displaying works from Hamburg, to arouse visitors’ pride in their city and their state34 with its associated identities.35 One can perceive the distinct traces of Lichtwark’s endeavours in the first collection catalogues he issued. In 1901, the Kunsthalle’s ground floor housed, alongside the engraving and sculpture collections, the Old Masters, which included the collection retracing the history of painting in Hamburg. This floor

31

For Alfred Lichtwark, see H. Junge-Gent, Alfred Lichtwark. Zwischen den Zeiten, München, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012; H. R. Leppien, ‘Alfred Lichtwark der erste Direktor der Kunsthalle’, in Schneede, Leppien, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle, pp. 40–44; Plagemann, ‘“Wir wollen nicht ein Museum, das dasteht und wartet. Lichtwark als Kulturpolitiker’, in Schneede, Leppien, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle, pp. 38–39. 32 M. Dibbern, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle unter Alfred Lichtwark (1886–1914). Entwicklung der Sammlungen und Neubau, PhD diss., Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 1980, pp. 28–29. 33 Dibbern, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle, pp. 27–68. 34 Hamburg was a city and a state at the same time (so called “Stadtstaat”). As a state, Hamburg was a member of the German Confederation (1815–1866), then a federal state in the North German Confederation (1867–1871) and finally a federal state in the German Empire (1871–1918). 35 Dibbern, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle, pp. 31–33, 80–93; Plagemann, ‘Wir wollen nicht ein Museum, pp. 38–39.

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also included rooms reserved for the Hudwalcker-Wesselhoeft collection. By this time, the museum had also acquired a library and reading room to support its educational mission.36 The first floor was home to the works of more recent masters: the collection of Hamburg-based nineteenth-century masterworks and the Stiftung Schwabe collection, which consisted principally of artworks by English painters. On the second floor, two rooms held works from Hamburg in watercolour and pastel. The Kunsthalle Hamburg collections, then, had already been housed at this time. Divided into chronological and thematic sub-collections, they were dispersed throughout the building, on its ground, first and second floors.37 Lichtwark laid plans in the years 1909 to 1911 for the future arrangement and presentation of the Kunsthalle collections in the annexe, which would be completed in 1919. The original building’s ground floor exhibited paintings by Dutch artists and provided rooms for temporary exhibitions for the engraving, photography and hand drawings collections. The engraving collection was moved to the annexe, which also contained rooms for public education, the library and reading room, and the photography collection. Nineteenth-century works found a home on the upper floors of the original building and, to an extent, the annexe, which was largely dedicated to the Kunsthalle’s various Hamburg-themed collections as well as the sculpture collection. The Stiftung Schwabe collection, presented as a separate entity within the Kunsthalle, occupied the rooms in the original building’s south wing. As far as possible, the spatial arrangement of these collections sought to enable visitors to visit each of them independently, without necessarily seeing the others. Thematically linked collections, such as the Hamburg-related works, appeared in close proximity to one another. However, a connection between the collections was not always necessarily recognisable.38 Lichtwark’s plan was not implemented by his successor, Gustav Pauli (1914–1933). Gallery of Hamburg paintings and pictures lost its status, and was exhibited on the ground floor and in the upper floor in the original building (south and west wing). On the upper floor of the annexe, the Old Masters were shown in the north wing and the New Masters in the south wing. Thus, a similar juxtaposition of old and contemporary art took place here as in the Städel Museum.39 Nevertheless, as in Frankfurt, the regional focus remained in Hamburg. 36

A. Lichtwark, Verzeichniss der Gemälde neuerer Meister. Geschichte und Organisation der Kunsthalle, Hamburg: Lütke & Wulff, 1901, pp. 11–13 (here the floor plans). 37 Lichtwark, Verzeichniss, pp. 11–13 (here the floor plans). 38 M. Dibbern, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle, pp. 213–215, fig. 24, 25, 47, 48. 39 O.  Christ, ‘Vom Erbe Lichtwarks zum “Museum einer Weltstadt”: die Hamburger Kunsthalle unter Gustav Pauli’, in Schneede, Lepien, Die Hamburger Kunsthalle, p. 86.

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Conclusion

The art museums in Frankfurt and Hamburg were founded by bourgeois initiatives and served as starting points for the establishment of public art collections. Their rapid expansion, thanks to additional endowments and donations, gave rise to the construction of new museum buildings. The arrangement and presentation of these collections, however, reflected the specific characteristics of their ‘bourgeois’ origins, as opposed to the style of their buildings, which drew on their aristocratic counterparts. Contemporary art was particularly important in this context, as it was juxtaposed with the art of the Old Masters in Frankfurt and in the first building of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. This juxtaposition was also maintained by Gustav Pauli in the Kunsthalle extension. Both of these museum collections of contemporary art expanded over time and therefore claimed more and more space which was a visible sign of the growing importance of the bourgeoisie and the art culturally associated with it. A second important feature of these ‘bourgeois’ museums was the emergence of regional foci in their collections. Targeted acquisitions brought paintings by Frankfurt-based artists to the Städel. The Kunsthalle took the regional emphasis a step further, collecting – in addition to art from Hamburg by Hamburg artists – paintings whose subject was Hamburg itself. In so doing, the museum aimed to help visitors engage with art by bringing them face to face with familiar images from their daily urban lives. Both of the museums’ regional collections became increasingly important parts of their holdings, a significance evident in the emerging need for larger spaces for their display. In displaying ‘their own’ art, these museums sought, each in their own way, to instil in their visitors a sense of identification with their city, state or the German Reich as a whole, creating a national identity. Although there is a discernible regularity, the modes of these identity-generating practices must be interpreted on a case-by-case basis. Museums founded by the rulers of states in what is now Germany usually did not feature regional foci or seek to engage with the history of art and culture in the geographical environs of institutions. In the nineteenth century, this phenomenon appears to have been specific to museums endowed by donors and associations originating from the bourgeoisie. Through the foundation of museums the bourgeoisie contributed to the creation of a national and local identity, at the same time emphasising its importance as the new leading social group. By locating contemporary and regional art alongside endeavours to continuously expand these collections and give them a distinct theme, the cases of Städel Museum in Frankfurt and Kunsthalle in Hamburg exemplify

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a strategy of public communication and education, in which ‘bourgeois’ collections played a crucial role. Through their involvement in the founding of museums, donations of collections, funding, and organisational commitment, the bourgeoisie expressed their cultural, and not only economic significance in an era of rising modern national identities. List of References Baumstark, Reinhold. ‘Klenzes Museen’, in Franziska Dunkel, Hans-Michael Körner, Hannelore Putz, König Ludwig  I.  von  Bayern und Leo von Klenze. Symposium aus Anlaß des 75. Geburtstags von Hubert Glaser, München: Beck, 2006, pp. 1–20. Böttger, Peter. Die alte Pinakothek in München. Architektur, Ausstattung, Programm, München: Prestel, 1972. Budde, Rainer. ‘Das Wallraf-Richartz-Museum und seine Sammlungen’, in Rainer Budde and Roland Krischel (eds.), Das Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. 100 Meisterwerke, Köln: DuMont, 2000, pp. 8–29. Christ, Oktavia. ‘Vom Erbe Lichtwarks zum “Museum einer Weltstadt”: die Hamburger Kunsthalle unter Gustav Pauli’, in Uwe M. Schneede, Helmut R. Leppien (eds.), Die Hamburger Kunsthalle. Bauten und Bilder, Leipzig: Seemann, 1997, pp. 78–92. Dibbern, Margrit. Die Hamburger Kunsthalle unter Alfred Lichtwark (1886–1914). Entwicklung der Sammlungen und Neubau, PhD diss., Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 1980. Gaethgens, Thomas W. ‘Das Städel in Frankfurt. Von der Stiftung eines Bürgers zu einer europäischen Institution’, in Städel Museum (ed.), … zum Besten hiesiger Stadt und Bürgerschaft. 200 Jahre Städel. Eine Festschrift, München: Prestel, 2015, pp. 41–51. Schaefer, Kurt. ‘Museen und öffentliche Kunstpflege’, in Architekten- und IngenieurVerein (ed.), Bremen und seine Bauten, Bremen: Schünemann, 1900, pp. 292–306. Heiden, Rüdiger an der. Die Alte Pinakothek, Sammlungsgeschichte, Bau und Bilder, München: Hirmer, 1998. Junge-Gent, Henrike. Alfred Lichtwark. Zwischen den Zeiten, München, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012. Justi, Ludwig. ‘Die Neuordnung der Gemäldegalerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut’, Museumskunde, 1.4, (1905), pp. 205–215. Leppien, Helmut  R. ‘Alfred Lichtwark der erste Direktor der Kunsthalle’, in Uwe  M.  Schneede, Helmut  R.  Leppien (eds.), Die Hamburger Kunsthalle. Bauten und Bilder, Leipzig: Seemann, 1997, pp. 40–44. Lichtwark, Alfred. Verzeichniss der Gemälde neuerer Meister. Geschichte und Organisation der Kunsthalle, Hamburg: Lütke & Wulff, 1901.

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Luckhardt, Ulrich. ‘… diese der edlen Kunst gewidmeten Hallen’. Zur Geschichte der Hamburger Kunsthalle anlässlich des 125. Jahrestages ihrer Eröffnung, Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1994. Martin, Otto. Zur Ikonologie der deutschen Museumsarchitektur zu Beginn des zweiten Kaiserreichs. Bauformen und Bildprogramme der kunst- und kulturhistorischen Museen in den siebziger und achtziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts, PhD diss., Mainz: Universität Mainz, 1983. Meyer, Corina. Die Geburt des bürgerlichen Kunstmuseums. Johann Friedrich Städel und sein Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: G+H, 2013. Mittlmeier, Werner. Die Neue Pinakothek in München, 1843–1854, Planung, Baugeschichte und Fresken, München: Prestel, 1997. Passavant, Johann David. Verzeichniss der öffentlich ausgestellten Kunst-Gegenstände des Städel’schen Kunst-Instituts, neu bearbeitet, Frankfurt am Main: C.  Naumann, 1858. Plagemann, Volker. ‘Die Anfänge der hamburgischen Kunstsammlungen und die erste Kunsthalle’, Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, 11 (1966), pp. 61–88. Plagemann, Volker. Das deutsche Kunstmuseum 1790–1870. Lage, Baukörper, Raumorganisation, Bildprogramm, München: Prestel, 1967. Plagemann, Volker. ‘Die Bildprogramme der Münchener Museen Ludwigs I.’, Alte und Moderne Kunst, 15.112 (1970), pp. 16–27. Plagemann, Volker. ‘Die Anfänge der hamburgischen Kunstsammlungen und die erste Kunsthalle’, in Uwe M. Schneede, Helmut R. Leppien (eds.), Die Hamburger Kunsthalle. Bauten und Bilder, Leipzig: Seemann, 1997, pp. 9–19. Plagemann, Volker. ‘“Wir wollen nicht ein Museum, das dasteht und wartet. Lichtwark als Kulturpolitiker’, in Uwe  M.  Schneede and Helmut  R.  Leppien (eds.), Die Hamburger Kunsthalle. Bauten und Bilder, Leipzig: Seemann, 1997, pp. 38–39. Rott, Herbert W. (ed.). Ludwig I. und die Neue Pinakothek, München: DuMont, 2003. Schneede, Uwe M. Leppien, Helmut R. (eds.). Die Hamburger Kunsthalle. Bauten und Bilder, Leipzig: Seemann, 1997. Schulze, Sabine. Bildprogramme in deutschen Kunstmuseen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1984. Städel Museum (ed.)… . zum Besten hiesiger Stadt und Bürgerschaft. 200 Jahre Städel. Eine Festschrift, München: Prestel, 2015. Städel Museum, Time Machine. The Städel Museum in the Nineteenth Century: https:// zeitreise.staedelmuseum.de/en/. Stein, Rudolf. Klassizismus und Romantik in der Baukunst Bremens, Vol. 1, Das Gebiet der Altstadt und der alten Neustadt, der Wall und die Contrescarpe, Bremen: Haustein, 1964. Thimann, Michael. ‘Raffael und Dürer. Ursprung, Wachstum und Verschwinden einer Idee in der deutschen Romantik’, in Michael Thimann, Christine Hübner (eds.),

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Sterbliche Götter. Raffael und Dürer in der Kunst der deutschen Romantik, exhibition catalogue, Göttingen: Kunstsammlung der Universität Göttingen, Rom: Casa di Goethe, Petersberg: Imhof, 2015. Verbeek, Albert. ‘Das erste Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. Zum Gedächtnis seiner Eröffnung am 1. Juli 1861’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 23 (1961), pp 7–36. Verzeichniss der Gemälde in der königlichen Pinakothek zu München, München: Dr. Wildschen Buchdruckerei (Parcus), 1859. Verzeichniss der öffentlich ausgestellten Kunstgegenstände des Städelschen KunstInstituts, Frankfurt am Main: C. Naumann, 1835. Verzeichniss der öffentlich ausgestellten Kunst-Gegenstände des Städel’schen KunstInstituts, Frankfurt am Main: C. Naumann, 1879. Weizsäcker, Heinrich. Catalog der Gemälde-Gallerie des Städelschen Kunstinstituts in Frankfurt am Main, Erste Abtheilung: Die Werke der älteren Meister vom vierzehnten bis zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Osterrieth, 1900. Weizsäcker, Heinrich. Catalog der Gemälde-Gallerie des Städelschen Kunstinstituts in Frankfurt am Main, Zweite Abhteilung: Die Werke der neueren Meister seit dem Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Osterrieth, 1903. Woermann, Karl. Katalog der Königlichen Gemäldegalerie zu Dresden, Herausgegeben von der Generaldirection der Königlichen Sammlungen für Kunst und Wissenschaft, Dresden: Hoffmann, 1887.

Fig. 20.1

Charles Karsten, Piet Mondrian in his Paris studio with ‘Lozenge Composition with Four Yellow Lines and Composition with Double Lines and Yellow’, 1933, KARS, e3.238–2, Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut © Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut.

Chapter 20

Reforms and Contradictions: New Museums of Modern Art in the Netherlands, 1908–1946 Laurie Kalb Cosmo During the fraught histories of the two world wars, three cultural institutions in the Netherlands emerged as groundbreaking museums of modern art. Whether in their architecture, use of space, or collecting and exhibiting, the Kunstmuseum (former Gemeentemuseum) Den Haag (1866), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1895), and Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (1938), supported new art movements and museum reforms. They developed within a larger early twentieth-century trajectory that saw national and universal museums of the past give way to specialized institutions devoted to modern and contemporary art. Such breakaway museums focused on art by living artists were often the result of initiatives from civil society, collectors, or societies of friends of the arts.1 Funded by state, region or city, these institutions reflected a new social dimension of international, national and local reach. In the Netherlands, as in other European countries, the modern art and architecture these collectors supported informed the rise of the new museums, and laid the groundwork for a new way of looking at art (Fig. 20.1).2 Although Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Stedelijk Museum were established as nineteenth century city museums with eclectic collections,3 in the 1930s, 1 D. Poulot, ‘The Changing Roles of Art Museums’, Aronsson, Peter and Gabriella Elgenius, eds., National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe 1750–2010. Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 95. 2 V. Newhouse, Towards a New Museum, New York: Monacelli Press, 1998, p. 11. 3 The early collections of the Stedelijk Museum consisted of eighteenth century art and artifacts presented in period rooms from the Sophia Augusta Foundation, donations by members of the VVHK (Society for the formation of a public collection of contemporary art) of works by contemporary Dutch artists, and later, Amsterdam militia, Asiatic art, clocks, medical pharmaceutical objects, and books. Still the Stedelijk Museum functioned as the modern counterpart of the Rijksmuseum. See M. A. Leigh, Building the image of modern art. The rhetoric of two museums and the representation and canonization of modern art (1935–1975): the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. PhD diss., Leiden: Leiden University, 2003, p. 24–25; The Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s (former Gemeente Museum) early collections, acquired before the wars, included European modern paintings, and long-term loans from the Wibbina Stichting.

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they aligned themselves with modern art and architecture. The Museum Kröller, the inspiration of German-born Helene Kröller-Müller (1869–1939), one of the first European women to amass a private art collection, opened first as a private museum in 1913 in Den Haag, showing international modern art. It became the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in 1938 in Otterlo. The founders and directors of these modernist museums ranged in their taste of new abstract forms. They also dealt differently with the German occupation of 1940–1945. Some resisted the Nazi regime, at great personal risk, while others collaborated with it. All faced enormous difficulties during the Second World War, though their museums survived and were transformative4. The histories of these institutions, along with their inherent political contradictions, inform this paper, which represents the early stages of a larger research project.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, established by the local authority with the support of private individuals led by Mennonite banker Christian Pieter van Eeghen,5 opened in September 1895 in a Dutch Neo-Renaissance building designed by Adriaan Willem Weissman. Functioning initially as a kunsthalle to display work by artists from local associations, the Stedelijk first acquired art in 1930, and accepted an important loan of Vincent Van Gogh paintings in 1931. Its directors, C.W.H. Baard (1920–1936) and David C. Roëll (1936–1945), modernized their galleries and mounted exhibitions of international modern art, even though this caused tension between both conservative local artists and the contemporary avant-garde. In 1937, Roëll hired graphic artist and activist Willem Sandberg as curator, who became director from 1945–1962. Sandberg promoted modern art in order to create a new type of museum: an open, living 4 In the Netherlands, over the past decade, museums of modern art that emerged during this period have produced publications about their activities during wartime and the compromises, resistances and collaborations undertaken by directors, curators, artists and patrons involved in their histories. See, for example, A. Dekker, Boijmans in de oorlog. Kunst in de verwoeste stad, Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2018; G. Langfeld, M. Schavemaker, M. Soeting (eds.), The Stedelijk Museum & The Second World War, Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen & Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2015; G.-J. Mellink, L. van Rhijn, Museum in de oorlog, kunst in vrijheid,/Museum in the War. Art in Freedom, Haag, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, 2021; E. Scheltinga, ‘Exhibiting in Wartime. Nazification and Resistance in Dutch Art Exhibitions’, in K. Hill (ed.), Museums, Modernity and Conflict. Museums and Collecting in and of War Since the Nineteenth Century, London: Routledge, 2020, p. 149–168. 5 C.P. van Eeghen founded the Vondelpark and Royal Antiquarian Society in Amsterdam.

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centre in which art was created.6 This coincided with the desire on the part of Amsterdam’s Socialist Party to “connect the masses with the museum”, demonstrating the political significance of both the museum concept and contemporary art itself. Sandberg introduced a Design Collection at the museum, to stimulate industry and commerce and serve the public. Eventually in 1944, the city council accepted a focus on modern art for the Stedelijk Museum.7 During the German occupation, many Dutch museums were forced to close, however the Stedelijk remained open and was able to express some defiance against the Nazi regime. Active in the Dutch Resistance, Sandberg and Roëll purchased modern art from German artists and dealers forced to flee their homeland, and staged small resistance exhibitions.8 They also quietly supported artists that refused to join the Dutch Chamber of Culture (Nederlandsche Kultuurkamer).9 Sandberg additionally created the first museum bunker in the Netherlands for safeguarding vulnerable collections of art, including those of Van Gogh’s heirs, the royal family, Jewish collectors, his museum and other Dutch institutions.10 Because he forged the identity documents of Jews and others wanted by the Gestapo and participated in the bombing of the Amsterdam Public Records Office, Sandberg was forced to go into hiding.11 Immediately after the war and two years after the death of the great Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, Sandberg hosted the artist’s posthumous monographic exhibition Piet Mondrian (1946), celebrating modern art’s triumph over the Nazi regime (Fig. 20.2). Mondrian, founder of the pathbreaking art movement De Stijl, which promoted abstraction as an unchanging core of reality and spirituality, had a long history with the Stedelijk Museum. In 1911, he co-organized the museum’s first Modern Art Circle (Moderne Kunstkring) exhibition, where 6 7 8 9

Leigh, Building the Image of Modern Art, p. 7. Leigh, Building the Image of Modern Art, pp. 25–35. An example is City and Country (Stad en land) (1942) with patriotic themes. Fashioned after the German Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), founded in 1933 by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the Dutch Chamber of Culture was an institution established by the German occupation to which all artists had to be affiliated in order to work. The aim was to keep the press and the art world under strict control and censorship where necessary. See ‘The Stedelijk Museum & The Second World War’, exhibition, 27 February–30 May 2015, stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/the-stedelijk-museum-thesecond world-war (accessed 11  December  2021). Langfeld, Schavemaker, Soeting (eds.), The Stedelijk in the War; C.  Wesselink, Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer. Geschiedenis en Herinnering (Artists of the Culturekammer. History and Memory), Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2014. 10 Wesselink, Kunstenaars. 11 During his time on the run, Sandberg created the Experimenta Typographica, a series of unique graphic design experiments that remain a highlight of the Stedelijk collections.

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Fig. 20.2

Willem Sandberg’s commemorative exhibition Piet Mondrian, held at Stedelijk Museum in 1946, included Mondrian’s unfinished ode to the end of the war Victory Boogie Woogie, pictured here. Unable to buy the painting, Sandberg had a copy made, and hung it in his office, as a vibrant symbol of freedom. The copy is still in the Stedelijk collection. The original, acquired by the Dutch state, has been in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag since 1998. Courtesy Kunstmuseum Den Haag © Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

he showed works by Cézanne, Braque and Picasso. Contact with leading representatives of Post-Impressionism and Cubism was the impulse for him to move to Paris, and start painting in an exclusively abstract manner, which represented a rejection of his figurative style.12 12

In 1917, Mondrian and artist and writer Theo van Doesburg established the magazine De Stijl, and in 1919, Mondrian moved back to Paris, where he lived until 1938, when faced with the threat of war and Nazi condemnation of his work as entartet (‘degenerate’), he moved to London and then New York, where he died in 1944. See H. Janssen, F.-W. Kaiser, Cezanne, Picasso, Mondrian. In nieuw perspectief, exhibition catalogue, Den Haag: Den Haag Gemeentemuseum, 2009; Tate Museum Liverpool: https://www.tate.org.uk/whatson/tate-liverpool/exhibition/mondrian-and-his-studios/mondrian-and-his-studiosroom-guide (accessed 20 April 2021).

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Though engaged in the art worlds of Paris and New York, Mondrian remained connected to the Netherlands. For instance, following his visit to the Netherlands in 1914 and prevented from returning to Paris due to the outbreak of World War I, the First World War Mondrian stayed in the art colony of Laren, where he further developed his abstract work and was supported with a stipend from renowned artist, journalist and art consultant Hendricus Petrus (Henk) Bremmer (1871–1956).13 Besides his association with Bremmer, Mondrian maintained ties to architect Charles Karsten (1904–1979) and estate agent and collector Salomon B. Slijper (1884–1971), both of whom purchased the artist’s work and arranged for donations to the Stedelijk Museum, which ultimately did not take place.14 Mondrian and Slijper had a long acquaintance based on patronage and empathy. During the 1910s, when both lived in and around Laren, the two socialized and went out dancing. Slijper, who was Jewish and the son of an Amsterdam diamond merchant, introduced Mondrian to his wealthy acquaintances. Correspondence from Mondrian to Slijper suggests that Mondrian harboured anti-Semitic sentiments through which he regarded Slijper.15 Nevertheless, the two remained friends until Mondrian’s death, although their contact waned the longer Mondrian lived abroad. With an eye to value as well as aesthetics, Slijper acquired the artist’s figurative and early abstract work in great numbers: either directly from the painter or from other collectors. Forced as a Jew into hiding during the German occupation, Slijper survived World War II and became one of the most important collectors of Mondrian’s art. His 1971 donation to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag of almost 200 items of Mondrian’s early drawings and paintings established that museum as the world’s largest repository of the artist’s work.16

13 Bremmer was also assisting Helene Kröller-Müller in building the collection that became the foundation for her museum. See E. Rovers, De eeuwigheid verzameld: Helene Kröller-Müller (1869–1939), Amsterdam: B. Bakker uitgeverij 2010; I. Bisseling, ‘Museums of Modern Art in the Netherlands,’ (email to L.K. Cosmo), 3 December 2021; White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, p. 142. 14 B.  Tempel, ‘Museums of Modern Art in the Netherlands’ (email to L.K.  Cosmo), 25 November 2021. 15 W. Coppes and L. Jansen, ‘Sal Slijper and Piet Mondrian: A Balanced Friendship?’, published online 18 May 2020: https://www.presentica.com/doc/11722467/sal-slijper-and-pietmondrian-a-balanced-friendship-pdf-document (accessed 20 April 2021), pp. 36–39. 16 ‘Piet Mondrian and Sal Slijper: friends for life?’, RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, 20  November  2019: https://rkd.nl/en/about-the-rkd/coming-soon/news/738-pietmondrian-and-sal-slijper-friends-for-life (accessed 27 November 2021); White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, pp. 150–151; Coppes, Jansen, ‘Sal Slijper’.

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Kunstmuseum Den Haag

In 1919, the municipality of the Hague commissioned renowned architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–1934)17 to design a museum that would house the modern works of the town’s collections.18 Then located in the city centre, the Kunstmuseum den Haag (formerly Gemeentemuseum) was the only Dutch public museum to collect modern international art, by such artists as Ferdinand Hodler, Egon Schiele, Odilon Redon, Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and the German Expressionists. The museum’s director Hendrick Enno van Gelder (1876–1960) (Fig. 20.3) had been acquainted with Berlage since the 1890s, when both men lived in Amsterdam and belonged to a group of socialist intellectuals who wrote for the newspaper De Kroniek.19 The two men believed a museum should be a “place in which to enjoy exceptional works of art…., not a storage facility nor an opportunity for study”, but “an accessible institution in the service of the community”,20 and collaborated over fifteen years to realize their dream in the Hague. Berlage’s design of the museum’s building was his final masterpiece; he died the year before the museum was completed in 1935.21 Steeped in the historicist styles of the turn-of the twentieth century, Berlage nonetheless designed for a new era. Concerned with the social consequences of his work, he intended every detail to express a social and artistic “unity of will”.22 The distinctive and harmonious Kunstmuseum, made with 11 cm yellow-bricks whose color reflects the surrounding environment, was no exception.23 Using 17 Berlage was known for, among other projects, the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange (1903) and Plan Zuid (social housing plan) in Amsterdam. 18 Until that time, the eclectic collections of the Municipal Museum were housed in a seventeenth century building of the St. Sebastian’s Guild for Riflemen. The building is currently the home of the Hague Historical Museum (Haags Historisch Museum). 19 J.  de  Bruijn, ‘Between Instrument and Monument: The Brainchild of Berlage and Van Gelder’, in A Museum of Dreams. Kunstmuseum Den Haag, exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam/Kunstmuseum Den Haag: ‘na010’ publishers, 2021, p. 37. 20 De Bruijn, ‘Between Instrument’. 21 Berlage’s first design was a grand, utopian model that included a domed central hall flanked by two galleries– one for modern painting and another for sculpture and for applied arts, with a large pool in between. Rejected by the municipality for its size and cost, the project ran aground until 1927, when the city council approved a more modest plan, begun in 1931. Berlage’s designs for the Kunstmuseum den Haag resemble an earlier museum project he collaborated on with Helene Kröller-Müller but did not complete. Bisseling, ‘Museums’, p. 11. 22 H.  Janssen, M.  White, The Story of De Stijl. Mondrian to Van Doesburg, London: Lund Humphries Publishing, 2011, p. 24. 23 E. Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003, p. 9.

New Museums of Modern Art in the Netherlands, 1908–1946

Fig. 20.3

Kunstmuseum Director Hendrik Enno van Gelder (1876–1960) and Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–1934). Courtesy Kunstmuseum Den Haag © Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

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modern colour schemes and light on the interiors and removing any distraction from the artworks themselves, Berlage gave greater consideration to circulation than any other Dutch or international museum before.24 Display also concerned Mondrian. Although the Kunstmuseum was not necessarily designed as a showcase for De Stijl, the movement found a place in the museum’s earliest displays. Mondrian’s Composition with Four Yellow Lines (1933), a picture that suggests a square we do not actually see in full, was presented to the Kunstmuseum by artist Charley Toorop. Because it was unclear how to incorporate the work within the museum’s new painting galleries, it was instead hung together with abstract canvases by Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and other De Stijl artists in one of the stairwells, where it was perceived to better enter a dialogue with the architecture.25 De Stijl artists sought to unite abstraction with common culture and thus advance the social implications of art, by having a say over how their artworks were hung (the concept of gemeenschapkunst – community art).26 During the Second World War, Kunstmuseum Den Haag closed and was used for storage by the occupying Germans. From 1942–1945, Gerhardus Knuttel, the museum’s chief curator of modern art who succeeded Van Gelder as director, was imprisoned along with other political hostages in the Sint Michielsgestel concentration camp, in central Netherlands, for refusing to engage in collaborative activities. After the war, Knuttel resumed his directorship, and after significant repairs, the museum re-opened in 1946.27

Kröller-Müller Museum

In March 1928, Helene Kröller-Müller and her shipping and mining tycoon husband Anton Kröller established the Kröller-Müller Foundation, to which they transferred their large collection of mostly modern European art, including the world’s second-largest number of Vincent Van Gogh artworks.28 Placing the collection out of reach of creditors, due to rising debts of the family business 24 Although the building’s exterior, which. lacked the customary marble and granite of nineteenth-century museums, struck many as ‘more reminiscent of a factory complex than the monumental art temple they expected’, the intimacy and careful lighting of the spaces won people over. See De Bruijn, ‘Between Instrument and Monument’, p. 34–35. 25 De Bruijn, ‘Between Instrument and Monument’, p. 32. 26 M. White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 143, 161. 27 ‘Museum Building’, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, https://www.kunstmuseum.nl/en/museum/ about-us/museum-building (accessed 27 November 2021). 28 See A. M. Hammacher. Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue of 276 Works, Otterlo: Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller 1975.

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Müller & Company, the foundation’s stated goal was to create “… a monument, which [gave] the idea of the spiritual direction of the present time, to the benefit and enjoyment of the community”.29 The Kröller-Müller Foundation ultimately donated its collection to the Dutch people, and in 1938, opened the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo, a remote heathland in the eastern Netherlands which was their estate and is now the Hoge Veluwe National Park.30 Today called the Kröller-Müller Museum, it is among the world’s first museums of modern art.31 Helene Kröller-Müller began collecting in 1908 through Henk Bremmer, with whom she first took classes in art appreciation. Kröller-Müller was inspired to collect works by Van Gogh, who Bremmer also promoted, following the maxim that “the spiritual and material worlds are one”.32 A devotee of modern art, Helene nonetheless straddled the tension between realism and abstraction, ultimately believing there had to be some references to actual life in art.33 The Kröllers had long considered creating a free-standing museum in Otterlo, and first enlisted H.P. Berlage, who already had a professional association with the couple.34 Ultimately, the socialist Berlage and nouveau riche Helene did not get along;35 Berlage resigned from his position with the Kröller-Müllers on receiving the Kunstmuseum Den Haag commission. The Kröllers then hired Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde (1863–1957), the first director of the School for Applied Arts in Weimar, and interior designer of the 29

‘1928–1935: The Donation’, in Kröller-Müller Museum, https://krollermuller.nl/en/ timeline/the-donation (accessed 3 December 2021). 30 Martin Bailey, ‘Why the Van Gogh Museum might never have existed–new research reveals how the family collection was nearly sold off’, published online 11 December 2020: https:// www.theartnewspaper.com/blog/virtually-all-the-van-gogh-museum-s-collectionmight-have-been-sold-off#:~:text=Helene%20Kr%C3%B6ller%2DM%C3%BCller %20never%20met,would%20not%20have%20got%20on (accessed April  20, 2021); R.  Zwikker, ‘An offer you can refuse’ Van Gogh Museum Articles, published online November  2020: https://assets.vangoghmuseum.nl/395bdf10-ae46-4372b99df319edc9b 8af ?c=12a57eead8be8da9eddf71afd04d8f039c62753f330d6633ed031fa0a8e74d48&_ ga=2.207248721.375929967.1618919931-2092007708.1618919931 (accessed 20  April  2021). At the time of the Foundation donation, the Krollers’ country estate became the Hoge Veluwe National Park. 31 Kröller-Museum: https://KröllerMüller.nl/en/ (accessed 27 November 2021). 32 E.  Rovers, ‘“He Is the Key and the Antithesis of so Much”: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Fascination with Vincent Van Gogh’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 33.4 (2007), p. 263. 33 Kröller-Müller collected even amidst the grave financial difficulties of the family business which eventually ceased existence in 1936, in Kröller-Müller Museum. 34 He had worked for the Buildings Department of Müller & Company since 1913, created plans for a ‘museum house’ on the couple’s ‘Ellenwoude’ estate in Wassenaar and completed the monumental Sint Hubertus Hunting Lodge on their land in the Veluwe. 35 ‘1918–1923 The Grand Museum’, in Kröller-Müller Museum.

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Fig. 20.4

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The Art Room at Villa Groot Haesebroek, Waassenaar, designed by Henry van de Velde. The Clown by Renoir and Portrait of Eva Callimachi-Catargi by Henri Fantin-Latour are hanging on the right wall, ca. 1931–1937. When the Den Haag offices of Müller & Co closed in 1933, the art collection on display there was transferred to the Kröllers’ Villa Groot Haesebroek in Wassenaar. Archive Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands © Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.

Folkwang Museum in Hagen, Germany, among the most important centres of modernism in central Europe.36 Van de Velde submitted over 1,000 drawings to the Krollers for a ‘grand museum’, although Müller & Company’s financial difficulties and shifting ministerial support meant greatly scaling back their initial plans. The result was a striking modernist brick building with small intimate and totally closed spaces and soft lighting (Fig. 20.4).37 36

The Weimar school ultimately integrated with the Bauhaus School. J.  J.  Sheehan, ‘Museums and Modernism, 1880–1914’, in Museums in the German art world: from the end of the old regime to the rise of modernism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 176; K. Kuenzli, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 72.4 (2013), pp.  503–29: https://doi. org/10.1525/jsah.2013.72.4.503 (accessed 20 April 2021); K. M. Kuenzli, Henry van de Velde. Designing Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, pp.  43–70, 155–178. 37 Hoping that she would one day achieve her ‘grand museum’, Helene Kröller-Müller referred to the 1938 building as a ‘transitional museum.’

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Financial circumstances notwithstanding, the Kröllers’ donation was a fitting choice for Helene. The museum would show the public Helene’s own superior taste, giving her prestige she might never have gained as a parvenu, or industrialist’s wife.38 In the case of female collectors, the emancipatory aspect was probably also important, as it was for other prominent women collectors from the bourgeoisie such as Wilhelmina von Hallwyl, Helena Rubinstein and Peggy Guggenheim.39 Helene Kröller-Müller lived to see her museum open in 1938, but died a year later, when her coffin was placed in front of her beloved Van Gogh painting, Four Withered Sunflowers (1887). The Kröller-Müller Museum remained open during the Nazi occupation, but only for a short time. Unlike the Stedelijk Museum, it interacted directly with German forces. In 1940, Reichskommissar  Arthur Seyss-Inquart asked Sam van Deventer, then museum director, to purchase three paintings by German artists, including Venus with Amor the Honey Thief (after 1537) by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Although the Reichskommissar claimed these paintings as Rückführung (Repatriation) because they “possess[ed]… . great emotional value for Germany”, they were in fact intended for Hitler and Goering. Van Deventer and Anton Kröller, by then Helene’s widower, accepted this offer, which gave them 600,000 guilders, which they used to acquire new artworks. Van Deventer purchased twenty modern French and Dutch paintings, two of which, by Pisarro and Degas, were returned after the war because they came from stolen Jewish collections. Van Deventer and Kröller negotiated with the Germans to improve the museum’s and Anton’s financial situation.40 By 1944–1945, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller functioned as a civilian hospital. Immediately after the war, van Deventer was arrested by the Military Command on suspicion of conspiring with the Germans and removing three paintings from the National Collection.41 The Kröller-Müller Museum reopened in 1945, when the museum’s artworks were recovered from storage and in 1946 acting director Willy Auping acquired Van Gogh’s oil sketch for his famous The Potato Eaters (1885), marking a new chapter in the institution’s history.42

38

E. Rovers, De eeuwigheid verzameld: Helene Kröller-Müller (1869–1939), Amsterdam: Bert Bakker uitgeverij, 2010, p. 250. 39 See  A.  Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift, Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2009. 40 Timeline Kröller-Müller Museum: krollernuller.nl/en/timeline/the-secrete-report (accessed 27 November 2021). 41 Timeline Kröller-Müller. 42 Timeline Kröller-Müller Museum: .krollermuller.nl/en/timeline/the-liberation-of-otterloo (accessed 27 November 2021).

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Conclusions

In difficult circumstances, modernist museums in the Netherlands created new meanings that would take the place of historicist monumentality and national sentiment.43 In their architecture, exhibition design and collecting practices of avant-garde art, all three museums advocated for an emotional and spiritual bond between artwork and beholder, one that would marry art with life. These notions paralleled ideas that had previously taken hold among art collectors and museums in Germany, with for example Karl Ernst Osthaus’ Folkwang Museum in Hagen44 and would mirror the trajectory of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the Dutch museums, modernism was exemplified by the art of Van Gogh and later Mondrian, around whose work modern Dutch collecting and museology concentrated. Such a concentration on the work of modernist, yet Dutch artists, pointed to the emergence of a kind of modernist-national thinking, which still accorded with the universalism of modern art. This modern art, introduced to the Netherlands from collections of exiles and émigrés arriving from Nazi Germany, including German Jewish art dealers and artists considered as entartete, was tremendously important to the development of international modern art at museums, especially Stedelijk Museum.45 Whether they were closed or not, all three museums acquired art during wartime; but such acquisitions must be regarded as having taken place under equivocal circumstances. That said, the Dutch Museum Association Project Museum Acquisitions from 1933 Onwards (Museale Verwervingen Vanaf 1933), is presently investigating the questionable provenance of some of these purchased works, having either been looted, confiscated, or purchased forcibly from Jewish collectors.46 Further studies of Dutch modernist museums will 43 Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, p. 184. 44 Kuenzli, Henry van de Velde, pp. 44–45. 45 G. Langfeld, ‘Art by Exiled Germans in the Stedelijk Museum’, in Langfeld, Schavemaker, Soeting (eds.), The Stedelijk in the War, pp. 77–100; B. von Bormann, Max Beckmann in Amsterdam, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum and Waanders Uitgever, 2007. 46 Some cases remain unresolved because the museums do not have accurate records from the period. Others involve artworks from Jewish collectors that were deliberately neglected to provide ‘camouflaged safekeeping’, while still others were returned to original owners after the war. See Rapport Museale Verwervingen 1940–1948: 1999: https://www.musealeverwervingen.nl/en/1610/over-het-onderzoek/onderzoeks resultaten-1940-1948/voormalig-onderzoek-1940-1948/gemeentemuseum-denhaag/?id=384&type=museum; https://www.musealeverwervingen.nl/en/1610/over-hetonderzoek/onderzoeksresultaten-1940-1948/voormalig-onderzoek-1940-1948/KröllerMüller-museum/?id=878&type=museum; https://www.musealeverwervingen.nl/en/188/ musea/s/stedelijk-museum-amsterdam/ (accessed 27 November 2021).

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also help to explore the complex question of what museum development meant in the early twentieth century and how intertwined it was with building and art making, collecting, and contemporaneous political events. Acknowledgements: The author wishes to thank Benno Temple and Doede Hardeman from Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Isabelle Bisseling and Bas Mühren from Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo for valuable discussions that informed this paper. List of References ‘1928–1935: The Donation’, https://krollermuller.nl/en/timeline/the-donation. Bailey, Martin. ‘Why the Van Gogh Museum might never have existed–new research reveals how the family collection was nearly sold off’, published online 11 December 2020: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/blog/virtually-all-the-van-gogh-museums - collection-might-have -been- sold- off#:~:text=Helene%20Kr%C3% B6ller%2DM%C3%BCller%20never%20met,would%20not%20have%20 got%20on (accessed April 20, 2021). Bormann, Beatrice von. Max Beckmann in Amsterdam, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum and Waanders Uitgever, 2007. Bruijn, Jan de. ‘Between Instrument and Monument: The Brainchild of Berlage and Van Gelder’, in A Museum of Dreams. Kunstmuseum Den Haag, exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag: ‘na010’ publishers, 2021. Coppes, Wietse. Jansen, Leo. ‘Sal Slijper and Piet Mondrian: A Balanced Friendship?’, published online 18  May  2020: https://www.presentica.com/doc/11722467/salslijper-and-piet-mondrian-a-balanced-friendship-pdf-document (accessed 20 April 2021). Coppes, Wietse. Jansen, Leo. ‘Piet Mondrian and Sal Slijper: friends for life?,’ RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, published online 20 November 2019: https:// rkd.nl/en/about-the-rkd/coming-soon/news/738-piet-mondrian-and-sal-slijperfriends-for-life (accessed 27 November 2021). Dekker, Ariette. A Controversial Past. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Second World War. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2018. Ford, Edward. The Details of Modern Architecture, Vol. 1, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003. Hammacher, Abraham. Wilhelmus Jacobus, Marie. Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue of 276 Works, Otterlo: Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller 1975. Higonnet, Anne. A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift, Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2009.

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Janssen, Hans. Kaiser, Franz-W.  Leal, Brigitte (et  al.). Cezanne, Picasso, Mondrian. In nieuw perspectief, exhibition catalogue, Den Haag: Den Haag Gemeentemuseum, 2009. Janssen, Hans. White, Michael. The Story of De Stijl. Mondrian to Van Doesburg, London: Lund Humphries Publishing, 2011. Kröller-Müller Museum: ‘Wartime Development’, https://KröllerMüller.nl/en/. Kuenzli, Katherine  M. ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 72.4 (2013): https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2013.72.4.503 (accessed 22 May 2020). Kuenzli, Katherine  M.  Henry van de Velde. Designing Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Langfeld, Gregor. Schavemaker, Margriet. Soeting, Margreeth (eds.). The Stedelijk Museum & The Second World War, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen publishers & Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2015. Leigh, Mary Anna. Building the image of modern art. The rhetoric of two museums and the representation and canonization of modern art (1935–1975): the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, PhD diss., Leiden: Leiden University, 2003. Mellink, Geert-Jan. Rhijn, Lynne van. Museum in de oorlog, kunst in vrijheid (Museum in the War, Art in Freedom), Haag: Kunstmuseum Den Haag, 2021. ‘Piet Mondrian and Sal Slijper: friends for life?’, RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, 20  November  2019, https://rkd.nl/en/about-the-rkd/coming-soon/news/ 738-piet-mondrian-and-sal-slijper-friends-for-life (accessed 27 November 2021). Poulot, Dominique. ‘The Changing Roles of Art Museums’, in Peter Aronsson Elgenius, and Gabriella Elgenius (eds.), National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe 1750–2010. Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change, London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Museum den Haag, https://www.kunstmuseum.nl/en/museum/about-us/museumbuilding. Newhouse, Victoria. Towards a New Museum, New York: Monacelli Press, 1998. Rapport Museale Verwervingen 1940–1948, 1999: https://www.musealeverwervingen. nl/en/1610/over-het-onderzoek/onderzoeksresultaten-1940-1948/voormaligonderzoek-1940-1948/gemeentemuseum-den-haag/?id=384&type=museum; https://www.musealeverwervingen.nl/en/1610/over-het-onderzoek/onderzoeks resultaten-1940-1948/voormalig-onderzoek-1940-1948/Kröller-Müller-museum/? id=878&type=museum; https://www.musealeverwervingen.nl/en/188/musea/s/ stedelijk-museum-amsterdam/. Rovers, Eva. ‘He Is the Key and the Antithesis of so Much: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Fascination with Vincent Van Gogh’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 33.4 (2007), pp. 258–272.

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Rovers, Eva. De eeuwigheid verzameld: Helene Kröller-Müller (1869–1939), Amsterdam: Bert Bakker uitgeverij, 2010. Scheltinga, Evelien. ‘Exhibiting in Wartime. Nazification and Resistance in Dutch Art Exhibitions’, in Kate Hill (ed.), Museums, Modernity and Conflict. Museums and Collecting in and of War Since the Nineteenth Century, London: Routledge, 2020. Sheehan, James J. ‘Museums and Modernism, 1880–1914’, Museums in the German art world: from the end of the old regime to the rise of modernism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ‘The Stedelijk Museum & The Second World War’, exhibition, 27 February – 30 May 2015, stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/the-stedelijk-museum-the-secondworld-war. Wesselink, Claartje. Kunstenaars van de Kultuurkamer. Geschiedenis en Herinnering. (Artists of the Culturekammer. History and Memory), Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 2014. White, Michael. De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Zwikker, Roelie. ‘An offer you can refuse’, Van Gogh Museum Articles, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, published online 30 November 2020: https://www.vangogh museum.nl/en/about/knowledge-and-research/van-gogh-museum-articles/anoffer-you-can-refuse (accessed 20 April 2021).

Notes on Contributors Marina Beck Has completed her PhD and is a researcher at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Since 2018, Beck has been working on her PostDoc Project: Modelling cultural history using the example of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Mediation concepts of the 21st century (in cooperation with the German National Museum Nürnberg). Her Habilitation project is entitled: Militaria as an element of identification in the state-building process of the 19th century. Army Museums of the German Confederation and the German Empire in European Comparison: Construction, Equipment, Presentation (working title). Her research interests include: architecture, the function and use of cultural history museums in the nineteenth century, residence research. Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz Polish art historian and independent provenance researcher living in Warsaw and Berlin. In the 1990s cultural counsellor at the Polish embassy in the Federal German Republic, founder of the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf and director of the Art Museum in Łódź. For over twenty years a private scholar, an expert on Nazi-looting of Judaica and Polish and Polish-Jewish art collections, and on postwar restitution in Europe. Author of over a hundred articles and historical studies on these subjects in Polish, English, German and French publications and academic journals (among others in: Zagłada Żydów. Materiały i Studia, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Osteuropa). Lurie Kalb Cosmo A University Lecturer in the Centre for Arts in Society (LUCAS) and member of the Research Group in Museums, Collections and Society at Leiden University. She previously taught art history at Temple University Rome, Italy and held curatorial and administrative positions at Peabody Essex Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles. Broadly interested in museum history and theory, her current projects focus on private art museums in twenty-first-century Europe, museums under fascism in 1930s Italy and museums of modern art in the Netherlands. Whitney Dennis A doctoral student in the Art History Department of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), where she is preparing her PhD dissertation

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on the art collecting of the Spanish old nobility and the new rituals of social, cultural and artistic distinction that developed in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing specifically on the case of the 17th Duke of Alba, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart. She is a part of the research group Arte y Pensamiento and also of the research project Politics of Noble Legitimation: Similarities, differences and appropriations in the art collecting of the Spanish nobility and bourgeoisie (1788–1931). Debra DeWitte Holds a PhD, specializes in combining traditional art historical methods with data analysis to study drawings in nineteenth-century Europe. Her most recent article, ‘The Display and Dispersal of Drawings in Nineteenth-Century France’, was written for the catalogue to the exhibition Nineteenth-Century French Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2023). She is co-writer of the Thames and Hudson Introduction to Art (2015), published as Gateways to Art in the United States (3rd ed., 2018). Tomasz Dziewicki An art historian, a PhD candidate, a nineteenth century art expert. Dziewicki received his MA in Art History Institute at the University of Warsaw in 2017. Currently he is preparing a PhD thesis on German expressionism and primitivism. Dziewicki is the head of Nineteenth-Century and Modern Art Department in DESA Unicum auction house in Warsaw. Shir Gal Kochavi Holds a PhD from the University of Leeds, UK (2017) and holds an MA in Law Studies from the Bar-Ilan University (2012) and an MA in The History of Business of Art and Collecting, from the Institute D’Etudes Superieures des Arts, Paris and the University of Warwick, UK (2008). Gal Kochavi is an independent researcher. Her professional experience includes Assistant Curator at The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California, Berkeley, and she also assisted in the curatorial department of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco and worked extensively as a provenance researcher at The Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets in Israel. She has published widely in international journals. Bénédicte Garnier An art historian and a curator in charge of the antiquities collection in the Musée Rodin. Garnier has worked mainly in the areas of the history of sculpture (between seventeenth and twentieth centuries), collecting and artists’

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houses. She has curated the exhibitions Rodin Displacement (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2021), Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece (British Museum, 2018), Rodin. La lumière de l’antique (Musée de l’Arles antique and Musée Rodin, 2013), La Passion à l’œuvre, Rodin et Freud collectionneurs (Musée Rodin, 2008), Rodin, Le rêve japonais (Musée Rodin, 2007). Pauline Guyot Graduate of the École du Louvre and the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is currently pursuing a thesis on the material culture of the demi-monde in the second half of the nineteenth century under the supervision of Bertrand Tillier at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research focuses on the history of collections, material and social history through the prism of gender. Dariusz Kacprzak PhD, art historian, certified keeper and museologist, academic teacher, graduate of the History of Art at the University of Warsaw (1995), and postgraduate in Museology Studies at the University of Warsaw (2004); his doctoral dissertation Collections and art collections of Łódź large-industrial bourgeoisie in the years 1880–1939, was defended in 2012 (published in 2015, Feliks Jasieński Prize 2016). Curator of collections of European art in the Museum of Art in Łódź (1995–2008), since 2008 the deputy director for scientific matters in the National Museum in Szczecin; curator and co-curator of numerous exhibitions and author/co-author, editor/co-editor of accompanying publications as well as scientific and popular-scientific articles published in Poland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Czech and France. Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik Vice president of the Polish Institute of World Art Studies in Warsaw, former Assistant Professor of Art History at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, scientific editor of the Corpus of Feliks Jasieński’s Donation at the National Museum in Krakow, member of the editorial board of Henryk Siemiradzki. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (2021). Since her PhD at the Université Paris  I Panthéon-Sorbonne, her research has investigated the history of collecting and mutual influences of styles and techniques both on the East-West and North-South axes. Kamila Kłudkiewicz An Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art History of the Adam Mickiewicz University and at the Audiovisual Archives of the Faculty of Art Studies of the Adam Mickiewicz University. Kłudkiewicz holds a PhD, is a graduate of

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Law and Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She is the author of the monograph (in Polish) Choice and Necessity. Collections of the Polish Aristocracy in Wielkopolska at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2016); and a scientific study of source materials (in Polish and German) Libri veritatis Atanazego Raczyńskiego/Von Athanasius Raczyński. Suplement/Supplement (2019) and numerous articles in academic journals. Her research interests lie in the history of collecting, museology, and material culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fiona Piccolo PhD candidate in Art History at the Université Paris  1 Panthéon-Sorbonne where she is conducting research on the print portfolio in Germany and Austria from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1920s. Within the scope of print culture, visual culture and material culture, her research interests have revolved around issues of seriality, intermediality and materiality in relation to the original print, as well as the technical and ideological dynamics of exchange, binding its creation, distribution and reception networks. Maria Ponomarenko PhD student at the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia. She studies the private collecting of drawings in St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Phillips. Léo Rivaud Chevaillier Graduate from the University Paris  1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Sciences Pro Paris in both History of Art and Political Science. Léo Rivaud Chevaillier is an independent researcher who has previously worked as an assistant curator in various museums, including the Orsay Museum, Pinault Collection, the Museum of Modern Art of Paris and more recently the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre Pompidou. His research interests range from the history of art of the late nineteenth century to the history of museums. Marcela Rusinko An Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic. Her focus is on modern and contemporary art in East-Central Europe, art collecting, material cultures, provenance research, art market and totalitarianisms of the Cold War period. Her collecting research refers to the theory and history, as well as its psychological and sociological aspects. She has worked as public art museum curator, art market journalist and editor-in-chief.

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Thomas Stammers Associate Professor (Modern European Cultural History) in the Department of History at Durham University. Stammers is a cultural historian of France in the long nineteenth century. His 2020 book The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris (Cambridge University Press)  explores the politics of collecting, the art market and cultural heritage in nineteenthcentury France. It was named the winner of the 2020 Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society for the best first book on non-British history. He continues to publish work related to nineteenth-century collecting, connoisseurship, museum institutions and the historiography of art, with a particular interest in the work of Francis Haskell. He also publishes on the tangible traces, cultural memory and historiography of the French Revolution. Felix Steffan Studied Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and completed his degree in 2014. Between 2014 and 2017, he curated the historical art exhibition Vermacht, verfallen, verdrängt. Kunst und Nationalsozialismus (Bequeathed, forfeited, suppressed. Art and National Socialism), which took place in autumn 2017 in the Städtische Galerie Rosenheim. Currently, Steffan works at the culture department of the city of Nuremberg. His main research interests are the era of the Prince Regent in Bavaria, the historical network research of art collecting, as well as the art and cultural policy in the time of National Socialism. Agnieszka Wiatrzyk An art historian, a graduate of the University of Warsaw. She has cooperated with numerous cultural institutions, for example with the Louvre Museum. Currently she is an Assistant Curator at the Polish Historical and Literary Society/Polish Library in Paris. Her research interests are: Renaissance and Modern art history, history of representation, history of ideas, art theory, curating and conservation, museums and patrimony, European graphic arts, history of collectionism, modernism. Milena Woźniak-Koch Art historian, researcher and lecturer. She holds a PhD title from the University of Warsaw (2020) and an MA from the University of Gdańsk (2010). Her doctoral thesis on art collecting of Warsaw bourgeoisie of Jewish origin 1880–1939 was awarded the prize of the Polish Association of Art Historians for the best dissertation in the field of Art History in 2020, and will be published in 2023. Currently, Woźniak-Koch is a fellow researcher at the Centre for

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Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Her research and numerous publications focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art collecting in Poland and Europe, as well as on the history of culture in the social context.

List of Illustrations 1.1

A selection of antiquities from Freud’s personal collection, transferred from Vienna to London, Freud Museum London © Freud Museum London. 1.2 Antelope with male young on its back (Bambara, French Sudan): from the Werner Muensterberger Collection. Reproduced in Warner and Wendy Muensterberger, Sculpture of Primitive Man, London: Thames and Hudson, 1955 © Author Photograph. 1.3 William Rothenstein, Charles de Sousy Ricketts; Charles Haslewood Shannon, lithograph, 37.6 × 25.4, 1897, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery, London. 1.4 Studio and Picture Gallery, Mario Praz Museum House, Rome © Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images. 2.1 Jacek Malczewski, Portrait of Edward Aleksander Raczyński, 1903, oil on canvas, 75 × 100, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation. 2.2 Eugène Carrière, Reading (La Lecture), c. 1890–1895, oil on canvas, 54 × 65, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation. 2.3 Charles Cottet, A Serene Evening in Brittany, before 1900, oil on cardboard, 55,8 × 70, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation. 2.4 Lucien Simon, Music (La musique), c. 1895, oil on canvas, 178 × 216, The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation © The National Museum in Poznań, Raczyński Family Foundation. 3.1 Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Wladimir Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Nikolay Konradi, 1890, Photo Studio of V. V. Barkanov (Tiflis), Russian National Museum of Music, Moscow © Russian National Museum of Music, Moscow. 3.2 Ivan Argunov, Portrait of an Unknown Woman in a Dark Blue Dress, 1760, oil on canvas, 60 × 45, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Previously owned W. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff. 3.3 Edmé Bouchardon, Lantern Dealer, 1737–1746; sanguine on paper, 25 × 20, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Previously painting was owned by Pierre-Jean Mariette, later acquired by W. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff. 3.4 Abraham Bloemaert, Landscape with Herdsmen and Satan Sowing Tares, 1604, oil on canvas, 47,5 × 62,5, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Previously owned W. Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff.

316 4.1

List of Illustrations

Raimundo Madrazo, María del Rosario Falcó y Osorio, 1881, oil on canvas, 117 × 217, Liria Palace, Madrid © Fundación Casa de Alba, Madrid. 4.2 Rosario working in the salón de vitrinas in Liria Palace, Madrid. Courtesy of the Archive of the Dukes of Alba (ADA) © Fundación Casa de Alba. 4.3 Salón del Gran Duque in Liria Palace, Madrid, 1893. Courtesy of the Archive of the Dukes of Alba (ADA) © Fundación Casa de Alba. 4.4 Joaquin Sorolla, Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, 17th Duke of Alba, 1908, oil on canvas, 210 × 199, Madrid, Liria Palace © Fundación Casa de Alba. 5.1 Leon Wyczółkowski, Potrait of Feliks Jasieński, 1911, pastel, 82 × 96, The National Museum in Kraków © The National Museum in Kraków. 5.2 Józef Pankiewicz, Japanese Woman, 1908, oil on canvas, 200 × 94, The National Museum in Kraków © The National Museum in Kraków. 5.3 Feliks Jasieński’s ‘Museum’, c. 1914, Polish National Archives, The National Digital Archive © The National Digital Archive. 5.4 The Feliks Jasieński Department of National Museum in Kraków, 1934, Polish National Archives, The National Digital Archive © The National Digital Archive. 6.1 William Malherbe, Paul Gallimard’s Portrait, c. 1920, oil on canvas, 64 × 53, private collection © Public Domain. 6.2 Louis Vauxcelles’s article Collection de M. P. Gallimard, in Les Arts, 81 (September 1908) © Public Domain. 6.3 Paul Cardon, Portrait of the writer, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt (1822–1896), in his office, between 1885–1895, albumen silver print, Musée Carnavalet, Paris © Public Domain. 7.1 Gustave Ricard, Portrait of Adèle Caussin, 1868, oil on canvas, 182 × 131, Paris Musées, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris © Paris Musées, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. 7.2 Henri Regnault, Salome, 1870, oil on canvas, 160 × 102.9, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Public Domain. 7.3 Interior of the mansion belonging to Adèle de Cassin, Marquise de Landolfo – Carcano, 1 rue Tilsitt, 8th arrondissement, Paris, photograph, Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris © Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris. 7.4 Interior of the mansion belonging to Adèle de Cassin, Marquise de Landolfo – Carcano, 1 rue Tilsitt, 8th arrondissement, Paris, photograph, Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris © Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris. 8.1 Z. Muller, Gronkowski’s portrait, 1940, charcoal on paper, 40 × 30,5 The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris. 8.2 Paul Hugues, The Interior of the office of Camille Gronkowski at the Petit Palais, 1932, oil on cardboard, 42 × 53, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The

List of Illustrations

8.3

8.4

9.1 9.2

9.3 9.4

10.1

10.2 10.3

10.4

11.1 11.2

11.3

317

Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris. Louis-Edouard Rioult, Boy with a Cat in Paris, 1st half of the 19th century, oil on canvas, 33 × 25, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris. Jean-Pierre Norblin de La Gourdaine, The Polish Diet in a Church, 1808, pen, brown ink, sanguine on paper, 36 × 42, The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris © The Polish Literary and Historical Society, The Polish Library in Paris. Max Bram with his wife Elisabeth Oswald, c. 1907, F 6467, The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim © The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim. Otto von Ruppert, Auer Dult, 1873, oil on canvas, 22,5 × 16,1, in L. Horst, Münchener Maler im 19. Jahrhundert, Vol. 3, München, Bruckmann, 1982, p. 410, Image 629. Max Bram with his art collection in Rosenheim, c. 1934, F 6476, The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim © The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim. Gauleiter Adolf Wagner at the Opening of Rosenheim’s new art gallery, 1937, F 10266, The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim © The Municipal Archive of Rosenheim. The new middle class as a rising elite. The successful Prague attorney Ladislav Jiří Weber (1893–1961) with his wife in the middle of their Czech modern art collection, 1920s-1930s, The Archive of the National Gallery in Prague © The National Gallery in Prague. Old and new middle class social and collecting stratification; collecting formative focuses and their range of values © Author. Art historian and theoretician Vincenc Kramář (1877–1960) with his famous early French Cubism collection in his Prague flat as a typical representative of new middle class – knowledge class, 1932, ‘Volné směry’ magazine. ‘Business Aristocracy’ old middle class collecting lifestyle. Interiors of residence of Czech-German top industrialist Heinrich Schicht (1880–1959) in Ústí nad Labem with clear references to the nobility standards, c. 1930, Museum of the City of Usti nad Labem © Museum of the City of Usti nad Labem. Albert Harlingue, Rodin among his antique collection, ca. 1910–1912, gelatine-silver print, 12 × 17,2, Ph.00210, Musée Rodin © Musée Rodin, Paris. Franck Bal, Rodin in the painting studio of the Villa des Brillants in Meudon, c. 1905, gelatine-silver print, 19 × 27,8, Ph.07004, Musée Rodin © Musée Rodin, Paris. Auguste Rodin, Assemblage: Kneeling female torso in an Ionian cup, 1895–1910 and 2nd quarter of the 6th century BC for the cup, plaster and terracotta, 23 × 25,7 × 18,5, S.03611, Musée Rodin © Musée Rodin, Paris.

318

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11.4 Eugene Druet, The personal collection in the hôtel Biron, 1913, gelatine-silver print, 27,5 × 38,1, Ph.02427, Musée Rodin, Paris © Musée Rodin, Paris. 12.1 ‘Bauhaus Drucke. Neue Europäische Graphik. Erste Mappe: Meister des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar’, portfolio of four woodcuts, two etchings and eight lithographs, 1921, Bauhaus, Weimar, private collection © Sotheby’s. 12.2 Ernst Barlach, Der Arme Vetter (The Poor Cousin), portfolio of thirty-four lithographies, 1919, Paul Cassirer Verlag, Berlin © Auktionshaus an der Ruhr. 12.3 Anonymous, Ex Libris Alice Wanke, XI. Jahrbuch österreichischer Exlibris Gesellschaft, 1913, Vienna © austria-forum.org. 13.1 Honoré Daumier, The Connoisseur, c. 1860–65, pen, ink, wash, watercolor, lithographic crayon, and gouache over black chalk on wove paper, 43.8 × 35.5, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 13.2 Duke d’Aumale’s collection of drawings kept in portfolios in the Olréans Room in the Château de Chantilly, late nineteenth century, Château de Chantilly © 2022 All Rights Reserved Friends de Chantilly, Inc. 13.3 Our Contemporaries at Home – M. Edmond de Goncourt, c. 1890s, charpentier after photograph by Paul Dornac, wood engraving © Image courtesy CMA Archives. 13.4 Ferdinand Delamonce, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, c. 1700–1750, pen and ink wash, 19.6 × 15.1, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Previously in the collection of the Marquis des Chennéviéres. 14.1 Bernard (on the left), Józef (sitting), Abe (on the right) Gutnajer, Warsaw, early 1930’s, private collection. Courtesy of Anne Hayden Stevens. 15.1 Bronisław Krystall (1884/1887–1983), c. 1912, The Archive of the National Museum in Warsaw © The National Museum in Warsaw. 15.2 Samuel Hirszenberg, The Black Banner, 1905, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 205.7, Jewish Museum, New York © Jewish Museum, New York. 15.3 Gustaw Wertheim (1878–1939), c. 1935, Warszawa – Konstancin Jeziorna. Courtesy of the Wertheim family. © The Wertheim family. 15.4 Marcello Bacciarelli, August Poniatowski’s Portrait (copy), after 1789, oil on canvas, 50 × 100, (photography of the painting in Zbiór obrazów Gustawa Wertheima w Warszawie i ‘Julisinie’). Courtesy of the Wertheim family. © The Wertheim family. 15.5 The interior of Bronisław Krystall’s apartment at 36 Aleje Ujazdowskie Street, Warsaw, c. 1927, The Archive of the National Museum in Warsaw © The National Museum in Warsaw. 16.1 Walker & Boutall after Maull, Mr. Reuben D. Sassoon as a Persian Prince, 1897–1899, 1931, 0724.187, The British Museum, London © The British Museum, London.

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319

16.2 The Benguiat Art Museum, Exterior View of the Pavilion Containing the H. Ephraim Benguiat Museum Collection and the Historical Damascus Palace, Paris, 1904, Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Washington DC © Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Washington DC. 17.1 Jacek Malczewski, The Finished Song, 1919, oil on canvas, 149 × 85, The National Museum in Kraków © Public Domain. 17.2 Tadeusz Makowski, La Petite Famille, ca. 1920, oil on canvas, 27 × 41, private collection © Auction House Tiroche. 17.3 Zygmunt Waliszewski, Black Madonna of Częstochowa, 1921, watercolour on cardboard, 67 × 49, The National Museum in Krakow © The National Museum in Krakow. 17.4 Róża Aleksandrowicz in her apartment in Kraków, c. 1906, private collection © Public Domain. 17.5 Róża Aleksandrowicz in her apartment in Kraków, c. 1918–1939, private collection © Public Domain. 18.1 Heinrich Dohrn jun. (1838 Braunschweig–1913 Florence), 1869, Pomeranian Library in Szczecin © Pomeranian Library in Szczecin. 18.2 The City Museum in Stettin. View of the representative hall with an exhibition of bronze copies and reconstructions of ancient sculptures by Heinrich Dohrn, c. 1913, Archives of the National Museum in Szczecin © Archives of the National Museum in Szczecin. 18.3 Reconstruction of Adolf Fürtwängler after Phidias, The Lemnian Athena, 1905–1908, bronze, cast (foundry: WMF – Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik, Abteilung für Galvanoplastik, Geislingen an der Steige), The National Museum in Szczecin © The National Museum in Szczecin, Grzegorz Solecki, Arkadiusz Piętak. 18.4 Walter Riezler (1878 Munich – 1965 Munich), Pauly Family Private Collection, courtesy of Richard Brook, Carlsbad California © Richard Brook, Carlsbad, California. 19.1 West facade of the Hamburg Kunsthalle on the Alsterhöhe and the Schiller Monument, c. 1900 © bpk-Bildagentur/Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz. 19.2 Floor plan, Reconstruction of the Exhibitoin,Städel-Museum, Neue Mainzer Street, Frankfurt am Main, 1833 (1. Dutch and Flemish Artists 17th and 18th century; 2. Early Netherlandish and German Artists; 3. Italian Artists; 4. Drawings by contemporary artists; 5. 18th century artists from Frankfurt and other artists; A. Reception rooms) © Author. 19.3 Mary Ellen Brest, View of the Italian Room at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. ca. 1838–ca. 1839, Photo: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (Inv. Nr. 17945) (https://sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/de/werk/der-italiener-saal-im-altenstaedelschen-kunstinstitut-an-de) © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

320

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19.4 First floor Plan, Reconstruction of the Exhibition, Städel-Museum, Schaumainkai, Frankfurt am Main, 1878 (1. Italian and French Artists; 2. Italian and Spain Artists; 3. Early Netherlandish Artists; 4. Early German Artists; 5. Dutch and Flemish Artists 17th century; 6. Dutch and Flemish Artists 18th century; 7. Frankfurt paintings and Artists; A. Prints and drawings by contemporary artists and Reproductions from Raphael; B. Prints and drawings by contemporary artists; C. Contemporary Artists) © Author. 19.5 Ground floor Plan (left) and first floor plan (right), Reconstruction of the Exhibition, Kunsthalle Hamburg, 1901 (Left: 1. Old Masters; 2. Collection of the history of painting in Hamburg; 3. Hudtwalcker-Wesselhoeft Collection; A. Vestibule; B. Engraving Collection; C. Library; Reading room. Right: 1. Nineteenth’s century Hamburg artists; 2. German and foreign artists; 3. Schwabe Collection) © Author. 20.1 Charles Karsten, Piet Mondrian in his Paris studio with Lozenge Composition with Four Yellow Lines and Composition with Double Lines and Yellow, 1933, KARS, e3.238–2, Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut © Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut. 20.2 Willem Sandberg’s commemorative exhibition Piet Mondrian, held at Stedelijk Museum in 1946, included Mondrian’s unfinished ode to the end of the war Victory Boogie Woogie, pictured here. Unable to buy the painting, Sandberg had a copy made, and hung it in his office, as a vibrant symbol of freedom. The copy is still in the Stedelijk collection. The original, acquired by the Dutch state, has been in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag since 1998. Courtesy Kunstmuseum Den Haag © Kunstmuseum Den Haag. 20.3 Kunstmuseum Director Hendrik Enno van Gelder (1876–1960) and Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–1934). Courtesy Kunstmuseum Den Haag © Kunstmuseum Den Haag. 20.4 The Art Room at Villa Groot Haesebroek, Waassenaar, designed by Henry van de Velde. The Clown by Renoir and Portrait of Eva Callimachi-Catargi by Henri Fantin-Latour are hanging on the right wall, c. 1931–1937. When the Den Haag offices of Müller & Co closed in 1933, the art collection on display there was transferred to the Kröllers’ villa in Wassenaar. Archive Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands © Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.

Index Aleksandrowicz, Róża XVI, 243, 244–252 Quentin-Bauchart, Maurice 97 Silva, María Teresa de (13th Duchess of Alba) 64 Adam, Juliette 111 Adler, Cyrus 237 Adler, Jankiel 205 Ajwazowski, Iwan 203 Albuquerque, Prosper 102, 103 Aleksandrowicz, Dov 247 Aleksandrowicz, Regina 250 Aleksandrowicz, Zygmunt 249 Alexander III of Russia 52 Alexandre, Falguière 125 Alhonse XII of Spain 106 Alphan, Adolphe 111 Altounian, Joseph 169 Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, Fernando (3rd Duke of Alba) 62–65 Aman-Jean, Edouard 31 Amelung, Walter 265 Ansky, S.; Anski, Szymon (Zaynvl Rapoport, Shloyme) 231 Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Maria 46 Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Nikolay 46 Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, Wladimir Nikolayevich XIV, 44–54 Argunov, Ivan 47 Arnhold, Edouard 37 Asch, Sholem 206 Assouline, Pierre 89 Augustine, Gabrielle Emma 102 Auping, Willy 303 Axentowicz, Teodor 244 Baard, C.W.H. 294 Bacciarelli, Marcello 217, 218 Bal, Frank 167 Bal, Mieke XVII Baldinucci, Filippo 191 Baltzell, Edward Digby 153 Balzac, Honoré de 1, 10 Bann, Stephen 2 Baranowska, Maria 259, 268 Baranowski, Edward 245

Barącz, Erazm 252 Barnes, Alfred 18 Barthou, Louis 97 Batiks, Javan 78 Baud-Bovy, André-Valentin 112 Baud-Bovy, Auguste 112 Baud-Bovy, Daniel 112 Baudelaire, Charles XIV, 94, 98 Baudrillard, Jean XIII, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 91 Baudry, Paul 101, 112 Becker, Howard 89 Belk, Russel 12 Belotto, Bernardo (Canaletto) 207 Bénedite, Léonce 31, 32 Benguiat, Hadji Ephraim XVI, 235–237 Benítez, Salvador 59 Benjamin, Walter 17, 18, 22, 171 Benois, Alexandre 45, 48, 49, 51 Béraldi, Henri 95 Berberova, Nina 54 Berger, Natalia 231 Berger, Peter 149, 152, 155 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 298–301 Bernheim, Alexandre 101 Besnard, Albert 89, 95 Best, Mary Ellen 279, 280 Billeter, Felix 37 Bing, Siegfrid 78 Bischoffsheim, Clarissa 96 Bisseling, Isabelle 305 Bniński, Ignacy 38 Bonaparte, Mathilde 127 Bonnard, Pierre 93 Bonnat, Léon 108, 111, 116, 117 Botkin, Sergey 49 Bouchardon, Edmé 50 Boucher, François 129, 194 Bouguereau, William 101 Boulanger, Boulanger 126 Bourdelle, Antoine 126 Bourdieu, Pierre 93, 94, 151 Bourgeois, Louis 11 Boznańska, Olga 75, 82, 203 Bram, Max XV, 134, 135, 138–142, 144–145 Bramante, Donato 279

322 Braque, Georges 296 Bremmer, Hendricus Petrus (Henk) 297, 301 Brook, Richard 266 Brožík, Václaw 108 Brun, Isidoro 61 Bruyère, Jean de La 1, 7 Brzozowski, Kazimierz 79 Buchbinder, Szymon 214 Cabanne, Pierre 1 Caillebotte, Gustave 36 Cain, Auguste 112 Cain, Georges 125 Cambio, Arnolfo di 279 Camondo, Isaac de 36, 90 Carrière, Eugène 32, 89, 90, 93, 95 Carriès, Jean-Joseph 125 Cassirer, Paul 37, 201 Castellanos, Spiridon 169 Caussin, Anne Marie Adele XV, 100–104, 106–118 Čeřovský, František 155 Cézanne, Paul 93, 296 Chagall, Marc 205 Chaplin, Charles 103 Charles IV Holy Roman Emperor 64 Charles V Holy Roman Emperor 63, 65 Charles-Philippe (Falaise, Jean de; Markiz de Chennevières-Pointel) 189, 191, 192, 194, 195 Charpentier, Georges 36 Charpy, Manuel 13 Chausson, Ernest 90 Chełmoński, Józef 74, 214, 217, 219 Chocquet, Victor 36 Chopin, Fryderyk 132 Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, Nawojka 251 Claudel, Camille 166 Clifford, James XIII, 8 Cochin, Charles Nicolas 129 Cock, Xavier de 109 Coello, Alonso Sánchez 65 Cognacq, Ernst 127, 129 Cohen, Hermann 223 Cohen, Richard 214, 237 Comiot, Charles 36 Constant, Benjamin 112

Index Cooper, Douglas 1 Cornelius, Peter 279 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille 90, 93, 101, 108, 112, 127 Correggio (Correggio, Antonio Allegri da)  65 Cottet, Charles 31, 32 Courbet, Jean Désiré Gustave 112, 125, 127 Courtois, Adèle 106 Cranach, Lukas (Lucas) (1st) 279, 303 Crozat, Pierre 188 Croze, Laure de 106 Cumont, Frantz 169 Curtius, Ludwig 265 Czajkowski, Józef 79 Czyżewski, Tytus 246 D’Annunzio, Gabriel 19 d’Epinay, Prosper 108 Dalou, Jules 125 Daubigny, Charles-François 108 Daumier, Honoré 93, 186, 187 Decamps, Alexandre 108 Degas, Edgar 36, 90, 93, 203, 303 Dehodencq, Alfred 126, 127 Delacroix, Eugène 93, 101, 108–110, 127, 191 Delamonce, Ferdinand 193 Delessert, Édouard 103, 104, 110, 111 Demidoff, Anatole Nikolaievich 101, 110 Denuelle, Alexandre 103 Desfossés, Victor 127 Deventer, Sam van 303 Diaghilev, Serge (Sergei) 45, 48, 49, 51, 52 Diaz de la Pena, Narcisse 101, 108 Diderot, Denis 171 Diéterle, Amélie 92 Dillon, Andrew 46 Distel, Anne 90, 93 Dittmar, Helga 46 Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav 49 Dodge Luhan, Mabel 15 Doesburg, Theo van 296, 300 Dohrn, Carl August 259 Dohrn, Felix Anton 259, 261 Dohrn, Heinrich (1st) 259 Dohrn, Heinrich Wolfgang Ludwig (2nd)  XVI, 256–262, 268, 269

323

Index Donath, Adolph 179 Doré, Gustave 101, 115, 116 d’Orléans, Henri Eugène Philippe Louis (Duke of Aumale) 189 Doucet, Jacques 97 Dreyfus, Alfred 188, 189, 231 Dreyfus, Gustave 188, 194 Drumont, Eduard 231 Duché, Lucie 90 Duhamel, Georges 130 Dumas, Alexandre 103, 104, 106, 110, 113–116 Dunikowski, Xawery 74, 219 Dunin-Borkowski, Leszek 38 Dupré, Jules 108, 110, 112 Durand-Ruel, Paul 90, 101, 108, 109, 201 Dürer, Albrecht 181, 277, 278, 282 Duveen, Joseph 188 Dvořáček, František 157 Edison, Thomas 232 Edward VII of the United Kingdom 233, 234 El Greco (Theotokopulos, Domenikos) 93 Elluini, Gabrielle 106 Elsner, Jaś 14 Ensor, James 94 Ephrussi, Charles 112, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195 Erlanger, Friedrich Emil 60 Everding, Hans 265 Eyck, Jan van 279 Falconet, Étienne Maurice 171 Falcó d’Adda, Manuel 57 Falcó y Osorio, María del Rosario (16th Duchess of Alba) XIV, 56–64, 67 Falkoff, Rebecca 13 Fałat, Julian 74, 219, 220 Fantin-Latour, Henri 302 Feilchenfeldt, Walter 98 Féral, Jules 101 Ferrère, Cécile 109 Filla, Emil 158 Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, Jacobo (17th Duke of Alba) 57, 58, 65–67 Fitz-James Stuart y Palafox, Carlos María (16th Duke of Alba) 58, 62 Fitz-James Stuart y Silva, Carlos Miguel (14th Duke of Alba) 64, 65

Fitz-James Stuart y Silva, María del Rosario Cayetana (18th Duchess of Alba) 64, 65 Fitz-James Stuart y Ventimiglia (15th Duke of Alba), Jacobo 58, 62 Fitzjames, James (1st Duke of Berwick) 65 Flechtheim, Alfred 201 Fleury, Rohault de 103 Fliess, Wilhelm 5 Fortuny, Marià 101, 109 Foucault, Michel 2 Fowles, John 10 Fra Angelico (Mugello, Guido di Pietro da)  279 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 93 Frémiet, Emmanuel 101 Freud, Sigmund 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 165 Frick, Hnery Clay 129 Frick, Wilhelm 142 Fromentin, Eugène 110 Furet, Francis 112 Furtwängler, Adolf 263–267 Galland, Pierre-Victor 103, 112 Gallimard, Gaston 89, 98 Gallimard, Gustave 90 Gallimard, Lucie 90 Gallimard, Paul XIV, 88–98 Gambetta, Léon 111 Gauguin, Paul 38 Gay, Peter 4 Gebethner, Stanisław 207 Geffroy, Gustave 90, 95 Géladakis, Élie 169 Gelder, Hendrick Enno van 298–300 Gerhardinger, Constantin 144 Géricault, Théodore 93 Gérôme, Léon 109 Gerstenberg, Otto 37 Gierymski, Aleksander 75, 203, 214 Gierymski, Maksymilian 75, 214 Gigoux, Jean 112 Gimpel, René 92 Giotto (Bondone, Giotto di) 279 Glaser, Curt 178 Glicenstein, Henryk 75, 203, 219 Godoy, Manuel 64, 65 Goebbels, Joseph 295 Goering, Hermann 303

324 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 171, 172 Gogh, Vincent van 294, 295, 300, 301, 303, 304 Goncourt, Edmond de 93, 94, 96, 129, 166, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194–196 Goncourt, Jules de 129, 190 Gottlieb, Leopold 214, 245 Gottlieb, Maurycy 214, 247, 248 Goupil, Albert 195 Goya, Francisco 75 Graham Bell, Alexander 232 Granet, François 129 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 101, 129, 203 Grinberg, Léon 208 Grodzinski, Veronica 37 Groeber, Hermann 144 Gromaire, Marcel 245 Gronkowski, Camille Achille Félix XV, 122–127, 129–132 Guggenheim, Peggy 303 Gutnajer, Abe XVI, 200, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209 Gutnajer, Bernard XVI, 200, 202, 206–209 Gutnajer, Józef 200, 202 Gutnajer, Ludwik (Eleazar) 202 Hallwyl, Wilhelmina von 303 Hamon, Jean-Louis 109 Hardeman, Doede 305 Hardtwig, Wolfgang 137 Harisse, Henry 59 Harlingue, Albert 164 Harriman, Averell 206 Harunobu (Suzuki, Harunobu) 76 Hassé, Caroline 106 Hauser, Friedrich 267 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 104, 106, 111 Hayashi, Tadamas 78 Hazard, Nicolas 36 Hébert, Ernest 109, 112 Heem, Jan de 203 Heilbut, Emil 37 Heine, Heinrich 230 Helbig, Wolfgang 169 Henley, Robert 127 Henner, Jean-Jacques 125 Herrmann, Gustav 266 Herszaft, Adam Abraham 219

Index Heyman, Stanisław 214 Hiersemann, Karl 76, 78 Hiroshige (Utagawa, Hiroshige) 78 Hirszenberg, Samuel (Hirschenberg, Schmul)  214, 215 Hitler, Adolf 144, 303 Hochman, Henryk 214 Hodler, Ferdinand 298 Hoffmeister, Adolf 159 Hokusai (Katsushika, Hokusai) 78 Holbein, Hans 279, 282 Houssaye, Henri 97 Hude, Hermann von der 284 Huet, Paul 129 Hughes, Edward 232 Hugo, Victor 112, 126 Hugues, Paul 124 Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique 65 Jabach, Eberhard 188 Jacobsen, Carl 169, 172 Jagmin, Stanisław 79 James, Henry 19 Jasieński, Feliks (“Manggha”) XIV, 72–76, 78–85 Jay, Martin 17 Jonghelincke, Jacques 65 Jongkind, Johan Barthold 90 Jourdain, Frantz 89, 93 Kahnweiler, Daniel 201 Kann, Alphonse 36 Karny, Alfons 82 Karsten, Charles 292 Kaufmann, Angelika 203 Kersten, Charles 297 King Ludwig II 135 Kisling, Moïse (Moses) 207, 219, 245 Klinger, Max 75, 82, 177 Knoedler, Roland 101 Knuttel, Gerhardus 300 Koehler, Bernard 37 Köhler, Wilhelm 142 Konradi, Nikolay 44, 47 Kopera, Feliks 83, 84 Korwin-Milewski, Ignacy 203 Kossak, Jerzy 246

Index Kossak, Wojciech 246 Kouřil, Vladimír 155 Kraft, Adam 279 Kraft-Ebbing, Richard von 5 Kramář, Vincenc 155, 156 Kratz, Édouard 116 Kröller, Anton 303 Kröller-Müller, Helene 294, 297, 298, 300–303 Krystall, Bronisław (Beirach) XVI, 212, 213, 218–224 Krystall, Izabela 222 Krystall, Karol 222 Krzyżanowski, Krzysztof 75 Kschessinska, Mathilde 51 Kuna, Henryk 203 Kuniyoshi (Utagawa, Kuniyoshi) 78 Kurzawa, Antoni 74 La Fontaine (La Fontaine, Jean de) 96 Lacan, Jacques 5 Lacaze, Lucien 130 Laguillermie, Frédéric Auguste 116 Lambroso, Jean Paul 268 Landau-Czajka, Anna 224 Lapuze, Henry 124–126 Larsson, Francis 18, 19 Laszczka, Konstanty 74, 84 Leck, van der Bart 300 Lemaire, Madeleine 114 Leoni, Pompeo 65 Levinstein, Walter 37 Lichtwark, Alfred 286 Lièvre, Edouard 112 Loewenfeld, Henryk 204 Louis XIII of France 129 Louis XVI of France 129 Madrazo, Raimundo de 56 Makowski, Tadeusz 245 Malczewski, Jacek 28, 74, 84, 203, 214, 219, 242–244, 249, 250, 252 Malherbe, William 88 Manet, Édouard 93 Mangin, Louise 106 Mannheim, Charles 233 Manzel, Ludwig 260 Mariette, Pierre-Jean 188, 191

325 Marquis de Lagoy (Meryan, Jean-BaptisteFlorentin-Gabriel de) 188 Marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre (Gaspard, Louis) 97 Marshall, John 169 Marx, Karl 151 Masanobu (Masanobu, Kitao) 76 Master Wilhelm (Lochner, Stefan) 279 Matejko, Jan 80, 203, 214, 217, 219, 220, 222, 251 Matisse, Henri 49, 169 Maupassant, Guy de 19 Mazerolle, Alexis 103 Mehoffer, Józef 74, 217 Meier-Graefe, Julius 179 Meissonnier, Ernest 101, 108 Melchionne, Kevin 10 Memmling, Hans 279 Ménard, René 31 Mendelssohn, Moses 229 Meunier, Charles 96 Michałowski, Piotr 80, 217, 219 Michelangelo (Buonarroti Simoni, Michelangelo di Lodovico) 279 Mickiewicz, Adam 126, 130, 132 Mickiewicz, Władysław (Ladislas) 130 Mierzejewski, Jacek 245, 246 Miller, Daniel 17 Millet, Jean-François 108, 127 Mills, Charles Wright 151, 160 Mingazzini, Giovanni 5 Mirbeau, Octave 90, 102 Mniszech, Michał Jerzy 217 Moltke, Hans-Adolf von 206 Mondrian, Piet 292, 295–297, 300 Monegro, Juan Bautista 63 Monet, Claude 90, 93, 166, 298 Monfort, Philippe de 103 Monod, Henri 97 Montesquiou, Robert de 18 Moore, Henry 168 Morawetz, Richard 154 Moreau, Gustave 172 Moronobu (Hishikawa, Moronobu) 76 Morozov, Ivan Abramovich XIV, 36 Moulin, Reymonde 12 Muensterberger, Wendy 9 Muensterberger, Werner XIII, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14

326 Mühren, Bas 305 Muller, Z. 122 Müller-Wischin, Anton 144 Murat, Caroline 20 Murillo (Pérez), Bartolomé Esteban 61, 62 Muthesius, Hermann 181 Nadelman, Eli (Elie, Eliasz) 219 Napoleon III Bonaparte 106, 111 Narischkine, Cyrille 110 Natanson, Adam 39 Natanson, Aleksander 39 Nebeský, Václav 160 Nepros, Edward 207 Niewska, Olga 82 Nittis, Giuseppe de 111, 114, 115 Norblin de La Gourdaine, Jean-Pierre 132 Norblin de La Gourdaine, Sébastien Louis Guillaume 132 Nordau, Max 6 Orłowski, Aleksander 203, 217 Ostade, Isaac von 207 Ostahaus, Karl Ernst 304 Oswald, Elisabeth 134 Paderewski, Ignacy Jan 80 Pajou, Augustin 129 Pankiewicz, Józef 74, 76, 77, 214 Pannemaker, Pieter de 63 Pannwitz, Eberhard von 206 Parrot, Fiona 17 Patek, Stanisław 206 Pauli, Gustav 179, 287, 288 Pearce, Susan 11 Pellerin, Auguste 36 Pellet, Gustave 76 Perugino, Pietro 61, 62 Petit, Francis 108, 109 Petit, Georges 90, 106, 108–110, 116, 195, 196 Philip II of Spain 63, 65 Philip V of Spain 65 Phillipps, Thomas 10 Picasso, Pablo 49, 166, 169, 170, 172, 296 Pieter, Christian 294 Pilar Osorio, María del 57 Pilgrim, Anton 279 Piłsudski, Józef (Polish Marshal) 249

Index Pissarro, Camille 90, 303 Pius VI (Pope) 217 Podkowiński, Józef 74, 84, 219 Pomian, Krzysztof XIII, 2, 3, 4, 35, 107, 172 Pophanken, Andrea 37 Portman, Josef 155 Potvin, John 15 Poussin, Nicolas 93 Praz, Mario 20, 21, 22 Prince Regent Luitpold 135 Prinet, René 31 Probus-Barczewski, Piotr 82 Proust, Marcel 19, 90 Przesmycki, Zenon 80 Przezdziecki, Aleksander 38 Raczyński, Edward Aleksander XIV, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 38 Raffaëlli, Jean-François 95, 96 Raphael (Raffaello Santi) 65, 277, 278–282 Rastawiecki, Edward 38 Recouvreur, Adrien 116, 117 Redín Michaus, Gonzalo 60 Redon, Odilon 75, 82, 298 Regnault, Henri 105, 109, 115, 127 Reicher, Edward XVI, 213–215, 224 Reinach, Salomon 48 Reiset, Frédéric de 188 Reitlinger, Gerald 12 Renoir, Jean 90 Renoir, Pierre-August 89–91, 93 Resch, Ota 158 Reynolds, Joshua 127 Rheims, Maurice 7, 8 Ricard, Gustave 100, 110, 111, 117 Ricketts, Charles de Sousy 15, 16 Riezler, Walter 265–267 Rilke, Rainer Maria 171 Rioult, Louis-Edouard 126–128 Rizi, Francisco 65 Robert, Hubert 207 Rodin, Auguste XV, 89, 94, 95, 98, 101, 164–172, 298 Rodríguez Marín, Francisco 59 Roëll, David C. 294, 295 Römer, Georg 267 Rops, Félicien 76 Rops, Félicien 94

327

Index Rosenberg, Paul 201 Rothenstein, William 16 Rothschild, Adolphe de 111 Rothschild, Charlotte de 233 Rothschild, Gustave de 111 Rothschild, Nathaniel de 233 Rousseau, Théodore 101, 108 Rovers, Eva XIII, 36 Roybet, Ferdinand 112 Rozwadowski, Karol Hubert 81 Rubens, Peter Paul 61, 62, 65, 101, 110 Rubinstein, Artur 215 Rubinstein, Helena 303 Ruppert, Otto von 136 Ruszczyc, Ferdynand 75, 84 Rzepiński, Czesław 246 Saarinen, Aline 1 Sachko-Macleod, Diane 15 Sagot, Edmond 76 Saint Seans, Camille 90 Saint-Raymond, Léa 91 Saint-Vidal, Francis de 112 Sales y Portocarrero, María Francisca de 58 Salomons, Philip 234 Sánchez Moguel, Antonio 59 Sandberg, Willem 294, 295, 296 Sassoon (Gubbay), Flora 234 Sassoon, Reuben David XVI, 228, 233–235 Schicht, Heinrich 157, 158 Schiele, Egon 298 Schirrmacher, Theodor 284 Schmidt, Valdemar 169 Schneider, Hortense 106 Schongauer, Martin 279 Schwarz, Adolf 249 Scorel, Jan van 279 Séailles, Gabriel 97 Seitei, Watanabe 78 Serrano y Sanz, Manuel 59 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur 303 Shakespeare, William 247 Shannon, Charles Haslewood 15 Shapton, Leanne 17 Shchukin, Siergei Ivanovich XIV, 36 Sieveking, Johannes 261, 263, 265 Silvermann, Willa Z. 94, 96 Simon, Lucien 31, 35

Sisley, Alfred 93 Skoczylas, Skoczylas 219 Skotnicki, Aleksander B. 243 Slijper, Salomon B. 297 Słonimski, Antoni 204 Sommer, Oscar 276 Somov, Konstantin 49, 54 Sorolla, Joaquin 66–67 Städel, Johann Friedrich 275, 276, 281 Stanisław II August of Poland (Poniatowski, Stanisław August) 217, 218 Stanisławski, Jan 74, 84, 214 Starý, Antonín 157 Steinbach, Erwin von 279 Steinfeld, František 155 Stewart, Susan 8 Stoffel, Eugène 111 Strauss, Isaac XVI, 231–233, 237, 238 Strauss, Jules 36 Sudek, Josef 155 Szukalski, Stanisław 82 Ślewiński, Władysław 38, 39, 75, 203 Tano, Marius 169 Tassaert, Octave 113 Tchaikovsky, Modest 47, 48 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 44, 47, 48 Temple, Benno 305 Teniers II, David 61 Teyschl, Otokar 157 Thévenin, Léon 96, 97 Thoma, Emil 144 Tichy, Karol 79 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 127 Tillmann, Georg 8 Titian (Vecelli, Tiziano) 62, 65 Toorop, Charley 300 Touluse-Lautrec, Henri de 93 Trentmann, Frank 13 Trębacz, Maurycy 214 Tschudi, Hugo von 80 Tylor, Francis Henry 11 Utamaro (Kitagawa, Utamaro) 76 Uzanne, Octave 94–96 Vasari, Giorgio 191 Vauxcelles, Louis 92

328 Védrine, Hélène 94 Veit, Philipp 276, 278, 282 Velázquez, Diego 64 Velde, Henry van de 301, 302 Velde, Willem van de 203 Vergara, Juan Antonio de Miranda y Ramírez de 62 Vernet, Carle 127 Veronese, Paolo 101 Vever, Henri 97 Victoria of the United Kingdom 233 Viegeland, Gustav 75 Vigner, Charles 78 Viollet-Le-Duc, Eugène 168 Vischer, Peter 279 Vollard, Ambroise 76, 92, 96, 201 Vollon, Antoine 101, 112, 114 Vuillard, Jean-Édouard 93 Wagner, Adolf 143 Wagner, Richard 79 Waldes, Jindřich 154 Waliszewski, Zygmunt 246, 247 Wallace, Richard 129 Wallraf, Ferdinand Franz 275 Wanke, Alice 183 Warburg, Felix 237 Warocqué, Roul 169 Wasson, Ellis 31 Watteau, Antoine 194 Weber Ladislav Jiří 148, 155 Weber, Max XII, 151 Weiss, Wojciech 75, 80, 84, 219, 244 Weissman, Adriaan Willem 294

Index Wellcome, Henry 18 Wertheim, Aleksander 217 Wertheim, Aleksandra 217 Wertheim, Gustaw XVI, 213, 215, 217, 218, 224 Wertheim, Jakub 217 Westheim, Paul 180 Wiereszczagin, Wasilij 203 Wille, Pierre 129 Winnicott, Donald 8, 15 Witkiewicz, Stanisław (Witkacy) 73, 74 Wittig, Edward 75 Woleński, Jan 223 Wolf, Artur 182 Wolters, Paul 267 Wouwerman, Philips 61 Wyczółkowski, Leon 72, 74, 76, 84, 214, 217, 219, 220 Wyspiański, Stanisław 74, 214, 217, 219 Yaremich, Stepan 49 Yass-Alston, Agnieszka 247 Zagajski, Mieczysław (Zagayski, Michael)  208 Zaleski, August 206 Zamoyski, August 219 Zamoyski, Stanisław 38 Zapolska, Gabriela 39, 252 Zaynvl Rapoport, Shloyme (Ansky, S.; Anski, Szymon) 231 Ziem, Félix 108, 125 Ziemba, Antoni 257 Zunz, Leopold 230