German collectors were among the first to appreciate the radical art of Van Gogh. In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, there were around 150 of his works in private collections in Germany. By 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, there were almost none left with these collectors.
The majority of Van Gogh collectors in Germany were Jewish (or of Jewish heritage). After 1933 they quickly became victims of Nazi persecution. Some had to go into exile, often being forced to relinquish their art, and many were simply murdered and their works seized.
Although the fate of spoliated artworks now receives considerable media coverage, much less attention has been focused on the creative role of Jewish collectors in fostering avant-garde art. This is addressed in an exhibition at Hamburg’s Bucerius Kunst Forum, From Monet to Picasso: Jewish Art Collectors in Germany (11 September-29 March 2027).
The 100 paintings and drawings in the show include works by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne and Edvard Munch, along with German Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein—and, of course, Van Gogh. The exhibition's co-curator, Stefan Koldehoff, is a German Van Gogh specialist who has worked alongside the Bucerius's director Kathryn Baumstark.
The focus of the show is on 15 Jewish collectors, each of whom get their own room in the exhibition. Together these families owned more than 30 Van Gogh works by the 1930s. Many had been acquired from Jewish dealers, such as Berlin-based Paul Cassirer and Munich-based Justin Thannhauser.
By 1945, works once owned by Jewish collectors had been scattered around the world. The Hamburg show aims to reassemble a selection. Unfortunately the presentation includes only a single Van Gogh since, despite a considerable efforts, loans proved elusive.
Van Gogh’s Girl with Ruffled Hair in the Bucerius Kunst Forum exhibition, alongside empty frames, symbolising the losses of Berlin collector Kurt Oppenheim Photo: Stefan Koldehoff, Cologne
The sitter in Girl with Ruffled Hair (June 1888), the show’s sole Van Gogh, had been described by the artist in most unflattering terms to his Australian artist friend John Russell. She was “a dirty little girl I saw this afternoon whilst I was painting a view of the river”. Describing her as a “mudlark”, she represented “a vague florentine sort of figure”.
By 1912 Girl with Ruffled Hair had been acquired by Tilla Durieux, an Austrian actor and wife of the art dealer Paul Cassirer. He was to die of suicide when Durieux went through divorce proceedings in 1926.
Durieux sold the Van Gogh portrait in the 1920s and it was bought by Berlin-based Margarete Oppenheim. On her death in 1935 it passed to her stepson Kurt. Most of his collection had to be sold off under the Nazis, but he was able to export the Van Gogh portrait, after a payment to the authorities.
Kurt Oppenheim emigrated to Switzerland, where he settled in Blonay. In 1945 he sold Girl with Ruffled Hair to the Swiss collectors René and Madeleine Junod. The portrait was subsequently bequeathed in 1986 to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, which is lending it to the Hamburg exhibition.
Sadly, Oppenheim’s greatest Van Gogh painting ended up later being seized by the Nazis and is now lost. In 1939 he sold Trees with Ivy (May 1889) to Paris-based Alexandrine de Rothschild, of the Jewish banking family.
Nazi deputy leader Hermann Göring and his art advisor Walter Hofer with Van Gogh’s Trees with Ivy at the Jeu de Paume depot of looted art in Paris, photographed by Heinrich Hoffmann (1942) Courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
Trees with Ivy was confiscated by the German occupation forces in December 1941. The last trace of the painting is a 1942 photograph of Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring proprietorially touching the seized painting when it was held at the Jeu de Paume depot in Paris. It is presumed that the picture was somehow destroyed or lost, although it is just possible that it survives, either unrecognised as a Van Gogh in private ownership or secreted away to prevent its restitution.
A fake: Cornflowers in a Vase, once owned by Georg Hirschland Hirschland descendants, United States, courtesy of Bucerius Kunst Forum
The other so-called “Van Gogh” in the Hamburg exhibition is a fake. Cornflowers in a Vase was bought in 1935, as an authentic work, by the Essen-based banker Georg Hirschland. It came from the Thannhauser gallery in Berlin. In 1938 Hirschland managed to flee Germany for the United States, but he had to leave artworks behind.
Hirschland had to relinquish Cornflowers in a Vase to the city of Essen and in 1939 it was sent to the Museum Folkwang. After the war, in 1949, the still life was restituted to his heirs in the US.
The painting was last exhibited, again as a Van Gogh, at the Wildenstein gallery in New York in 1955. But after that, its authenticity was questioned and it was excluded from the 1970 de la Faille Van Gogh catalogue raisonné. Cornflowers in a Vase remains with the Hirschland descendants and is now being exhibited—as a fake—for the first time in more than 70 years.
Koldehoff’s aim in the Hamburg exhibition is to focus attention on “the pioneering role of Jews in establishing, fostering and defending modern forms of art in Germany”.
Of the 150 Van Gogh works that were with German collectors by the 1930s, probably around 100 were with Jewish owners—in a country where less than one per cent of the population had been Jewish.
