ALL ROADS LEAD TO LEICESTER

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1 The new German Expressionism gallery at Leicester s New Walk Museum contains not just one of the finest and most extensive collections of early 20th-century German painting, but a fount of extraordinary stories of exile. Claire Wrathall reports ALL ROADS LEAD TO LEICESTER Far left: Trevor Thomas; left: Tekla Hess; opposite: Franz Marc, Rote Frau, 1912 February 5, 1944: Operation Steinbock, the Luftwaffe s sustained bombing of London, had begun a fortnight earlier. In Italy the Battle of Anzio was raging. It was not, on the face of it, the best time to be celebrating modern German and Austrian art in Britain. But Trevor Thomas, director of the Leicester Museum (now New Walk Museum and Gallery), thought differently. For that day saw the opening of an exhibition of 62 mostly Expressionist works by 16 artists, among them Käthe Kollwitz, Max Liebermann, Franz Marc and Emil Nolde. That said, the Allies were represented too: by Lyonel Feininger, who had been born in New York so counted as an American; Wassily Kandinsky, who might have spent much of his career in Munich and at the Bauhaus, but was Russian by birth and a French citizen by then; and Oskar Kokoschka, who had taken Czech citizenship. Tactfully the show was entitled Mid-European Art. As Thomas wrote in the threepenny catalogue, a single folded sheet paper was scarce with a woodcut by Feininger on its cover, The rise of Hitlerism destroyed the schools and the spirit, exiled and suppressed the men and their works. Modern Art was persecuted. Here we can only show and judge what was attempted before this catastrophe overtook the creative spirit of a continent. That Thomas was able to stage such an exhibition during wartime came about thanks to a meeting with Tekla Hess, the émigré widow of a wealthy German-Jewish shoe manufacturer, who used to visit the gallery not least for its lunchtime concerts. (Thomas, an accomplished singer, was an ambitious programmer of music too, booking the likes of Kathleen Ferrier and Michael Tippett.) Before the war, Tekla and her husband, Alfred, had amassed a collection of perhaps 4,000 contemporary works one of the largest in Germany many of which they had donated to the Angermuseum in their hometown, Erfurt, prior to Alfred s death in Keen supporters of the Bauhaus, then based in nearby Weimar, and patrons of artists from many of the art movements prevalent in Germany at the time, they had, for instance, commissioned Erich Heckel (like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a founder of Die Brücke) to paint a series of frescoes for the Angermuseum. Miraculously they survived destruction at the hands of the Nazis, says Simon Lake, curator of the German collection in Leicester. Quick-thinking members of staff bricked up the doorway to the room where they d been painted and put up a temporary wall in front of it. After the war the wall was removed, and the frescoes were completely unharmed. They would have been destroyed as degenerate art had they been found. During the 1920s, Hess was a genial and informed collector who liked to buy directly from artists, whom he cultivated as friends, Lake continues. Kandinsky and Paul Klee (of the Munich-based Blaue Reiter group), as well as Feininger, Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Dix, the writer Bertolt Brecht and singer Lotte Lenya, were among the friends who visited their home. Indeed, Heckel painted a circus scene in gouache for the cover of their guest book, in which all the artists were encouraged not just ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF LEICESTER ARTS AND MUSEUM 54 Spring 2015 Art Quarterly

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3 Tekla decided to leave for England, smuggling out what paintings she had left along with her furniture Above left: Franz Marc, Legend of the Animals, 1912; above right: Max Pechstein, The Bridge at Erfurt, 1919; right: Johannes Koelz, Thou Shalt not Kill, to inscribe but to illustrate; a copy now hangs at New Walk, one of a hundred or so works in the new German Expressionist Gallery, which opened last autumn to display one of the finest, most extensive collections of early 20thcentury German art outside Germany. At the heart of the collection are four paintings that featured in Trevor Thomas s 1944 show. The greatest is Franz Marc s Rote Frau (1912), which had belonged to Tekla s brother, Stefan Pauson. It is the only canvas by Marc in a British public collection and a rare work inasmuch as it is a figure study that prefigures his move towards abstraction. Among those on the museum s governing council who argued in favour of buying them were Frederick Attenborough, a member of the Museum Committee, principal of what was then University College, Leicester (and father of David, the naturalist, and Richard, the late actor and film director). Rote Frau cost the museum 350 in 1944, but as its then chairman, Sir Charles Keene, quipped, Surely we can afford to buy a scarlet woman for our bachelor director. (A bitter irony: two years later Thomas was arrested in a public lavatory for looking in a suspicious way at a young man, a glance if such it was that cost him his reputation and his job, despite a testimonial from Kenneth Clark tipping Thomas to succeed him as director of the National Gallery.) In addition to Rote Frau, the museum also acquired a cityscape by Feininger, Behind the Church or The Square (1916); a Nolde gouache, The Mask or Head with Red-Black Hair (c. 1910) and The Bridge at Erfurt (1919), painted from a bedroom in the Hess s home by Max Pechstein and a gift from Tekla Hess to the museum as, says Lake, an expression of gratitude to the museum and to Trevor Thomas. For Tekla had much to be grateful for. In 1933 her son, Hans, had been sacked by his employer, the Berlin publisher Ullstein, for being Jewish, after which he left Germany for France and then London, where he had formed the Free German League of Culture, the organisation that subsequently arranged the first German exhibition in Leicester, drawing on loans from the collections of its members. Tekla had stayed behind to be close to her mother and, realising the works they owned would be deemed Entartete Kunst, or degenerate art, by the Nazis, had begun to send some of it abroad, loaning it to galleries in Switzerland. But the authorities eventually became wise to what she was doing and, says Lake, told her she had to return everything they knew about or they would arrest her for taking assets out of the country. So though the entire collection wasn t seized as such as the collection in the Angermuseum had been there was a risk that it would be. Rather, it was dispersed and much of it inevitably sold. (During the 1960s Hans was awarded 75,000 Deutschmarks by the German government in partial recompense for the loss of the collection and the persecution he had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.) Four years later, Tekla too decided to leave for England, smuggling out what paintings she had left along with her furniture. She had a friend who worked for the post office who helped her spirit paintings out, says Lake. But two years later the outbreak of war saw Hans KOELZ: ESTATE OF JOHANNES KOELZ, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS PECHSTEIN: PECHSTEIN HAMBURG/TOEKENDORF/DACS, FEININGER: DACS Spring 2015 Art Quarterly

4 Above: Lyonel Feininger, Behind the Church or The Square, 1916; left: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Sailing Boats off Fehmarn, 1914 interned as an enemy alien and shipped to Canada, though eventually he was returned to England and sent to Loughborough to work on a farm. Tekla moved to Leicester to be near him. Trevor Thomas later appealed to the Ministry of Labour and negotiated his release, appointing him deputy keeper at the museum, from which he went on to be curator of the York Art Gallery. Those four paintings became the basis for a remarkable collection of 20th-century German art, which now runs to 500 works that have been bequeathed, bought (many with Art Fund support) or loaned, and about a fifth of which are on show. Among the highlights are works by Lovis Corinth, Otto Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka and Schmidt- Rottluff, part of a bequest of 24 works from the art historian Rosa Schapire, a sponsor of Die Brücke, the Dresden movement founded by Heckel, Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff, and another émigré who left Hamburg for England in August 1939 and ended up in Leicester. Other important donations have come from the retired Leicester-born businessman Art Quarterly Spring

5 The collection at Leicester continues to grow, a body of paintings that is particularly strong on portraits of and by women Above: Käthe Kollwitz, Help Russia, 1921; above right: Margarethe Klopfleisch, Despair, 1941; right: Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Inderin, 1964 Michael Brooks, who, says Lake, inspired by early visits to the museum, began collecting in the 1990s and presented us with more than 60 works [among them Marc s Legend of the Animals (1912)] in Gestures like that have really helped. Last year another bequest was made through the Art Fund in memory of Tekla Hess s nephew, Peter Pauson, whose father, Stefan, had been deported to Dachau but managed to escape, and who was the original owner of Marc s Rote Frau. As Stefan s granddaughter and Tekla s great niece, Hilary Pauson, told me: Of course we could have sent them to auction, but then they would have been dispersed. I like the idea that they ve been reunited with other family works. Now everybody can see and study them. I thought that was a good thing to do. Ultimately the pictures that I ve still got will follow them. It makes sense to me to keep the family pictures together as far as possible. And so the collection at Leicester continues to grow, a body of paintings that is particularly strong on portraits of and by women, among them Gabriele Münter s portrait of the Danish writer Anna Roslund (1917), an archetypal neue Frau (with her short hair, direct gaze and pipe); Käthe Kollwitz s unflinching Self-portrait (1920) of her careworn 53-year-old face; and Selfportrait with a Cat (1928) by Lotte Laserstein, one of the first women to study at the Berlin Academy, whose early work was typical of what was known as Neue Sachlichkeit New Objectivity a reaction to Expressionism in that it presented its subjects in intense, hyper-realistic detail. It s very austere, almost Holbeinesque, says Lake. You can see how fine her brushwork is, a very steady, very careful technique. Look at the folds of the fabric and the fur on the cat, who allegedly followed her home one day, and apparently she fed it brandy biscuits to keep it quiet on her lap while she painted it. If Laserstein s demeanor is masculine and severe, the portrait of Sheela Bonarjee (whose daughter lives in Leicester), entitled simply Inderin (Indian woman; 1964) by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky a pupil of Beckmann and longterm companion of the writer Elias Canetti, who, like her, fled to England from Vienna in the late 1930s is altogether sweeter and more feminine, though no less enigmatic. A mysterious smile plays across her lips in response to the novel she is reading, which is said to be Canetti s fantastical and frightening Auto da Fé, in which she is apparently so absorbed she has failed to notice the slightly sinister seagull that has settled just to the right of the book. There is sculpture too, notably Margarethe Klopfleisch s woodcarving Despair (1941) and the Plasticine maquette she made in an internment camp on the Isle of Man, an agonised response to the miscarriage she suffered while detained. But perhaps the most surprising portraits in the collection are two by the Austrian artist Ernst Neuschul, another artist who had almost been forgotten but has been rescued by Leicester and given a home here, says Lake. One, Woman Applying Make-up (1930), was donated by the artist s sons last year. The other, Negermutter, painted in Berlin in 1931, shows a smartly dressed black woman in a cloche hat breastfeeding a baby under a tree. KOLLWITZ: DACS MOTESICZKY MARIE LOUISE VON MOTESICZKY CHARITABLE TRUST. KLOPFLEISCH: REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE ARTIST S ESTATE, SONJA GROSSNER 58 Spring 2015 Art Quarterly

6 Left: Lotte Laserstein, Self-portrait with a Cat, 1928; above: Ernst Neuschul, Negermutter, 1931 Neuschul believed in championing the oppressed in society: the workers, the unemployed, gypsies Lake says, and giving them a nobility, a sort of monumentalism. This was painted at a time when you would never see portraits of black people, you would never see breast-feeding in public. He was very brave to paint it. A few years later he had an exhibition in Berlin at which the canvases were slashed with swastikas on Goebbels s orders. Such is the extent of the collection that the hang will change from time to time in order that other works can be seen. Among the most extraordinary pieces owned by the museum, and not normally on show, for instance, are six fragments from a large-scale triptych, Thou Shalt Not Kill (1930 7) by Johannes Koelz, modelled on a medieval altarpiece but with an apparently crucified soldier in a tin helmet and gas mask at its centre. Koelz had served in the First World War, during which he had won an Iron Cross at Verdun for rescuing a fellow soldier who had had a leg blown off. He became a policeman (he had been in the detachment that fought Hitler s supporters in the Beer Hall Putsch) and an artist, but his painting and the poetry defined him as a dissenter. Charged with producing pacifist propaganda and summoned to appear before the authorities in Munich, Koelz was surprised to find the arresting officer was the soldier whose life he had saved. His passport was confiscated, but he was given 48 hours to leave Germany, and he and his young family managed to escape over the Alps into Switzerland. Before they left, he cut up the painting into, it is thought, about 20 pieces, taking a small fragment with them and leaving the others with friends who were prepared to hide them. After Koelz s death, his daughter, Ava Farrington, who happened to be living in wouldn t you know Leicestershire, began her search for the missing panels, six of which are now at New Walk. It does seem that all roads lead to Leicester, says Lake. For though he concedes that the collection is not as big as those at the Brücke-Museum in Berlin, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies in Los Angeles or the fantastic holding of Neue Sachlichkeit at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, it is the most extensive in the UK. And, more than that, what we have too are the stories of the refugees who came to England that we ve been able to rediscover through the art. In that respect it has a real resonance and power. Which is not to say that there isn t great art here too. As Patrick Legant, formerly director of German and Austrian art at Sotheby s and the independent expert commissioned by the museum to assess its collection, put it: I was blown away by its depth and range. It is absolutely unique. Enthralling, Lake calls it simply. And so it is: a testimony not just to art itself, but the value we place on it and the debt we owe, as Trevor Thomas wrote in the introduction to the show in 1944, to the courageous individuals who rescued [these] pictures from certain destruction. Expressionism: The Total Artwork at New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. Art Quarterly Spring