What is provenance research?
Dealing with the museum’s own collection is an important area of work done at museums. This includes knowledge about the origin of the objects in the museum’s collection. The origin of objects, the so-called provenance, is not always completely understood.
At the beginning of her artistic career, Käthe Kollwitz mainly sold prints. She also gave hand drawings or prints to selected art collections. The Dresden Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) under Max Lehrs, for example, was one of the first institutions to acquire Kollwitz’s works. But there were also private collectors who were interested in the artist. Today, there are artworks by Käthe Kollwitz that have been part of many collections over the decades and have been and are offered on the art market for a variety of reasons.
The Berlin textile dealer Julius Freund (1869-1941) is the only collector Käthe Kollwitz mentions in her diaries, even twice. His name stood and stands in professional circles for the quality of a select collection of works by German artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Born in Cottbus, Freund made a career in Berlin in the ready-to-wear clothing industry with three-piece suits for ladies and gentlemen and achieved considerable wealth in the years before the First World War. He used this to build up a collection of German art, which included works by the Cottbus Romantic Carl Blechen, Max Liebermann and also Käthe Kollwitz. Unfortunately, it is not yet documented when Kollwitz and Freund met. Presumably, however, at the latest since the large solo exhibition at the Paul Cassirer Gallery on the occasion of Käthe Kollwitz’s 50th birthday in the summer of 1917. Some of the works exhibited there can later be found in Julius Freund’s collection.
In 1920, Käthe Kollwitz even borrowed two of her drawings sold to Freund to have them lavishly facsimilated for the so-called Richter portfolio. These two drawings — Weihnacht and Überfahren — were later acquired by the museum’s founder and art dealer Hans Pels-Leusden and are now part of the museum’s collection. But how did the two artworks come into the possession of Hans Pels-Leusden and why is this question relevant to the museum?
When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, the life of the Jewish textile dealer and art collector Julius Freund, and his family, changed drastically. His children Hans and Gisèle fled Germany due to their left-wing political views, while Julius Freund and his wife Clara mainly resided in Italy after the Berlin textile business was forced to close. Freund did everything he could to save his extensive art collection from being seized by the Nazis. Through the mediation of Oskar Reinhart and Fritz Nathan, Freund was able to place the collection on permanent loan to the Winterthur Art Museum in Switzerland.
Kollwitz noted in her diary in 1936:
“August 3, 1936, the collector Julius Freund and his wife are with me. He has taken his beautiful collection to Winterthur in Switzerland.”
It was not until February 1939 that the couple managed to flee to their son in England. Due to the high “Jewish Property tax” and “Reichs Flight Tax,” the Freund family arrived in London almost penniless. In September 1940 they had to flee again before the bombing of London. Julius Freund suffered a stroke on the flight and died a few months later on March 11, 1941 in the hospital for the poor in Wigton, Cumberland. In the summer of 1941, his family decided on an emergency sale of the art collection in Switzerland, which was auctioned off at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne in the spring of 1942. Among them were the works of Käthe Kollwitz, some of which can be found today in some museums in Switzerland and Germany, located in private collections or, in some cases, completely lost.
In 2005 the so-called Limbach Commission recommended restitution to the Freund family for four artworks from the former Freund Collection owned by the federal government. The Freund family had lost nearly everything after being forced into exile by the Nazis due to their Jewish origins and deprived of their German citizenship in 1940. The Kollwitz Museum is in good contact with the anglophone Freund heirs. The museum views the commemoration of the Jewish-Berlin art collector Julius Freund and his collection of Kollwitzs’ art as part of the it’s mission. This includes researching in whose possession the two drawings were before they came into the collection of Hans Pels-Leusden.
Käthe Kollwitz’s 50th birthday solo exhibition at Paul Cassirer in 1917 had brought the artist’s drawings to great attention. She sold almost all of the drawings she exhibited. Thus arose the need to make her drawings more widely known through facsimiles (reproductions true to the original) and also to preserve them in one’s own memory. A first portfolio was created in 1920 and contains 23 facsimiles of Kollwitz drawings, the so-called Richter-Mappe.
Emil Richter honored the work of Käthe Kollwitz and, as a publisher, received the sole right to print her plates and distribute her work in 1900. Together with the artist, he selected 23 drawings and one lithograph from her work for the portfolio and facsimilated them. Different editions of this portfolio were created: an unnumbered edition C, edition B with 20 copies and only five copies of edition A, of which the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Berlin owns a portfolio.
