Wilhelm Werner (art collector)

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Heinrich Stegemann : Portrait Wilhelm Werner , pencil and watercolor, around 1926

Walter Wilhelm Werner (born December 25, 1886 in Kiel ; died October 31, 1975 in Hamburg ) was a German carpenter and master craftsman at the Hamburger Kunsthalle . He preserved paintings by Anita Rée owned by the Kunsthalle from being confiscated by the National Socialists and became known posthumously as a private collector of works from the Hamburg Secession .

Life

Wilhelm Werner was the son of a locksmith. After the early death of his parents in 1896, he was placed in a foster family in Hohenwestedt . He completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter, which he completed in 1906 with the journeyman's examination. After military service, he worked in his profession in Kiel and Hamburg. In 1914 he applied to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, was hired by the director Gustav Pauli and began his service as an assistant supervisor on July 5, 1914.

During the First World War he served in a medical company and as a front soldier. When he returned to Hamburg unharmed in 1918, Pauli successfully campaigned for his permanent position. He married in 1919 and his daughter Käte was born in 1920. He rose from supervisor to foreman assistant, in 1922 to foreman assistant with an official apartment in the old building of the Kunsthalle and in 1927 to works assistant. He was responsible for handling the works of art, for hanging them in the exhibition rooms as well as for packaging and shipping the paintings and was responsible for the carpentry. Pauli also valued his skill as a carpenter when restoring a wooden panel from an altar belonging to Dürer's pupil Hans Schäufelein .

On October 31, 1933, the National Socialists retired Pauli for political reasons. On the instructions of the Reich Governor of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann , to all civil servants, Wilhelm Werner joined the NSDAP in May 1937 . During the air raids on Hamburg from 1940 onwards, he held a fire watch in the Kunsthalle . In 1942 he managed to put out a fire on the stairwell floor with sand. In April 1944 he was drafted and classified as fit for military service, but since he was indispensable for the Kunsthalle, he was not drafted into the Wehrmacht and therefore used in the Second World War. In 1947 he became the foreman of the art gallery.

Wilhelm Werner is said to have been a reserved and modest person who was well-read. Until his retirement on March 31, 1952, he lived with his family in the official apartment in the basement of the Kunsthalle.

Act

Anita Rée: self-portrait, around 1930. Hamburger Kunsthalle collection
Anita Rée: Teresina , 1925. Collection Hamburger Kunsthalle

Exhibitions of the Hamburg Secession took place in the Hamburger Kunsthalle from its foundation in 1919 until its dissolution in 1930. This is how Wilhelm Werner came into contact with the young artists. Outside of his office hours he built stretcher frames for oil paintings in the workshop of the Kunsthalle , pulled up the canvases and also made paint boxes for outdoor work. As a thank you, they gave him pictures. Over the decades as an employee of the Kunsthalle, close and lifelong friendships developed with several artists from the Hamburg Secession, especially with Heinrich Stegemann . When they were barely able to exhibit and sell under National Socialism due to repression and their classification as " degenerate art ", Werner bought pictures from them within the framework of his limited financial means and supported them with them.

Werner put together an art collection of 500 works, including groups of works by Stegemann and Willem Grimm , several pictures by Fritz Flinte and Eduard Hopf as well as individual works by Karl Kluth , Alma del Banco , Emil Maetzel , Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen and Fritz Kronenberg . He preferred representational art, landscape motifs and still life were the focus. 85 of the works are oil paintings , the other drawings , watercolors , small sculptures and prints . He had built a professional graphics cabinet to store the paper works. The most modern artistic developments of that time, which went in the direction of abstraction, are not represented. Werner didn't like them. He did not collect for representative reasons; the friendships with the artists made him a collector and shaped his taste in art.

On July 14, 1937, by order of Hermann Göring, a commission put together by Adolf Ziegler confiscated works of modern art from the possession of the Hamburger Kunsthalle for the propaganda exhibition “Degenerate Art” in Munich. Five weeks later, on August 21, there was a second seizure action with the order to secure the entire inventory of modern art and to transport it to a central warehouse in Berlin. A targeted search was made for “degenerate art” in the depots. But seven paintings by the artist Anita Rée, who was ostracized by the National Socialists and bought by Gustav Pauli between 1915 and 1930, were not among them.

Sometime after 1945, the paintings by Rée were again stored in the depot of the Kunsthalle, including her last self-portrait from 1930, three years before her suicide, and the children's picture Teresina , which Rée had painted in Italy in 1925. It was only after Werner's death that his widow Anna Werner reported that between July and August 1937 he had hidden the paintings unnoticed from the depot of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in his official apartment in the basement of the old building and that he had tacitly returned them to the depot after the war. According to Ulrich Luckhardt, the art historians and employees of the Kunsthalle Dietrich Roskamp and Wolf Stubbe, who had witnessed the confiscation actions in the summer of 1937, agreed that only Wilhelm Werner could be the savior of the works. On the occasion of the exhibition Persecuted and Seduced. Art under the swastika in Hamburg 1933–1945 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle In 1983 this was mentioned publicly for the first time.

The seven paintings by Reé rescued by Werner were presented in full for the first time in 2017 in a retrospective at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The exhibition was preceded by research that gave a new orientation about the work of Anita Rées. Maike Bruhns compiled the catalog raisonné.

"If you open the artist's new catalog raisonné, you can judge what an invaluable service the secret hero has rendered to the art world."

- Maike Bruhns

Exhibition of the art collection

In 2011 the Hamburger Kunsthalle honored Werner with the exhibition The Collection of Caretaker Wilhelm Werner . The collection, from which Werner did not sell any work even after his retirement, is owned by Werner's descendants and has never been made available to the public before. It was known only to a few experts. Curator Ulrich Luckhardt selected 130 works from them. The largest group was made up of works by Heinrich Stegemann, Willem Grimm, Fritz Flinte and Eduard Hopf. The exhibition documented that Wilhelm Werner brought together important movements in Hamburg art from the first half of the 20th century. It showed the artistic development of painters like Flinte and Stegemann, who had worked their way from the Impressionist beginnings through Expressionism to cubic forms. Stegemann's oeuvre , confiscated by the Nazis and largely destroyed in a bomb attack on Hamburg, lives on in the collection with 22 paintings and 100 works on paper. He had portrayed Werner several times in the 1920s with pencil and watercolor as an ageless man with angular features and an inward view, or together with his wife and daughter. He created large oil paintings of eight-year-old Kate in a red coat and her parents-in-law in a contemporary style. Anita Rée is represented in the collection with an undated still life, which, due to its style, must have been created before 1921. Werner only collected pictures of Eduard Hopf when he turned away from the New Objectivity after his first trip to Norway in 1930 and, at the same time as Grimm or Karl Kluth, took Edvard Munch's organic landscapes as the model for his artistic work. The show was accompanied by black and white photographs of Werner's work and family life. In a photo from 1937, you can see him sitting in his official apartment, absorbed in a book, surrounded by paintings from his own collection.

literature

  • Ulrich Luckhardt: The collection of the caretaker Wilhelm Werner (= catalog for the exhibition from September 18, 2011 to January 15, 2012 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle ). Mare Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-936543-72-8 .

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Werner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Luckhardt: “… the good Werner” - the caretaker as a silent hero. In: ders .: The collection of the caretaker Wilhelm Werner (Hamburger Kunsthalle). Mare Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-936543-72-8 , pp. 18-25.
  2. ↑ a b Petra Schellen: The caretaker's collection. The secretive Mr. Werner. In: taz . November 27, 2011.
  3. ↑ a b c d The caretaker as a collector. The Kunsthalle Hamburg shows the collection of a more than unusual man. Ulrich Luckhardt in conversation with Susanne Führer. Deutschlandradio Kultur , September 16, 2011, accessed on September 23, 2018.
  4. ↑ Ulrich Luckhardt: “… the good Werner” - the caretaker as a silent hero. In: ders .: The collection of the caretaker Wilhelm Werner (Hamburger Kunsthalle). Mare Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-936543-72-8 , p. 20.
  5. ↑ Nora Sdun: Caretaker Collections . The collection of the caretaker Wilhelm Werner . Textem, November 5, 2011.
  6. ↑ a b Ulrich Luckhardt: “… the good Werner” - the caretaker as a silent hero. In: ders .: The collection of the caretaker Wilhelm Werner (Hamburger Kunsthalle). Mare Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-936543-72-8 , pp. 24-25.
  7. ↑ a b Benedikt Erenz: Anita Rée. Dream hem of childhood. In: Die Zeit , No. 38/2017, online September 13, 2017.
  8. ↑ Maike Bruhns in collaboration with Karin Schick and Sophia Colditz: Anita Rée - the work (catalog for the retrospective from October 6, 2017 to February 4, 2018 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, curated by Karin Schick), Prestel Verlag, Munich 2018, ISBN 978 -3-7913-5712-6 .
  9. ↑ Maike Bruhns: Anita Rées painting in all its beauty and depth. NDR Kultur , April 25, 2018.
  10. ↑ Katja Engler: Late honor for a silent hero . Die Welt, September 4, 2011.
  11. ↑ Ulrich Luckhardt: “… the good Werner” - the caretaker as a silent hero. In: ders .: The collection of the caretaker Wilhelm Werner (Hamburger Kunsthalle). Mare Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-936543-72-8 , p. 21.
  12. ↑ Belinda Grace Gardner : Luminous Canvases. Kunsthalle shows the collection of its former caretaker. In: The world . September 17, 2011. In the exhibition catalog on p. 26.

Remarks

  1. ↑ The caretaker of the Kunsthalle Hamburg was called the foreman. His areas of activity went beyond those of a usual caretaker.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 2, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Werner, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Werner, Walter Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German carpenter and master craftsman at the Hamburger Kunsthalle
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiel - Gaarden
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1975
Place of death Hamburg - Barmbek