Alfred Hess (art collector)

Alfred Hess, 1928

Alfred Hess (born May 19, 1879 in Erfurt ; † December 24, 1931 ) was a German entrepreneur , art collector and art patron .

family

Thekla and Alfred Hess, 1920s

He grew up in Erfurt as the son of the Jewish shoe manufacturer Maier Hess (1849–1915) and his wife Amalie Hess, b. Nordheimer (1851-1927). His father and his brother founded the Maier & Louis Hess shoe factory in 1879 , which from the beginning produced shoes on a machine basis. At the end of the 19th century, the factory in today's Thälmannstrasse 60 in Erfurt was rebuilt and continuously modernized. In 1898 a representative manufacturer's villa in the style of historicism was added. The buildings still exist today. Alfred Hess married the daughter of the wickerwork manufacturer Pankratz Pauson (1852-1910), Thekla (1884-1968), née Pauson, who was based in Lichtenfels in Upper Franconia . The couple had a son, the art historian and museum curator Hans Hess OBE (1907–1975).

Act

Alfred Hess' villa in Erfurt (2015)

After completing his training, Alfred Hess worked in his father's company. In 1910 he had the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg build a spacious new villa on the property at Richard-Breslau-Straße 14 in Erfurt. The company was on February 10, 1913 the company M. & L. Hess Schuhfabrik AG into a joint stock company converted. After his father's death in 1915, Alfred Hess became managing partner of the factory. His experience as a war participant in the First World War changed his social and cultural interests significantly. He began to get involved politically, joined the German Democratic Party and vehemently campaigned for the consolidation of the Weimar Republic . As an entrepreneur, he made sure that the working conditions for his employees were improved and planned the construction of social housing .

After 1919, he privately replaced the pre-war furnishings in his villa with antiques and new paintings and began collecting modern art. He also supported the Erfurt Museum, today's Angermuseum , through foundations and loans for modern art in cooperation with the museum directors Edwin Redslob , Walter Kaesbach and Herbert Kunze .

When the government of the Free State of Thuringia wanted to close the Bauhaus Weimar in 1924 , together with other representatives from industry and business, he submitted a petition to the state parliament for its continuation, which provided for 100,000 to 150,000 Reichsmarks to be made available for preservation. It was emphasized that the interest only applies to the cultural significance of the Bauhaus and is not of an economic nature.

From 1925 onwards, Hess sponsored the boarding school “ Schule am Meer ” on the North Sea island of Juist , which recommended itself in particular with a musical focus on performing ( amateur play ). In addition to the Swiss pedagogue Rudolf Aeschlimann , the painter Fritz Hafner , the reform pedagogue Martin Luserke , the social scientist Elisabeth Jaffé von Richthofen and the chemist Paul Reiner, Hess was a member of the board of trustees of the Schule am Meer foundation , and he was also one of their confidants, the interested parents have informed and advised about the Landerziehungsheim .

In the Weimar Republic for a time as a limited partnership , the company went bankrupt in 1930 due to the global economic crisis that began at the end of October 1929 . A short time later, Alfred Hess died as a result of an operation. His wife and son Hans managed to completely discharge the company by the summer of 1933 and bring it back into profitability.

aftermath

When he died in 1931, he left his wife Thekla and his son Hans, in addition to the majority shares in the shoe factory, some real estate and a collection of around 80 oil paintings, 200 drawings and watercolors and around 4,000 graphic sheets, including by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Franz Marc , August Macke , Erich Heckel , Emil Nolde , Lyonel Feininger , Max Pechstein , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , Christian Rohlfs , James Ensor , Otto Mueller , Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Paul Klee .

Plaque

Thekla Hess sold the villa, gave some pictures to family members and former directors of the company and moved from Erfurt with the art collection to her mother in Lichtenfels in Franconia. At the time, Hans Hess was living in Berlin as a subtenant of the writer Elisabeth Hauptmann and worked for Ullstein Verlag . After the seizure of power of the Nazis in 1933, he found himself both in his apartment by house searches of the Gestapo threatened in his job in a Jewish company, sold its shares in the meantime again debt-free and profits Income generated ends shoe factory and emigrated in 1933 via Paris to London . In 1936 Thekla Hess had a large part of the collection housed in the Cologne Art Association. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's key work, Berliner Straßenszene , was then sold by the Cologne Art Association to the Frankfurt collector Carl Hagemann (Hagemann resold it to the State of Berlin. Today the work is again in the possession of the Hess family). In 1939 she followed her son Hans to Great Britain. She was able to take some works from the art collection with her, the others were in Switzerland and Cologne or had been sold from there, the rest stayed in Lichtenfels.

In 1948, the factories of M. & L. Hess AG were expropriated and became public property . Together with the Eduard Lingel shoe factory , this resulted in the VEB shoe factory Thuringia . After further mergers a few years later, the company was named VEB Schuhfabrik "Paul Schäfer" in 1952 (after Paul Schäfer , a former employee of the Lingel company and a KPD member).

In 2016, the heirs reached a restitution agreement with the Neue Galerie New York for Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's nude from 1914, which had been sold in 1994 by the heirs of the Cologne painter Peter Herkenrath .

Honors

• The Alfred-Hess-Straße in Erfurt is named after him 1,992th
• Memorial plaque on the Alfred Hess Villa in Erfurt

literature

• Edwin Redslob : From Weimar to Europe. Experienced and well thought-out. Berlin 1972. / as reprint: Glaux, Jena 1998, ISBN 3-931743-16-0 .
• Hans Hess : Thanks in colors. From Alfred and Thekla Hess' guest book. 9th edition, Piper, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-492-10606-4 .
• Steffen Raßloff : Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. Erfurt in the Weimar Republic. Sutton, Erfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-86680-338-1 .
• Mechtild Lucke: The Erfurt patron and collector Alfred Hess. In: Henrike Junge: Avant-garde and audience. Reception of avant-garde art in Germany 1905–1933. Böhlau, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-412-02792-8 .
• Christina Feilchenfeldt, Peter Romilly: The Alfred Hess Collection. In: Weltkunst, magazine for art and antiques , Volume 70 (2000), ISSN  0043-261X .
• Ruth Menzel: Alfred Hess. Shoe manufacturer, art collector and patron. Sutton, Erfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-86680-288-9 .

Web links

• Claims for return from the Alfred Hess collection . State of knowledge, overview and opinion. By Andreas Hüneke, Degenerate Art Research Center , FU Berlin, Institute of Art History.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Photo: Maier Hess (1849-1915) tomb, Amalie Hess, b. Nordheimer (1851–1927), Alfred Hess (1879–1931) . From: alemannia-judaica.de, accessed on April 23, 2017
2. ↑ Dietmar Grosser: Shoes from the conveyor belt. In: Thüringer Allgemeine from January 2, 2016
3. ↑ Alfred Hess . From: erfurt-web.de, accessed on April 8, 2017
4. ^ The Story of the Hess family . From: germanexpressionismleicester.org, accessed April 8, 2017
5. ^ Alfred Hess Collection . From: van-ham.com, accessed April 8, 2017
6. ↑ Ernst Fröhlich in: Das Neue Tagebuch , year 1937, issue 1, p. 21.
7. ^ Information sheet about the school by the sea on the North Sea island of Juist , school year 1928/29, p. 15.
8. ^ Information sheet about the school by the sea on the North Sea island of Juist , school year 1929/30, p. 16.
9. ↑ Press release on the return of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's painting “Berlin Street Scene” ( memento from August 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). Lawyer David J. Rowland / Lawyers Schink & Studzinski (Rowland & Associates, New York / Berlin), May 25, 2007. From: nazi-looted-art.de, accessed on April 23, 2017
10. ↑ Melissa Müller, Monika Tatzkow: Lost Images Lost Lives. Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art . 1st edition. Munich 2009.
11. ↑ see the web link to return claims in 2004 and the later state of knowledge
12. ^ New gallery Returns Painting Seized by Nazis and Then Rebuys It in Settlement , New York Times on September 27, 2016, accessed on September 28, 2016
13. ↑ Christina Feilchenfeldt: My grandfather's legacy . In: Der Tagesspiegel, September 23, 2006. On: tagesspiegel.de
14. ↑ Thomas Lackmann: Odd journey of a paradise scene . In: Jüdische Allgemeine, December 7, 2006. On: juedische-allgemeine.de
15. ↑ The State Secretary and the Heiress . In: Die Welt, May 23, 2007. On: welt.de
16. ↑ justice only after advance payment . In: Die Tageszeitung, January 2, 2009. On: taz.de
17. ^ Johanna di Blasi: Franz-Marc-Bild leaves the Sprengel Museum Hannover . In: Hannoversche Allgemeine, July 7, 2011. On: haz.de
18. ↑ Stefan Koldehoff: Stolen and sold . In: Die Zeit, 30 (2015), 6 August 2015. On: zeit.de
19. ^ Communist gets payout for painting stolen by Nazis . In: The Times, September 30, 2016. At: thetimes.co.uk
20. ↑ Alfred Hess on erfurt-web.de
21. ↑ Discussion with Feilchenfeldt and Romilly, see Ref., 2000