Alphonse May
Alphonse Kann (born March 14, 1870 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died 1948 in London ) was a French art collector.
Life
Alphonse Kann was born into a Jewish banking family. The family moved to Paris when he was ten years old , where he became a school friend of Marcel Proust at the Lycée Condorcet . The adult Kann is said to have been a model for the character of "Charles Swann" in Proust's work Eine Liebe von Swann .
Can trained as a banker and also worked for relatives in London. At the age of thirty he retired from the business and devoted himself to collecting art, which relatives had already done. He initially collected works by old masters. However, he then sold a large part of his old masters collection in two auctions and concentrated on modern painters .
Kann emigrated to London in 1938 and left his collection in the City Palace in Saint-Germain-en-Laye . After the German conquest of France , his collection was confiscated by the Germans. The task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg dragged off the collection, and its deputy director Bruno Lohse put together a meticulous sixty-page inventory list with 1,400 items. The works were given the seal "Ka". The first choice among the pictures went to the inventory of the planned Führermuseum , the second choice had Hermann Göring , who exchanged the pictures of modernism, which were considered to be degenerate art , for old masters in the art trade the USA and Switzerland.
In 1947, 725 works from German depots were returned to Kann. Other works from collections and museums such as the Zurich Bührle Foundation , the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Center Georges-Pompidou were identified late despite being marked by the ERR, and Kann's heirs were successively compensated.
- Pictures with a provenance Alphonse Kann
Paul Gauguin
Juan Gris
Jean-François Millet
Vincent van Gogh
Henri Rousseau
literature
- Bettina Wohlfahrt: Collection in the Storm of History . Report on auction at Artcurial. In: FAZ , February 11, 2017, p. 15
Web links
- Literature by and about Alphonse Kann in the bibliographic database WorldCat
- D'Alphonse à Hélène Kann , Artcurial auction catalog, February 22, 2017
- Vincent Noce: Collection majeure. Alphonse Kann, ami de Proust, fut un amateur plus qu'éclairé . In: Liberation , April 9, 1998
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Vita Alphonse Kann in the Artcurial 2017 auction catalog
- ↑ Thomas Buomberger, Guido Magnaguagno (ed.): Black Book Bührle. Looted art for the Kunsthaus Zürich? Zurich: Rotpunkt, 2015, ISBN 978-3-85869-664-9 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Can, Alphonse |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French art collector |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 14, 1870 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1948 |
| Place of death | London |