Bernhard Mayer (art collector)

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Bernhard and Auguste Mayer, wedding photo (1897)
Vincent von Gogh: garden with weeping willow , today Merzbacher Kunststiftung
Paul Cézanne: Landscape near Ausver-sur-Oise (1881/82), today the Israel Museum , gift of Lilly Schwabacher-Mayer
Vincent van Gogh: Portrait de Joseph Roulin (1889), today Moma

Bernhard Mayer (born July 22, 1866 in Laufersweiler ; † July 18, 1946 in Zurich ) was a German fur trader , anarchist , patron and art collector.

Life

Bernhard Mayer came from a Jewish family from the Hunsrück . His father ran a grocer's, his mother was a housewife and did the field and garden work. At the age of eleven he left his parents in order to attend high school in Bad Kreuznach and later learn a businessman there. He broke off his training and worked first in Simmern , then Saarbrücken , Saargemünd and finally in 1885 in Aachen . Although he was not a practicing Jew, he suffered from the anti-Jewish atmosphere - they even refused to accept him into the gymnastics club, which is why he wrote the following:

We want to be free gymnasts
that's what everyone can do
be he a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim.

He left Germany for professional reasons and moved to Brussels in 1892 . Here he began an apprenticeship as a furrier in 1895 and after initial difficulties his fur business flourished and he opened branches in Paris , Berlin , Zurich and Amsterdam , which were run by members of the family. The poet Else Lasker-Schüler jokingly called him Nerz-Bernardo . In 1897 he married Auguste Lipper (1875-1958) and had with her the son Ernst (1901) and the daughter Lilly (1903). In 1903 in Brussels he bought two pictures from an outsider, James Ensor , as a support; He and Guste laid the foundation for an unsystematically structured collection of images.

Mayer was actually a social democrat , but Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis won him over to anarchism. The anarcho-syndicalist Raphael Friedeberg from Monte Verità lured him to Ascona, where he bought a piece of land in 1908. He made friends with Gustav Landauer , Peter Kropotkin and Max Nettlau . In 1926 he built a house in Ascona. As a staunch Tolstoian, he supported the nonviolent anarchists and the artists of the mountain. He financed a rural commune in Herrliberg on Lake Zurich for the feminist and trade unionist Margarethe Faas-Hardegger .

At the beginning of the First World War , Mayer had to leave Belgium as a German , he went to Berlin and in 1916 to Zurich, then to Ascona. The Munich art historian Franz Stadler encouraged him to buy paintings by French impressionists, but only first-class works . In 1926, Mr. and Mrs. Mayer had the Teatro San Materno built for the dancer Charlotte Bara in Ascona . Mayer was otherwise active as a patron and art collector, mainly in the twenties he acquired paintings by Cézanne , van Gogh , Renoir , Matisse and Picasso , among others . In a hotel built specially for this in Ascona, he accommodated numerous writers and artists, especially emigrants, such as Holitscher , Ehrenstein , the Fritsch couple , Else Lasker-Schüler and many others. First works that had become famous, such as by Ignazio Silone , were only published thanks to his financial guarantee. Wherever possible, he did it anonymously.

In 1941 he fled from the National Socialists to the USA, some of his pictures he had brought there to safety as early as 1936, while others were lost. In New York City in 1944, with Guste's help, he wrote his memoirs, which he dedicated to his four grandchildren. After the end of the war he returned to his house in Ascona with the pictures. Guste Mayer died there in 1958.

Part of his art collection found its place in the Merzbacher Collection of his granddaughter Gabrielle Merzbacher-Mayer and her husband Werner Merzbacher as inspiration, incentive and catalyst .

Fonts

  • Bernhard Mayer: Interesting contemporaries. Memories of a Jewish businessman and citizen of the world. Edited by Erhard Roy Wiehn . Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz 1998 (autobiography and articles, German and English), ISBN 3-89191-888-7 .

literature

  • Christian Klemm (Ed.): The Bernhard Mayer Collection: Exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, June 19 to August 23, 1998 . Kunsthaus, Zurich 1998.
  • Tobia Bezzola ; Linda Schädler (Ed.): Festival of Color. The Merzbacher-Mayer Collection . Dumont, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8321-7683-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~alcalz/aufbau/1946/1946pdf/1946a31s34.pdf obituary on genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com (pdf)
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Stephanie Rachum: A story from two collections: Bernhard and Auguste Mayer / Werner and Gabriele Merzbacher. In: Bezzola; Schädler: Festival of Color , 2006, pp. 14–28.
  3. ^ Bernhard Mayer: Interesting contemporaries .
  4. ↑ Harald Szeemann , Bernhard Mayer, fur trader, Jewish cosmopolitan, collector of many people and less, first-rate pictures (online)
  5. ^ VG: In memoriam Bernhard Mayer. In: Interesting Contemporaries. Memories of a Jewish businessman and citizen of the world. P. 346.
personal data
SURNAME Mayer, Bernhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German fur trader, anarchist, patron and art collector
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Laufersweiler
DATE OF DEATH July 18, 1946
Place of death Zurich