Carl Monday

Carl Montag (born March 23, 1880 in Winterthur , †  July 28, 1956 in Meudon ), also Charles Montag , was a Swiss painter and art mediator. From 1903 he lived mainly in France and later also took French citizenship. His work consists mainly of landscape views and still lifes. In terms of style, Montag initially oriented himself towards the artists of the Munich School , then worked in the Impressionist style and later found his models with the Fauves . He used his contacts with artists and gallery owners in Paris as an art broker for the purchase of works of art by Swiss collectors and museums. As the organizer of numerous important exhibitions, he introduced well-known modern artists to the Swiss public. His activity was controversial during World War II, when he played an active role in the sale of pictures from Jewish property. He also became known as the painting teacher of the later British Prime Minister Winston Churchill .

Life

Youth, training and work as a painter

Carl Montag was born in 1880 as the son of the pasta manufacturer Sigmund Montag from Isny im Allgäu and his wife Alwine Caroline, who was born in Geilingen, in Winterthur. Montag grew up in Winterthur and attended school there. This was followed by training as a drawing teacher at the Winterthur Technikum from 1896 to 1900 , which he completed with a diploma. From 1900 to 1902 he lived in Munich to study painting with Heinrich Knirr and Angelo Jank . The same old painter Paul Klee was one of his classmates . Mondays' artistic works from these early years were based on the works of the Munich School. In addition to influences from realism, there are also stylized Art Nouveau elements in his pictures from the Munich period . A first exhibition of his works took place in 1902 in the Zurich Hotel Metropol.

On the advice of the Swiss painter Rudolf Koller, Montag moved to Paris in 1903, where he and the poet Hans Reinhart , a former classmate from Winterthur, moved into an apartment on Rue de la Santé. The landscape paintings created in the first years of Paris are influenced by Cuno Amiet and Giovanni Giacometti in terms of their choice of motifs and application of color . Montag initially found his motifs in the Paris area and during visits to Switzerland and neighboring southern Germany, where some pictures were taken on Lake Constance.

Through the dentist and art collector Georges Viau , he met the sculptor Auguste Rodin and several impressionist painters such as Claude Monet , Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir . He also met important art dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and art collectors such as Henri Rouart , through whom he in turn met Edgar Degas . From 1905 to 1910 he repeatedly visited Brittany on the advice of Monet and painted some motifs with seascapes. From 1905 he exhibited his work in the Société des Artistes Indépendants , from 1907 also in the Salon d'Automne . At this time he met regularly with a group of artists who, in addition to the Swiss Félix Vallotton , who lived in Paris, and the French painters Pierre Bonnard and Albert Marquet, also included Henri Matisse , who influenced Montag in his later still lifes. Henri Manguin and Henri Lebasque were among his closest artist friends . Together with Manguin, Montag visited the French Mediterranean coast repeatedly from 1911 onwards. The pictures he took there are clearly under the influence of the Fauves and occasionally show a relationship to pictures by Paul Cézanne .

Montag exhibited his pictures several times in Switzerland. He showed his work in 1905 in the Zurich Zunfthaus zur Meisen , in 1906 in the Kunsthalle Basel and in 1907 in the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen . In Paris he had a solo exhibition in 1914 at the Galerie Druet on Rue Royale. In 1918 Montag largely stopped painting in order to work as an art dealer, art broker and exhibition organizer. In the same year he married Charlotte Elise Mandron (1887–1925), who had previously been a model for Pierre Bonnard. From 1922 they lived with their daughter Claire, born in 1919, in Meudon near Paris.

The art mediator

Montag began working as an art mediator between dealers, gallery owners and collectors around 1905. He established contacts between art dealers in Paris and the Zurich galleries Wolfsberg and Neupert and advised collectors such as Sidney Brown from Baden, Hans Mettler from St. Gallen , Willy Russ-Suchard from Neuchâtel , Emil Staub-Terlinden from Männedorf and, to a lesser extent, the people of Winterthur Collectors Richard Bühler , Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler , Georg and Oskar Reinhart . Through his mediation, works of French Impressionism and the subsequent art movements came into Swiss collections for the first time. In a constant written exchange, he informed those interested in Switzerland about current offers in Paris and also arranged direct contacts between collectors and artists. Through his agency commission, Montag had enough financial means to build up his own art collection, which included works by Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard and Félix Vallotton.

The exhibition organizer

The growing public interest in modern painting from France aroused an increasing interest in museums to exhibit this art. After such exhibitions had already been seen in Basel in 1906 and in Zurich in 1908, Montag came to his new field of activity as an exhibition organizer through his close and numerous contacts with artists, collectors and galleries. In particular, the Kunsthaus Zürich repeatedly engaged him with this task from 1913 to 1949. After he was able to give the general public an overview of the development of art in France in the exhibition French Art there in 1913 , primarily through loans from Swiss collectors, the exhibition French Pictures from Switzerland followed in the same year in Stuttgart with the same task. He subsequently organized such overview shows in Winterthur, Basel and Geneva. At the end of the First World War , Montag worked for the French art critic René-Jean , who at the time worked as a cultural attaché at the embassy in Bern. The French Foreign Ministry commissioned Monday 1917 with the exhibition French Art of the XIXth Century. and XX. Century at the Kunsthaus Zürich to interest the neutral Swiss population in French art and culture.

Monographic exhibitions on Odilon Redon , Juan Gris , Fernand Léger , Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard soon followed . A particular highlight in this series was the first retrospective shown in a museum in 1932 with works by Pablo Picasso at the Kunsthaus Zürich. In addition, Montag devoted himself to the exhibitions he organized, but also to artists of the 19th century such as Eugène Delacroix , Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet, and in 1938 also showed a contemporary Swiss artist with a painting exhibition by Le Corbusier . He was appointed Commissaire délégué des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Zurich auprès de la France ( Delegate Commissioner of Fine Arts of the City of Zurich in France ) by the Zurich City President Emil Klöti on November 27, 1937 .

In addition to Switzerland, he also appeared as an exhibition organizer in France. In 1938, for example, he organized the exhibition Peinture française du XIXe siècle dans les collections privées suisses in Paris (with 19th century French masterpieces from the Swiss possession), followed in 1939 by a Paul Cézanne exhibition in Lyon. After showing masterpieces from the Musée Fabre in Bern in the same year , an exhibition of drawings and watercolors from the 18th to 20th centuries followed at the museum in Montpellier in 1940.

Activity in World War II

Carl Montag remained mostly in France during the Second World War. His previous clients in Switzerland were very reluctant to buy art during this period. His role in the Aryanization of the Parisian galleries Wildenstein and Bernheim-Jeune was inglorious . Their Aryan administrator Édouard Gras commissioned Monday in February 1941 as an expert to estimate the gallery Bernheim-Jeune's stock of images and to help with its further exploitation. It is unclear whether he personally enriched himself during these campaigns. Evidence is provided that he brokered works of art at the Wildenstein Gallery, which was named Roger Dequoy & Cie in the Second World War after its Aryan managing director Roger Dequoy . The Swiss collector Emil Georg Bührle acquired five pictures by Deqouy in September 1941 and two paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir were brought to the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1943 , each through the mediation of Carl Montag. However, the suspicion against Monday that he had worked as a consultant or dealer for Adolf Hitler could not be substantiated on the basis of the documents in the Koblenz Federal Archives in connection with the special order in Linz .

Friendship with Winston Churchill

Through the painter Madge Oliver (1875–1924), Montag met the British politician Winston Churchill during the war in 1915 , and from then on he served as a painting teacher. A friendship that lasted for decades developed between the two men and both visited museums and exhibitions together. Churchill was also a repeated guest at Monday's house in Meudon. Montag helped Churchill, who was painting under the pseudonym Charles Morin, to an exhibition in the Parisian Galerie Druet in 1921. When Douglas Cooper briefly arrested Hitler as one of Hitler's suspected looted art dealers on Monday after the Second World War , it was allegedly Churchill who had this arrest lifted and who ensured that Montag was never prosecuted for his activities during the war . In 1946 Montag was one of the co-organizers of Churchill's visit to Zurich, during which he gave his historic speech about a united Europe. Churchill's friendship with Montag lasted until his death.

Last years of life

Shortly after the Second World War, Montag participated again in organizing exhibitions. These mostly took place at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where he continued to advocate modern painting from France. After organizing another exhibition in Paris in 1945, he showed a show by the Swiss artists Jean-Étienne Liotard and Johann Heinrich Füssli in the Musée de l'Orangerie there in 1948 . In 1956, Montag died in Meudon. His works are, for example, in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and the Museum Langmatt in Baden .

Honors

For his services as Ambassadeur de l'art français ( Ambassador of the French Arts ), on Monday 1920 Georges Clemenceau personally appointed him Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor ). In 1939 he was appointed Officier de la Légion d'honneur (Officer of the Legion of Honor).

Exhibitions organized by Carl Montag (selection)

• 1913 Zurich, Kunsthaus : French Art
• 1913 Stuttgart, Art Building : French Pictures from Switzerland
• 1916 Winterthur, Art Museum : French painting
• 1917 Basel, Kunsthalle : French painting
• 1917 Zurich, Kunsthaus: French Art of the XIX. and XX. Century
• 1918 Geneva, Musée d'art et d'histoire : Exposition d'art français
• 1919 Zurich, Kunsthaus: French masters of the Barbizon school
• 1919 Winterthur, Art Museum: Odilon Redon
• 1919 Basel, Kunsthalle: Odilon Redon
• 1932 Zurich Kunsthaus: Bonnard-Vuillard
• 1932 Zurich Kunsthaus: Picasso
• 1933 Zurich Kunsthaus: Juan Gris
• 1933 Zurich Kunsthaus: Fernand Léger
• 1934 Bern, Kunsthalle : French masters of the 19th century
• 1934 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Camille Corot
• 1936 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Gustave Courbet
• 1937 Zurich, Kunsthaus: From David to Millet
• 1937 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Les maîtres populaires de la réalité
• 1938 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Le Corbusier
• 1938 Paris, La Gazette des Beaux-Arts: Peinture française du XIXe siècle dans les collections privées suisses
• 1939 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Félix Vallotton
• 1939 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Eugène Delacroix
• 1939 Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts : Cézanne
• 1939 Bern, Kunsthalle: Picasso - Braque - Gris - Léger - Bores - Beaudin - Vines
• 1939 Bern, Kunsthalle: masterpieces from the museum in Montpellier
• 1940 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Donation from Lucien Vollard
• 1940 Montpellier, Fabre Museum : Exposition de dessins et d'aquarelles du XVIIIe et XXe siècle
• 1945 Paris, Galerie des Beaux-Arts: Exposition vente au bénéfice des petits enfants sinistrés de Londres
• 1946 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Braque - Kandisky - Picasso
• 1947 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Petit Palais, Musée de la Ville de Paris
• 1948 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Georges Rouault
• 1948 Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie : Liotard et Fussli
• 1948 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Albert Marquet
• 1949 Zurich, Kunsthaus: Pierre Bonnard

literature

• Thieme-Becker : General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present , Volume XXV, 1931, page 74.
• Florens Deuchler: The French Impressionists and their predecessors . Langmatt Sidney and Jenny Brown Foundation, Baden 1990, ISBN 3-85545-044-7 .
• Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel: Carl Montag: Painter and Art Mediator (1880-1956) . Exhibition catalog, Langmatt Sidney and Jenny Brown Foundation, Baden 1992, ISBN 3-85545-065-X .
• Dorothy Kosinski, Joachim Pissarro , Maryanne Stevens: From Manet to Gauguin: masterpieces from Swiss private collections . Exhibition catalog, Royal Academy of Arts, London 1995, ISBN 90-5544-064-7 .
• Mary Soames: Winston and Clementine: the personal letters of the Churchills . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1998, ISBN 0-395-96319-2 .
• Peter Harclerode, Brendan Pittaway: The lost masters: World War II and the looting of Europe's treasurehouses . Welcome Rain Publishers, New York 2000, ISBN 1-56649-165-7 .
• Esther Tisa Francini, Anja Heuss , Georg Kreis : Refuge - looted property. Chronos Verlag, Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-0340-0601-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Art Looting Intelligence Unit (ALIU) Reports 1945-1946 and ALIU Red Flag Names List and Index. Retrieved June 25, 2017 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel: Carl Montag , page 39.
3. ↑ Florens Deuchler: The French Impressionists and their predecessors , page 26.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Kosinski, Pissarro, Stevens: From Manet to Gauguin , page 18.
5. ↑ Kosinski, Pissarro, Stevens: From Manet to Gauguin , page 17.
6. ^ ^{A b} Exhibitions based on an overview list by Rudolf Koella, published in Florens Deuchler: The French Impressionists and their predecessors , page 26.
7. ^ ^{A b} Francini, Heuss, Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut . Page 294
8. ^ Francini, Heuss, Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut , page 291.
9. ↑ ^{a b c d} Francini, Heuss, Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut , page 295.
10. ^ Francini, Heuss, Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut , page 296.
11. ^ Francini, Heuss, Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut . Page 297
12. ↑ This involved two works each by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, as well as a picture by Jacques-Louis David. See: Peter Harclerode, Brendan Pittaway: The lost masters , 135.
13. ^ Francini, Heuss, Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut , page 298.
14. ^ Francini, Heuss, Kreis: Fluchtgut - Raubgut , page 301.
15. ^ ^{A b} Mary Soames: Winston and Clementine , 539.
16. ^ Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel: Carl Montag , pages 294–296.

Web links

• Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel: Monday, Carl [Charles]. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel: Monday, Carl (Charles). In: Sikart