Dorothee Westphal

Dorothee Westphal (born March 27, 1902 in Landsberg an der Warthe , † October 30, 1968 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen ) was a German art historian .

Life

Dorothee Westphal was the daughter of the judge Ernst Westphal (1871-1949), a grandson of the banker Alexander Mendelssohn and great-great-grandson of Moses Mendelssohn , and his wife Helene Minna Westphal, nee. Simon (1880–1965), daughter of the businessman James Simon (1851–1932), the patron of the Berlin museums . Her sister was Leni Westphal (1912–2007)

She spent her childhood in Duisburg and lived with her parents in Potsdam from 1912 to 1933 . From 1922 she studied art history, classical archeology and history in Munich, Vienna and Berlin. In 1929 she received her doctorate from Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin. From 1929 she completed a traineeship at the Berlin museums and in 1932/33 received a work contract for preparatory work on the catalog of Italian paintings in the Gemäldegalerie . In November 1933 she was released as a "non-Aryan". She continued her studies privately and gave private lessons in art history. After the outbreak of the war she lived underground in Berlin. The deportation of her family did not take place due to the intervention of General Director Otto Kümmel because of the services of her grandfather James Simon to the Berlin museums. After 1945 she worked at the Central Collecting Point in Munich , and from 1957 at the Berlin museums, where she built the museum library in Dahlem .

Publications (selection)

• Bonifazio Veronese (Bonifazio dei Pitati) . Bruckmann, Munich 1931 (= dissertation).

literature

• Cornelius Müller-Hofstede : Obituary for Dorothee Westphal . In: Meeting reports of the Berlin Art History Society NF 17, 1968/69, pp. 6-7.
• Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 2: L – Z. KG Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 760-761.