Emmi Ruben

Emmi Ruben (born February 7, 1875 in Hamburg as Emmi Geister; † June 4, 1955 there ) was an art collector and patron .

Life

The "woman at his side"

Emmi Ruben came from a middle-class background; her father was a men's tailor in Hamburg. Only through her marriage to the merchant Albert Ruben did she find her way into the Hanseatic educated middle class . Albert Ruben, authorized signatory and partner in the coal import company and shipping company Bernhard B. Blumenfeld was a talented piano player and very committed to culture. Together with his wife he designed her home to a kind of salon of a circle of culture enthusiasts. In addition to music, he showed great interest in painting, which was modern at the time. The painter Ivo Hauptmann , who worked for the Blumenfeld company, was particularly close to him. He cultivated friendships with the Hamburg Kunsthalle director Alfred Lichtwark , the director of the Museum of Art and Crafts Justus Brinckmann, and with painters from the Hamburg Secession .

For a long time Emmi Ruben was primarily "the woman by his side". She ran the big household and raised the two children Elisabeth and Walther. But she also made close friendships in the artistic environment, such as with the painter Alexandra Povòrina , with whom she later went on a trip to Paris .

The patroness and art collector

After the death of her husband in 1926, Emmi Ruben initially moved into a smaller apartment. Now on her own, she began to develop her own personality. In the tradition of her late husband, she made the new apartment a meeting point for artistically creative people and personalities of Hamburg's art scene. The art historians Gustav Pauli , Erwin Panofsky , Max Sauerlandt and Peter Hirschfeld , whose wife played early music on old instruments , came to their house concerts . In 1932 Albert Görland held a series of lectures on philosophy in her apartment.

She was actively committed to the Hamburg artists. She began to build up her own collection of paintings with works from the Hamburg Secession. Together with the art historian Rosa Schapire , she founded a support group for the secession artists Richard Haizmann and Willem Grimm in 1929.

A close friendship developed with the artist Erich Hartmann and his wife. In 1931 she took both of them into her apartment for a year, where she let them live free of charge until the city assigned the artist couple a studio apartment in the Ohlendorff House. But she also valued Fritz Flinte , Jean Paul Kayser and Fritz Kronenberg and tried to help Paul Bollmann , Heinrich Stegemann , Eduard Bargheer and Karl Ballmer .

Emmi Ruben now also organized exhibitions and domestic artist get-togethers to draw on a model. The secession painters Alma del Banco , Anita Rée and Gretchen Wohlwill were frequent guests at these sessions. The philosopher Görland sat as a model, not least because of his distinctive skull.

The years of National Socialism

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , the end of artistic freedom had come in Hamburg as well. In March 1933 the 12th Secession Exhibition was forced to close. In April, the authorities dissolved the GEDOK artists' association founded by Ida Dehmel , of which Emmi Ruben was a member. Previously, Ida Dehmel was forced to resign as chairwoman and the office on Jungfernstieg was brutally destroyed by the SA .

During this politically tense time, Emmi Ruben continued to show solidarity with the artists she valued and expanded her collection with works from the “Secession”. Karl Kluth painted a portrait of the patroness. She ordered a second version of her painting “Rest on the Flight” from Anita Rée. When she by the suicide of the artist on Sylt learned she blamed herself for not helping more.

In addition to funds for the acquisition of painting materials and study trips, Emmi Ruben also procured Christmas presents for the children of the artists and even invited them to the cinema. Willem Grimm wrote to her: "It wasn't just the money at that time, but also the feeling that you stand behind it (sic) and the last thing in particular was a comforting awareness in the many empty hours in the studio."

Looking back, Maike Bruhns writes about Emmi Ruben:

“What, from a historical distance, may appear to be fearless commitment, was in truth the result of constant self-conquest. Emmi Ruben was by nature neither brave nor strong, but rather fearful. She thought liberally and democratically like her late husband; She harbored fear and loathing of the National Socialists, if only because her children were endangered by their father's Jewish descent and their own communist attitudes . "

The Nazis blackmailed the Emmi Rubens children into foregoing their inheritance so that their mother would not be bothered. The legacy was then " Aryanized ". The daughter Elisabeth emigrated with her Jewish husband from Berlin to Copenhagen ; he had previously been interned in the Brandenburg concentration camp for six months . The son Walther, a sinologist , was also married to a Jew and fled to Turkey .

In 1943, when Hamburg was destroyed by the Allied bombing (see Operation Gomorrah ), Emmi Ruben, accompanied by Hannah Kluth, retired to Mumbach an der Bergstrasse , where the family owned a farm.

post war period

Gravestone Emmi Rubens in the women's garden

In 1946 Ruben returned to Hamburg and moved into the apartment of the sculptor Oscar Ulmer and his wife. Here she spent the last ten years of her life in cramped conditions. Her passion for collecting now concentrated on handy daguerreotypes and crochet lace . She remained in contact with the artists of the Secession, in particular with Grimm, Flinte, Hartmann and the Hans Martin Ruwoldts family . In 1948 she donated her art collection, apart from a few pieces, such as those by Ernst Barlach and Rée, to the Hamburger Kunsthalle . In 1955 she was honored by Senator Biermann-Ratjen for her commitment to the artists persecuted under the National Socialists.

A gallbladder disease increasingly forced her to be inactive. Emmi Ruben died in Hamburg on June 4, 1955. Her grave stone is the lasting memory in the garden of the women of the cemetery Ohlsdorf erected. In 2016 the Emmi-Ruben-Weg in Hamburg-Hausbruch was named after her.

literature

• Maike Bruhns : “Emmi Ruben. Ein Lebensbild ", in: Exhibition catalog" Art in the ostracism. The Emmi Ruben donation in 1948. “Hamburger Kunsthalle 1998.
• Brita Reimers: "Emmi-Ruben-Weg", 2016 ( PDF file )

Exhibitions

• “Art in ostracism. The Donation Emmi Ruben 1948 ”, Hamburger Kunsthalle 1998.

Web links

• Literature by and about Emmi Ruben in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage women's garden