Erica showers

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Erica Brausen (born January 31, 1908 in Düsseldorf , † December 16, 1992 in London ) was an art dealer of the 20th century. She founded the Hanover Gallery in London in 1947 and was considered to be the discoverer of numerous important artists, including the painter Francis Bacon .

Life

Erica Brausen came from a conservative banking family in Düsseldorf with a problematic relationship with her parents. Her father, a passionate hunter, had six-year-old Erica photographed with a hunting rifle. In 1930 she turned her back on Germany, not least because of the emergence of Hitler's fascism, and got to know the modern art scene in Paris, which was untouched by fascism . She had a deep friendship with the sculptor Joan Miró . In 1935 she moved with him to the Mediterranean island of Mallorca , where she ran a bar. During the Spanish Civil War she helped numerous Jewish and socialist friends to emigrate, for example the French writer Michel Leiris through her contacts with a submarine captain in the US Navy .

At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 she arrived penniless in London. As a German, she had difficulties establishing an existence in the art scene. After the war, in 1946, she met Arthur Jeffress, an American of British descent. In 1947 he financed her own gallery, which was located on London's St. George Street, right on Hanover Square. The artists she first exhibited and discovered here included Francis Bacon, Max Ernst , René Magritte , Man Ray and the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti , with whom she had a long-standing friendship. In 1946, on the advice of Graham Sutherland, she bought Bacon's painting Painting 1946 , later sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it can still be seen today. This presence and his first solo exhibition in Brausen's gallery helped Francis Bacon achieve his breakthrough. In 1973 the Hanover Gallery in London closed.

Bacon and Brausen remained close friends until Erica Brausen got to know the Dutch model Catharina "Toto" Koopman better, a survivor of the Holocaust in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Erica Brausen lived with her in an open and public love affair until her death. In 1958, Brausen and Koopman built a modern building complex on the Italian island of Panarea . When Koopman died there in 1991 at the age of 82, Brausen locked himself in with the corpse for a week and only had roses brought to her to twine around her lover's head.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barry Joule: Obituary: Erica Brausen in the Independent of December 30, 1992
  2. ↑ The Times : Gallery owners - swayed by the heart, August 16, 1965, p. 11
  3. ↑ The relationship with Francis Bacon is at the center of a short biography by Erica Brausen, written by Jean-Yves Mock in French, translated into English by Gill Hedley
  4. ↑ The two women first met in 1945.
  5. ↑ see Stephen Heyman: Toto Koopman, Model Spy , New York Times Magazine, August 13, 2013
  6. ↑ Jean-Noel Liaut: The Many Lives of Miss K: Toto Koopman - Model, Muse, Spy , Rizzoli, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8478-4142-4 .
personal data
SURNAME Shower, Erica
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Art dealer and patron
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 1992
Place of death London