Fritz Meyer-Fierz

Fritz Meyer-Fierz (born October 9, 1847 in Lichtensteig ; † December 11, 1917 in Zurich ) was a Swiss entrepreneur , patron and art collector .

Life

Fritz Meyer was born in Lichtensteig in 1847. He only used the surname Meyer-Fierz as an alliance name after his marriage . He first studied geology at the Zurich Polytechnic and then completed a commercial training in Paris and London. Then he stayed in Singapore . After his brother Theodor was murdered in an uprising on the Namoe Trassi tobacco plantation near Medan on Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies in 1871 , he took over the management of the plantation and stayed there for several years. From 1887 he stayed mainly in Zurich again, but occasionally returned to Sumatra. In 1910 he donated a collection of 72 handicrafts from East Asia to the ethnographic collection of the Geographical-Ethnographic Society of Zurich (now the Völkerkundemuseum of the University of Zurich ). These included stone figures, brass work, bronze objects, weapons and sarongs from the islands of Java , Borneo , Bali and Sumatra.

With the fortune gained in the tobacco trade, Meyer-Fierz began to build up an art collection in the 1880s. Possibly due to business contacts in the Netherlands, he initially bought works from the Hague School . These included pictures by George Hendrik Breitner , Jan Toorop , Hendrik Willem Mesdag , Anton Mauve , Jozef Israëls and the brothers Jacob , Matthijs and Willem Maris . This was followed by works by French artists from the Barbizon School , including works by Jean-François Millet . Meyer-Fierz bought directly from dealers in Paris, since at the end of the 19th century there was hardly any contemporary art from France available in the Swiss art trade. In contrast to other Swiss collectors, he showed little interest in German art and instead turned to young Swiss artists. He noted: "The young artists in Switzerland create something that, in addition to a lot of daring, has a strength and determination that the academics out there in the Reich lack". The Swiss art historian Paul Ganz described Meyer-Fierz as the first collector of contemporary art in Zurich.

One of his favorite artists was Ferdinand Hodler , from whom he loaned 46 works from his collection for an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1914. After paintings by Vincent van Gogh were shown in Zurich in 1908 , he bought several of the painter's paintings shortly afterwards. These included Five Sunflowers in a Vase (destroyed in World War II), Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby ( Philadelphia Museum of Art ), cypresses ( Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York), Plowing Fields (private collection) and The White House at Night ( Hermitage , Saint Petersburg). This made him one of the artist's earliest collectors in Switzerland. In addition, Meyer-Fierz owned individual works by other artists. These included the still life Pommes, orange et citron by Paul Cézanne ( Kunstmuseum Bern ), Nafea faa ipoipo by Paul Gauguin and Boom A by Piet Mondrian ( Tate Gallery of Modern Art , London). He sold the Gauguin painting to the Basel collector Rudolf Staechelin during his lifetime .

• 

  Ferdinand Hodler:
  The Spring (Version IV) , around 1912,
  private collection

• 

  Ferdinand Hodler:
  Lake Geneva with Jura , around 1911,
  private collection

• 

  Ferdinand Hodler:
  Holy Hour (study of the second figure from the right of the six-figure version) , around 1907,
  private collection

• 

  Paul Gauguin:
  Nafea faa ipoipo? , 1892,
  private collection

• 

  Piet Mondrian:
  Boom A , around 1913,
  Tate Modern, London

• 

  Vincent van Gogh:
  Five Sunflowers in a Vase , 1888,
  destroyed

• 

  Vincent van Gogh:
  Madame Augustine Roulin with Baby , 1888,
  Philadelphia Museum of Art

• 

  Vincent van Gogh:
  Cypress Trees , 1889,
  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  Vincent van Gogh:
  Field with a plowing farmer , 1889,
  private collection

• 

  Vincent van Gogh:
  The White House by Night , 1890,
  Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Fritz Meyer-Fierz died in Zurich in 1917. Four paintings with the motif Warriors by Ferdinand Hodler were donated to the Kunsthaus Zürich. Most of the art collection was auctioned off by his heirs in 1926 at the Frederik Muller auction house in Amsterdam. His son Franz Meyer Senior was also an art collector and long-time president of the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft . His grandson Franz Meyer Junior was an art historian, art collector and long-time director of the Basel Public Art Collection ( Kunstmuseum Basel ) and the Kunstmuseum Bern .

literature

• Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich (Ed.): Annual report of the Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft in Zürich , Volume 11, Zürich 1911.
• Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich (Ed.): Communications from the Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich . Volume 401939. Beer, Zurich 1939.
• Lukas Gloor : From Böcklin to Cezanne. The reception of French impressionism in German-speaking Switzerland . Lang, Bern 1986, ISBN 3-261-03572-2 .
• Dorothy Kosinski, Joachim Pissarro , Maryanne Stevens: From Manet to Gauguin, masterpieces from Swiss private collections . Royal Academy of Arts, London 1995, ISBN 90-5544-064-7 .
• Anton Mensing: Tableaux modern, aquarelles: collection Fritz Meyer de Zurich . Auction catalog, Frederik Muller & Cie, Amsterdam 1926.
• Andreas Zangger: Colonial Switzerland, a piece of global history between Europe and Southeast Asia (1860 - 1930) . Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 3-8376-1796-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich: Communications from the Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich . Volume XXXX, p. 80.
2. ^ Andreas Zangger: Colonial Switzerland , p. 247.
3. ↑ The handicraft collection from Indonesia came from the Gemmi collection, was purchased by Meyer-Fierz and immediately donated to the Geographical-Ethnographic Society. See Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich (Ed.): Annual Report of the Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft in Zürich , Volume 11, p. 8.
4. ^ DW: Zurich art collectors and their collections . Article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of June 24, 1958, p. 1.
5. ↑ Lukas Gloor: Von Böcklin zu Cezanne , p. 133.
6. ↑ Quoted from an obituary in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of January 25, 1918, reproduced in Lukas Gloor: Von Böcklin zu Cezanne , p. 133.
7. ↑ Quoted in Hans A. Lüthy: Hodler collector in Zurich . Article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from 10./11. June 1989, p. 65.
8. ^ Hans A. Lüthy: Hodler collector in Zurich . Article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from 10./11. June 1989, p. 65.
9. ↑ Kosinski, Pissarro, Stevens: From Manet to Gauguin , p. 130.