Fritz Neugass

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Fritz Neugass (born March 28, 1899 in Mannheim ; died June 1979 in New York City ) was a German art critic and photographer.

Life

Fritz Neugass was of Jewish origin. His father Julius Neugass (1869-1939) was an ear, nose and throat doctor in Mannheim. After graduating from high school in 1917, Neugass volunteered as a soldier in the First World War. He was seriously injured and released in 1918. He turned to Protestantism as early as 1917. From 1919 he studied art history and archeology in Munich, Berlin and Bonn and received his doctorate in 1924 under Carl Neumann in Heidelberg.

In 1925 he was a volunteer at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome and then in Florence. In 1926 he settled in Paris and became a correspondent for numerous German and international newspapers. He reported for the Berliner Tageblatt , the Vossische Zeitung and the world art.

He became known for his reviews for world art . He reported on the current Paris art scene, including portraits of Alf Bayrle and Giorgio de Chirico , from 1933 he traveled and made photo reports for European and American newspapers.

From autumn 1933 he was in a relationship with Luise Straus-Ernst , who had fled to Paris.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Neugass was interned in the Fort Carré camp in Antibes . In November 1939 he was brought to Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence . There he met Max Ernst , Walter Hasenclever and Lion Feuchtwanger, among others . In the spring of 1940 he became a working soldier in the French army.

As a journalist, he was accused and condemned of enemy propaganda by the Vichy regime in 1941. To forestall the threat of deportation to Germany, he fled to the USA via Casablanca and Cuba at the end of 1941 with the help of Varian Fry . From 1942 to 1947 worked in various bookstores. He received US citizenship in 1947. In the 1950s he wrote for various European newspapers, including Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Handelsblatt . He published over seventy articles in the magazine Weltkunst .

In his late career as a journalist, he evaluated the acquisition policy of museums and strategies of the art market, which he viewed critically.

Since 1944 he was married to the librarian Lotte Labus. His estate is in the University at Albany , New York.

Fonts

  • Medieval choir stalls in Germany . Strasbourg 1927. Dissertation Heidelberg

literature

  • Neugass, Fritz , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Art Historians in Exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 453-458
  • Eva Weissweiler : Notre Dame de Dada. Luise Straus-Ernst - the dramatic life of Max Ernst's first wife . Cologne, 2016

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Neugass, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Neuville, François (pseudonym); Brentano, Friedrich (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art critic and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH March 28, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim
DATE OF DEATH June 1979
Place of death New York City