Fritz Schmalenbach

Fritz Schmalenbach (born July 13, 1909 in Cologne , † July 1984 in Lübeck ) was a German art historian and museum director.

Life

Ernst Friedrich Schmalenbach was the son of the founder of business administration Eugen Schmalenbach and Marianne Sachs. His sister Marianne became a lawyer, the art historian Werner Schmalenbach was a son of his uncle Herman Schmalenbach .

Fritz Schmalenbach graduated from secondary school in Cologne in 1928 and studied art history, archeology and history in Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau and Cologne and received his doctorate in Münster in 1934 under Martin Wackernagel with a dissertation on Art Nouveau in Münster .

As the son of a Jewish mother, he had no career opportunities in National Socialist Germany and he emigrated to Switzerland, where he taught in Basel from 1934 to 1945 . From 1945 Schmalenbach was assistant and from 1950 curator at the Kunstmuseum Bern . In 1956 he was appointed to succeed Hans Arnold Gräbke as director of the museums for art and cultural history of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck , where he worked until his retirement in 1974. His successor was Wulf Schadendorf . Schmalenbach was also an honorary professor at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel .

In 1945 he married Susanne Bing, who had a doctorate in literature . She was the daughter of the lawyer Moritz Bing from Cologne.

Stumbling block for Susanne Bing in Cologne

Fonts

• Art Nouveau: a contribution to the theory and history of flat art , reprint of the 1931 and 1941 edition, Lang, Bern 1981
• Painting of the 'New Objectivity' , Mann, Berlin 1973
• Studies on painting and painting history , Mann, Berlin 1972
• Oskar Kokoschka , Königstein i. Ts. (Verlag Langewiesche) 1967 (= The Blue Books )
• Käthe Kollwitz , Koenigstein i. Ts. (Langewiesche publishing house) 1965 (= The Blue Books ). ISBN 978-3-7845-2671-3
• New studies on painting of the 19th and 20th centuries , Rota-Verlag, Bern 1955
• Excerpts from Anker pictures , Büchler, Bern 1954
• Art historical studies , Schudel, Basel 1941

literature

• 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. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 618-620.
• P. Betthausen, PH Feist, C. Fork: Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, two hundred portraits of German-speaking authors from four centuries , Metzler, 1998, pp. 353–355
• Dieter Schneider:  Schmalenbach, Johann Wilhelm Eugen. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 118 f. ( Digitized version ).