Gallery Boisserée

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The gallery Boisserée is a gallery of 20th and 21st centuries in Cologne . It was founded in 1838 by the nephews of the well-known art collectors and patrons Sulpiz Boisserée and Melchior Boisserée and is one of the oldest galleries in Germany.

Act

Foundation and first years

The bookstore with antiquarian bookshop and art trade in Minoritenstrasse 11 in Cologne was opened by cousins ​​Josef and Nikolaus Wilhelm Boisserée in 1838. The fathers of the company founders, Lorenz and Wilhelm Boisserée, were brothers of the well-known art collectors and patrons Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée , who after Dissolution of the monasteries and monasteries during the Napoleonic secularization engaged in saving important medieval paintings from destruction by the French occupation forces.

After the early death of the founders (Nikolaus Wilhelm died in 1846, Josef in 1854), Josef Boisserée's widow (who had married his younger brother Bernhard Boisserée after his death) continued the company with her son Karl. After the death of Bernhard Boisserée she appointed the bookseller Franz Theodor Helmken as managing director, who in 1888, after the death of Therese Boisserée (Karl had died in 1882), took over the business as sole owner.

The company J. & W. Soon after it was founded, Boisserée gained importance as a bookstore, and numerous patrons and friends from the contemporary art world are regular customers of the house: Boisserée is well-known and popular among circles of the Rhenish nobility, and has numerous customers from university and business life in the Rhineland. The company has only occasionally been active in the publishing book trade, around 100 titles have been published. Under Helmken , the then very successful (five editions) first cathedral guide appeared in 1880, “Der Dom zu Coeln, its history, construction, pictorial decoration and its Art treasures. "

A few years after the business was founded in 1838, the shop had been relocated from Minoritenstrasse 11 to Hohe Strasse 148, to a tall Gothic house that fell victim to an expansion of Hohe Strasse in the early 1890s. Helmken therefore moved back into business premises in Minoritenstrasse 19a in 1892 - the Cologne book and art trade was concentrated in the Minoritenviertel for a long time, and in 1862 the Ferdinand Franz Wallraf collection was given a permanent home there by a bequest from Johann Heinrich Richartz, thanks to the first museum building in Cologne. When Helmken finally retired in 1902, he sold the business to Hermann Schilling (1875–1955), who had joined the company in 1890 as an apprentice. Hermann Schilling ran the book and art shop for 40 years; In the 1920s he expanded the company's gallery activities - the Munich and Düsseldorf schools (including Max Clarenbach , Fritz von Wille , Julian Klein von Diepold, among others) were successfully sold and in 1928 the shop was enlarged into a spacious gallery by renting the neighboring house at 1 at Breite Strasse . Hermann Schilling was a member of the board of directors of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels for many years and served as a commercial judge in Cologne for twelve years.

Second World War and a new beginning

In the hail of bombs of the Second World War, the business premises of Boisserée were completely destroyed several times, and the old home on Minoritenstraße was finally lost.

After the end of the war, Hermann Schilling transferred the Boisserée company to his nephew Walter Schilling. One of the few things that could be rescued from the rubble of the bombed business premises was a customer database, with which Walter Schilling resumed business in 1946 from a guesthouse in the Siebengebirge: Supported by an employee and an apprentice, he began shipping legal literature.

The 1950s until today

After further post-war intermediate stops at Herwarthstrasse 31 and Hohe Strasse 135 - here Walter Schilling showed an exhibition with east zone painters after the war (“Ostzone painters exhibit”) and thus, together with the gallery Der Spiegel, laid the foundation for today's Cologne gallery scene Schilling and the Boisserée bookstore set up new business premises in the Stollwerkhaus in 1952. In 1955 he opened the Boisserée Gallery in the immediate vicinity of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum , at Drususgasse 7-11 (today's location), in order to present contemporary art in changing exhibitions.

Walter Schilling was committed and persistent in promoting young, as yet unknown artists, especially from the Romanesque and South American regions; six to eight exhibitions per year are evidence of lively gallery activity.

After Walter Schilling's son Johannes joined the company, the focus of the house clearly shifted to gallery activities. In 1984, as part of a thorough renovation and redesign of the business premises in Drususgasse, the traditional bookstore was closed, whereby not only the changes in the German book trade played a role, but also the need to gain additional exhibition space.

In 1988 Johannes Schilling took over the gallery from his father and, in 1997, involved the Austrian Thomas Weber in the company. Since 2009 the gallery has been under the management of the managing partners Johannes Schilling (born 1959 in Cologne) and Thomas Weber (born 1969 in Bludenz , Austria).

In 2003, Galerie Boisserée and Thomas Weber published the catalog raisonné of the artist Karl Fred Dahmen (Deutsches Informel ).

Gallery work

Today the gallery shows art from the 20th and 21st centuries on two exhibition levels. Boisserée combines the art trade with established, international art with gallery activities in the field of contemporary art.

In the last few years the gallery u. a. Represented at the following trade fairs: Art Cologne (Cologne), Cologne Fine Art & Antiques (Cologne), IFPDA Print Fair (New York) and LOPF London Original Print Fair (London).

Boisserée is a member of the BVDG (Federal Association of German Galleries and Editions eV), the CINOA (International Confederation of art and antique dealers associations) and the ifpda (International Fine Print Dealers Association).

In the field of painting after 1950, the gallery shows solo exhibitions by Max Ackermann , Eduardo Chillida , Karl Fred Dahmen, Max Ernst , Joan Miró , Antonio Saura , Emil Schumacher , Pierre Soulages and Antoni Tàpies, among others . In the gallery's contemporary program in recent years, artists such as Jürgen Brodwolf , Patrick Hughes, Henning Kürschner, Jan Voss and Franziskus Wendels have been exhibited.

Galerie Boisserée pays special attention to the technique of the original graphics and works on paper. The gallery enjoys international recognition due to its extensive collection of graphic works by Georges Braque , Marc Chagall , Eduardo Chillida, Max Ernst, Maurice Estève , Sam Francis , Hans Hartung , Marino Marini , Henri Matisse , Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell , Pablo Picasso , Serge Poliakoff , Antonio Saura, Emil Schumacher, Pierre Soulages and Antoni Tàpies. Visitors will find contemporary graphics by Josef Albers , Georg Baselitz , Richard Hamilton , David Hockney , Patrick Hughes, Robert Indiana , Sol LeWitt , Julian Opie and Andy Warhol .

Publications of the Boisserée Gallery

  • Thomas Weber (arrangement, author), Volker Dahmen (eds.), Thomas Weber, Johannes Schilling, Tayfun Belgin: KF Dahmen - catalog raisonné. Volume I 1946–1964 and Volume II 1966–1981. Published by the Walther König bookstore, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-88375-750-0

Exhibition catalogs

literature

Web links