Gallery Franz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Franz Gallery was opened on October 19, 1946 in West Berlin , where it existed until around 1951/52 in Kaiserallee (today: Bundesallee) 214. Its owners were Reinhard and Elli Franz.

Reinhard Franz gained experience in the art trade at Galerie Matthiesen before the war and made the acquaintance of Alfred Flechtheim in the field of boxing . The couple, who both belonged to the KPD , got through the years of National Socialism with a private boxing school . After the end of the war, they converted the ground floor rooms into gallery rooms, which, with their wide, high rooms, were well suited for the exhibition of sculptures.

In the opening exhibition Sculpture and Sculpture Drawings of Our Time , they showed works by Ernst Barlach , Waldemar Grzimek , Georg Kolbe , Wilhelm Lehmbruck , Gerhard Marcks , Gustav Seitz , Hans Uhlmann , Karl Hartung and other well-known sculptors, including several large formats, which in view of the difficult Circumstances of those years was extraordinary.

The Franz Gallery also distinguished itself through relatively high-profile exhibitions, ranging from clearly object-related art with a socially committed note by artists such as Otto Dix , Horst Strempel and Fritz Duda to highly abstracting artists such as Ernst Wilhelm Nay , Juro Kubicek or Hans Uhlmann was enough.

After the well-known gallery of Gerd Rosen stepped down in connection with the currency reform and the Berlin blockade of 1948/49, Galerie Franz moved from the top of the Berlin galleries to a prominent position for a short time, even if other Berlin galleries, in particular the Bremer galleries , were pupils and jumpers unlocked. The exhibition Zone 5 , which is significant due to its name alone , with which several well-known Berlin artists distanced themselves from the disputes between the four allies and demanded artistic independence, took place in the Galerie Franz.

The gallery's brief heyday ended quickly. If Berlin had been politically and administratively divided into two halves since the end of 1948, the conflicts of the Cold War in the field of culture reached their climax at the beginning of the 1950s: at the University of the Arts in West Berlin there was a wave of layoffs, Professors who were also active in East Berlin were removed from teaching. At the same time, voices from East Berlin violently attacked Western art and individual artists as part of the so-called formalism dispute. The Franz couple had become suspicious to the West Berlin authorities due to their well-known sympathy for communism and their SED membership at the latest with the Berlin blockade. The opening of a small gallery on Unter den Linden in East Berlin by Elli Franz, which was actually only closed in 1955 when the house was demolished, did the rest. The course taken in 1951 finally led to a scandal. The Berlin authorities felt provoked by the exhibitions by Oskar Nerlinger and Fritz Cremer , well-known representatives of the GDR art scene, which were shown in direct succession . When the opening of the exhibition of Fritz Cremer's works in May 1951, the writer Arnold Zweig , member of the People's Chamber and President of the German Academy of the Arts in East Berlin, spoke and showed an "Annunciation Angel of the American Century" in the form of a US soldier West Berlin police. The West Berlin authorities withdrew the gallery's business license, and the resulting legal process dragged on for years. The Franz Gallery - how long it ultimately existed is unclear - from then on no longer had any significance for the West Berlin art scene.

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Berlinische Galerie. Museum educational service. Eckhart Gillen. Diether Schmidt (Ed.), Zone 5. Art in the four-sector city 1945 to 1951, (West) Berlin 1989, pp. 195–205.
  • Markus Krause, Gerd Rosen Gallery. The avant-garde in Berlin 1945–1950, Berlin 1995, pp. 47–52.
  • Christina Thomson. Petra Winter (Ed.), The Gallery of the 20th Century in Berlin 1945–1968. The way to the New National Gallery, Berlin. Munich 2015, pp. 172–178.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gallery of the 20th Century. Retrieved March 18, 2019 .