Gottlieb Reber

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Gottlieb Friedrich Reber (born March 23, 1880 in Lage ; † July 15, 1959 in Lausanne ) was a German art collector and art dealer.

Life

The son of a Protestant pastor came from a family of eleven children. In 1906 he married Erna Sander, the daughter of a textile manufacturer from Barmen (today Wuppertal). In 1918 he moved to Munich with her and daughter Gisèle, the following year to Lucerne, and later to Ascona and Lugano. From 1928 the Reber family lived in the Château de Béthusy in Lausanne for ten years.

Reber began collecting 19th century French art around 1906. He owned 27 paintings by Cézanne, as well as works by Corot, Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin and van Gogh. He bought from Daniel Henry Kahnweiler , Ambroise Vollard and Léonce Rosenberg in Paris and from Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin. In 1921 he acquired works by Pablo Picasso and other Cubists. In the early 1930s he had about five dozen pictures by Picasso. There were also sixteen works by Georges Braque, eleven by Fernand Léger and eighty-nine by Juan Gris.

Reber was friends with Carl Einstein, and from 1929 on he edited the French-language surrealist magazine Documents with him . Einstein dedicated the chapter on Cubism in his book The Art of the 20th Century to him . Renée Sintenis modeled a portrait bust in 1927. Max Beckmann made a portrait of Reber in 1929, which is now in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum . Fernand Léger , Einstein and Reber met in May 1930 in Béthusy Castle .

Reber did not come to Germany after 1933. Walter Andreas Hofer accompanied him on trips to England, France, Holland and Italy between 1930 and 1934. Irmgard Fritsch, Frau Hofer's sister, worked for him as his secretary. Reber left Switzerland in the summer of 1941 and settled in Florence and Rome. He introduced Hofer, Hermann Göring's art agent, to the influential art dealer Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi . On October 30, 1940 he delivered the portrait of a Saxon princess by Lucas Cranach to the “Reichsmarschall” for 18,000 Swiss francs. On January 2, 1941, a tondo by Lorenzo di Credi came to the Berlin head of the main trust agency East as a gift through Reber .

During the war, Reber Hofer's main buyer in Italy. He relied mainly on the help of Contini-Bonacossi. Hofer paid Reber ten percent commission on all purchases. At least one painting, a portrait of a woman from the Friulian-Venetian school of the 16th century, was sold to the special order Linz. Reber explained that such art treasures could easily be removed from Italy in special trains.

In 1943 his German citizenship was revoked. Switzerland later refused him an entry visa. He stayed in Italy. In 1947 he learned in Florence that his painting by Cézanne Knabe with the red vest had been confiscated in Lausanne. In August 1948 he was able to sell the picture to Emil Georg Bührle for 400,000 francs .

literature

  • Andrea Pophanken, Felix Billeter: Modernism and its collectors, French art in private German ownership from the Empire to the Weimar Republic. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-05-003546-3 .

Web links

  • Reber at kubisme.info (Dutch)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Place of birth, date of birth and death according to Andrea Pophanken, Felix Billeter: Die Moderne und their collectors , pp. 348–349
  2. ^ Conor Joyce, Carl Einstein in Documents and His Collaboration with Georges Bataille, 2003, p. 232
  3. ^ Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom, German Portraits from the 1920s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2007, p. 270
  4. ↑ Contini-Bonacossi's biography at lootedart.com
  5. ↑ Washington National Archives, NARA M1944. Records of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, Subject Files, compiled 1944 - 1946, documenting the period 1940 - 1946, Gottlieb F Reber, Date Range: 1940-1946
personal data
SURNAME Reber, Gottlieb
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reber, Gottlieb Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Location (lip)
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1959
Place of death Lausanne