Grete ring

Grete Ring (born January 5, 1887 in Berlin , † August 18, 1952 in Zurich ) was a German art historian and art dealer .

Life

Margarete Ring's parents came from old Jewish families, her father Victor Ring (1857–1934) was Vice Director at the Berlin Superior Court , her mother Margarethe Marckwald (1861–1921) was Max Liebermann's sister-in-law .

She completed her studies in art history in 1912 with a doctorate under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich . She found her first job at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. In 1919 she returned to the National Gallery in Berlin . Her art-historical interest was in the 19th century, she put together a collection of hand drawings, including works by Carl Gustav Carus , Anselm Feuerbach , Caspar David Friedrich , Friedrich Overbeck , Adolph Menzel and Max Liebermann .

In the early 1920s she moved to the Cassirer Art Salon . In addition to the art trade , she organized exhibitions, wrote catalog articles and wrote articles for art magazines. After Paul Cassirer's suicide , Grete Ring took over the management of the art salon together with Walter Feilchenfeldt . In January 1928 a Van Gogh exhibition took place at Cassirer's premises, which was supplied by the art dealer Otto Wacker . Ring and Feilchenfeldt realized that some of the pictures were forgeries . This went down in art history as the "Wacker case". In the same year, Grete Ring had an architect friend, Wilhelm Büning, build a summer house in Sacrow near Potsdam .

She worked for the Cassirer art salon until 1935 , then emigrated via Amsterdam until she settled in London in 1938 . Her gallery in London fell victim to the German air raids in 1940 .

In 1949 she published her most important work, A Century of French Painting 1400–1500 . Grete Ring died in 1952 during a hospital stay in Switzerland.

Publications

• Contributions to the history of Dutch portrait painting in the 15th and 16th centuries. Seemann, Leipzig 1913.
• The Wacker case. In: Kunst und Künstler May 1932, pp. 153–165.
• A Century of French Painting 1400–1500. London 1949.

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. 554-556.
• Stefan Koldehoff: The Wacker forgeries. A catalog In: Van Gogh Museum Journal 2002, pp. 138–149.
• Jürgen Strauss (ed.); Jan Thomas Köhler, Jan Maruhn: Sacrow - From the Brandenburg village to the place of modernity. Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89479-211-6 .
• Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt: Grete Ring as an art historian in exile. In: Ursula Hudson-Wiedenmann, Beate Schmeichel-Falkenberg (Ed.): Crossing borders. Women, art and exile. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, pp. 131–150.

Web links

• Literature by and about Grete Ring in the catalog of the German National Library
• Summer house in Sacrow