Herbert von Garvens

Herbert Garvens , 1908 after his father was raised to the hereditary nobility of Garvens-Garvensburg (born September 24, 1883 in Hanover ; † September 9, 1953 in Bornholm , Denmark ) was a German-Danish gallery owner.

Life

The youngest son of the factory owner Wilhelm Garvens trained as a businessman in the Hamburg branch of his father's company and was a volunteer there for a while. His inclination towards books and pictures was shown early on. In 1908 he traveled through Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Tibet and India. In 1908 the Garvens family was raised to hereditary nobility by Prince Friedrich von Waldeck and Pyrmont .

After visiting the Belgian painter James Ensor in Ostend in 1910 , he began to put together a collection of contemporary art, with works by Wassily Kandinsky , Robert Delaunay , Oskar Kokoschka , Marc Chagall , Fernand Léger , Edvard Munch , Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff . Bernhard Hoetger drew his attention to Paula Modersohn-Becker .

After his father's death in 1913, he and his brother Wolfgang (* 1880; † 1953 in Züschen ) took over the Garvenswerke, transferring the management of Austrian companies to Alfred Götzl .

He was close friends with the art historian Paul Erich Küppers and in 1916 co-founded the Kestner Society .

In 1917 he served as a reserve officer in southern France and was taken prisoner. He spent 1918/19 at Fort Barraux , where he organized a small art exhibition of reproductions and music evenings with the art historian and camp librarian Hanns Krenz . Here he also got to know Richard Haizmann .

At the beginning of 1920 he returned to Germany, had his library cataloged by Hanns Krenz and on October 1, 1920 founded the "Galerie von Garvens" in his parents' villa with Krenz as managing director. They organized 26 exhibitions of contemporary art, among others by Willi Baumeister , Otakar Kubín , George Grosz , Walter Dexel , Kurt Schwitters and Otto Gleichmann . They also showed Far Eastern art and in February 1921 the Heidelberg collection of art by mentally ill people and by eccentrics such as Karl Junker and in 1922 Wilhelm Groß . After the gallery was closed in November 1923, the collection was not taken over by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne .

He took a trip to Java, Korea and Hawaii and then moved to the Baltic resort of Prerow . The Garvenswerke went bankrupt in 1930 and was liquidated on July 30, 1943.

Exile in Denmark

He had already got to know the Baltic island of Bornholm in 1930 . He bought the abandoned Abildgård farm in Sandkås, Allinge , and moved into it in 1932. Before 1933, significant parts of his modern collection were secretly saved to Bornholm. From 1936 onwards he did not return to Germany, and most of his assets were lost due to the tightened Reich flight tax. He ran an open house that attracted many emigrants and Danish artists, including Asger Jorn and other painters from the CoBrA group, Harald Isenstein and Ole Sarvig . The painter Eli Rasmussen became a close friend and lived with von Garvens from 1939. In June 1943 he had to leave Bornholm as a German civilian after the island had been declared a security area by the Navy High Command . He found shelter in Rasmussen's house in Lyngby near Copenhagen, where he hid a resistance fighter for a few weeks at risk of death. From September 1944 he had to live with forged papers and under a false name in order to evade the control of the German occupation authorities. After the end of the war in 1945, von Garvens received numerous letters of discharge, so that, unlike German citizens, his property was not confiscated. He returned to Bornholm and received Danish citizenship in 1951.

The greater part of the Garvens collection was auctioned in the Stuttgart art cabinet in 1955 by Roman Norbert Ketterer , who researched and marketed existing holdings of modern art that had previously been classified as degenerate .

literature

• Two years at Galerie von Garvens , Hanover 1922.
• The gallery owner Herbert von Garvens - a collector and art lover . In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter, New Series ; Volume 60.
• Henning Rischbieter: The twenties in Hanover: fine arts, literature, theater, dance, architecture 1916-1933. Exhibition catalog Kunstverein Hannover from August 12 to September 30, 1962, Hanover 1962. therein: Gallery and Collection von Garvens , pp. 61 - 69, with dates and titles of the 26 exhibitions from October 1920 to December 1923.
• Birgit S. Nielsen: Herbert von Garvens. Gallery owner, art collector. In: Exile in Denmark. German-speaking scientists, artists and writers in exile in Denmark after 1933 , ed. v. Willy Dähnhardt and Birgit S. Nielsen, Heide 1993, pp. 363-366.
• Gwendolen Webster: Herbert von Garvens and Kurt Schwitters . In Sch ... The Kurt Schwitters Society Journal No. 3 , 2013, p. 40-55, ISSN 2047-1971.

supporting documents

1. ^ Böttcher: Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon ; P. 125
2. ↑ http://www.artnet.de/Artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=5A3D54BD563944A1CA2C01EA6A68400C
3. ↑ http://www.art.org/Brand%20Claussen%20-%20The%20Collection%20of%20Works%20of%20Art%20in%20the%20Psychiatric%20Clinic,%20Heidelberg.pdf  ( page no longer available , search in Web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Karl Schrader took over the factory in Wülfel .
5. ↑ http://www.albert-gieseler.de/dampf_de/firmen8/firmadet80482.shtml
6. ↑ Birgit S. Nielsen: Herbert von Garvens. Gallery owner, art collector . In: Exile in Denmark , ed. v. Willy Dähnhardt and Birgit S. Nielsen, Heide 1993, pp. 363-366.
7. ↑ KUNSTHANDEL / KETTERER: The man with the flair - . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 1960, ( Online - Aug. 24, 1960 ).

Web links

• http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n82-155219