Horst Kempe (art dealer)
Werner Horst Kempe (born February 7, 1907 in Dresden ; † December 8, 1998 in Haag in Upper Bavaria ) was an art dealer in Dresden.
Life
Horst Kempe attended the König-Georg-Gymnasium in Dresden. In the 1920s he began collecting postage stamps and art. In the summer of 1945 he started a stamp trade in Dresden. He was particularly interested in the provisional issues of the post-war period and in a short time he built up a stamp wholesaler that is well known throughout Germany. He wrote several publications such as "Beautiful Saxon Special Cancels" and "The Stamp on Letter". He played an important role in the SBZ philately .
In the early 1950s he was the victim of an expropriation campaign against the private stamp trade in the GDR . So Horst Kempe remembered his old hobby of art collecting and started an art trade in the bombed-out Dresden under the name NOVA . Due to Horst Kempe's mediation, Hauptwerke u. a. by Erich Heckel , Otto Dix and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in the Dresden museums . Because of his friendship with Otto Dix he had the privilege of being his trusted art dealer in the GDR.
Kempe was arrested in 1974 and, after nine months of custody, deported directly from the Stasi prison to the West without charge or judgment. This time he became one of the first victims of the wave of expropriations staged by Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski and his KoKo against the private art trade in the GDR. Following the example of this first joint action by the Stasi , Customs and Tax Investigations, dozens of private art collectors and dealers in the GDR were expropriated in the years that followed. Günter Blutke described the story in his 1990 book “Obskureshops with Art”.
literature
- Günter Blutke: Obscure business with art and antiques: a crime report. Links Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-86153-013-9 .
- Wolfgang Seiffert and Norbert Treutwein: The Schalck Papers. Zsolnay-Verlag, Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-552-04340-3 .
- Simon Burnett: Ghost Strasse - Germany's East Trapped between Past and Present. Black Rose Books Ltd., Montreal 2006, ISBN 1-55164-290-5 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kempe, Horst |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kempe, Werner Horst (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German art dealer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 7, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dresden |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 8, 1998 |
| Place of death | Hague in Upper Bavaria |