Lempertz

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Lempertz

logo
legal form Limited partnership
founding 1845
Seat Cologne , GermanyGermanyGermany 
management Henrik Hanstein
Number of employees 21-50
sales € 62 million
Branch Trading and auctioning of art and antiques
Website www.lempertz.com

Lempertz is the name of an art auction house in Cologne that emerged from a former Bonn book and art dealer founded in 1845 .

history

Mathias Lempertz

The history of the House of Lempertz began at the beginning of the 19th century: Johann Matthias Heberle (1775–1840) opened a printing house in Cologne in 1802, which was expanded a little later to include an “antiquarian and auction house”. The first auction of the J. M. Heberle company took place in 1811 . After the company's founder died in 1840, his 24-year-old employee Heinrich Lempertz (1816–1898) took over the company, which from then on became “J. M. Heberle (H. Lempertz) “was called.

Mathias Lempertz (1821–1886), the brother of Heinrich Lempertz, opened the “Buch- und Kunsthandlung Heberle-Lempertz” in 1845 as a branch of the Cologne company at Fürstenstrasse 2 in Bonn, the house where Schiller's widow Charlotte von 19 years earlier Lengefeld had died. In the same year, the first public auction of August Wilhelm Schlegel's posthumous library took place on December 1st . In 1854, the Bonn branch became an independent company owned by Mathias Lempertz.

Kunsthaus Lempertz at Neumarkt in Cologne (2010)

In 1875 Peter Hanstein (1853–1925) bought the company and paid 20,000 gold marks for the name Math. Lempertz, bookstore and antiquarian bookshop . Three years later he founded the Peter Hanstein Verlag , which mainly focused on history, philosophy and theology. In 1888 the bookstore moved into new business premises in Hof 40, later in Franziskanerstraße 6 in Bonn. In addition, more and more paintings by old masters and applied arts were auctioned and a branch was opened in Cologne in 1902, which was initially located at Domhof 6 in the house of the Archbishop's Diocesan Museum. In 1908 Lempertz was the first European auction house to start auctioning East Asian art.

In 1918 the Math. Lempertz company acquired the classicist house Fastenrat at Neumarkt 3, corner of Cäcilienstraße 48, from the estate of Johannes Fastenrath . She set up her main office here and also auctioned Johannes Fastenrath's art collection there in June 1918.

After Peter Hanstein's death in 1925, his two sons Hans Hanstein (1879–1940) and Josef Hanstein (1885–1968), who had been partners since 1912, inherited the company. Josef Hanstein was close friends with the Jewish architect Manfred Faber , who carried out assignments for exhibition and interior design for Lempertz and converted and expanded the office building on Neumarkt in 1933/34.

In 1937 Heinrich Böll began his apprenticeship as a bookseller in the Lempertz bookstore in Bonn. In the same year, the Cologne auction house was commissioned by the Jewish art dealer Max Stern (1904–1987) to auction works from its holdings after his gallery was closed by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts . On 12./13. December 1939 was at Lempertz the collection of due "currency offenses" and "racial disgrace" arrested Jewish Barmer art dealer Walter Westfeld foreclosed (1889-1943), whose fortune and art collection were confiscated. In 1942 Josef Hanstein was imprisoned for a long time by the Gestapo in the basement of the EL-DE house because he was “too friendly towards Jews” , but was released again through contacts with influential people.

Lempertz bookstore in Bonn after 1945

After the war, business was initially continued in Margarethe Hanstein's (née Kerp) parents' office at Sternstrasse 50 in Bonn. The bookstore was re-founded in 1947 as Mathias Lempertz Buchhandlung und Antiquariat GmbH in Bonn and reopened the following year in a new office building at the founding location Fürstenstrasse 1. It gradually developed into a university bookstore and in 1983 also became the official depository bookstore of the Bibliotheca Vaticana publishing house . In 1996 the publisher Franz-Christoph Heel bought the bookstore and in the following year founded the book publisher “Edition Lempertz” in Bonn , whose book program deals particularly with topics of Catholic theology and regional publications. The manager of Edition Lempertz was Antje-Friederike Heel, who in 1999 also took over the management of Matthias Lempertz Buchhandlung und Antiquariat GmbH. In 2003 Edition Lempertz and Siegler Verlag were merged. The Siegler Verlag program mostly includes military history publications, which in turn are published under the imprint of the Brandenburg publishing house . Its naming rights come from the former military publisher of the German Democratic Republic . On December 31, 2005, the Lempertz bookstore in Bonn was closed after more than 150 years. However, Edition Lempertz, based in Königswinter , was retained .

Kunsthaus Lempertz in Cologne after 1945

Madonna and Child on the facade of the gallery (2007)

The building at Neumarkt suffered during Operation Millennium on May 31, 1942 severe war damage and opened on 22 November 1952 after the start of construction since 10 October 1951 of the of Peter Baumann conceived reconstruction with the auction of the important collection Hubert Wilm (Munich) December 1952. After the war, Josef Hanstein (1885–1968) and his son Rolf Hanstein (1919–1970) continued to run the “Kunsthaus Lempertz”. The building has been a listed building since September 3, 1993.

From 1953 to 1957 the first exhibitions of the Roman-Germanic Museum and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum took place there. Since 1958, the house has held separate auctions of modern art. A first foreign office was opened in New York in 1965, and further representative offices followed. The Lempertz Contempora gallery for contemporary art was also opened in 1965. After Rolf Hanstein's premature death in a car accident in 1970, his son Henrik Hanstein (* 1950) took over the business. As the first German auction house, Lempertz has been auctioning contemporary art as well as photography and photographic works in its own auctions since 1989.

With its representative offices in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Zurich, Brussels, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai, the Kunsthaus Lempertz is one of the most important art auction houses in Europe today. Around 14 auctions are held each year, accompanied by illustrated catalogs and one-week preview. In addition to the spring and autumn auctions, at which ancient art, applied arts, modern and contemporary art, photography and photo works as well as East Asian art are auctioned, there are the two auctions for books and graphics, as well as the tribal art auction in spring. The auctions take place in Cologne as well as in the branches in Brussels and Berlin. In addition, Lempertz has long acted as an intermediary between private collectors and museums and has been able to convey important cultural assets to public institutions. Lempertz is a member of the " International Auctioneer " (IA AG) group, which was founded in 1993 and brings together eight leading independent auction houses from eight countries around the world. The turnover in 2012 was 51 million euros.

criticism

One of the works from the Max Stern Collection that was foreclosed in November 1937 was called up from Lempertz in 1977 and again in 1996, without the auction house having pointed out the previous history.

In May 1981 the Kunsthaus auctioned between 20 and 30 works of art worth one million DM from Albert Speer's possession with the anonymous provenance “From private property”, but had checked as a precaution whether the pictures were “suspect of restitution”.

The auction house came under fire again in October 2010 when it became known that it had auctioned several forged paintings by Wolfgang Beltracchi , including alleged works by Heinrich Campendonk and Max Pechstein from a nonexistent Jäger collection , including the forgery of Campendonk's “Rotes Picture with horses ”at a record price of 2.4 million euros. The director of the auction house was accused by the buyers of not having adequately fulfilled his obligation to examine as an auctioneer - an accusation that was corroborated by journalistic research. The Cologne Regional Court sentenced on September 1, 2012, the Kunsthaus to pay restitution of more than two million euros (after Lempertz had repaid the applicant previously 800,000 euros). After Lempertz appealed against the judgment, a settlement concluded before the Cologne district court was announced on December 5, 2012, after the main claim of over two million euros from Beltracchi's real estate assets was to be settled.

Important auctions and brokerage

literature

Web links

Commons : Lempertz  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ DIE ZEIT No. 53/2014 of January 8, 2015 [1]
  2. ↑ Rheinland-Verlag, Rheinische Lebensbilder , Volume 12, 1991, p. 165
  3. ↑ Kunsthaus Lempertz, Collections and Legacies since 1888 ( Memento of the original from July 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lempertz.net
  4. ^ Wolfram Hagspiel : Cologne and its Jewish architects. JP Bachem, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-7616-2294-0 , pp. 57-99.
  5. ^ Entry on Walter Westfeld at LostArt
  6. ↑ The entire catalog can be viewed on the title page of the auction catalog from December 12, 1939 Part of the collection of digitized campaign catalogs on the Internet, last accessed on April 3, 2015.
  7. ↑ Lempertz bookstore disappears from Bonn after 150 years ; buchmarkt.de of August 31, 2005
  8. ↑ Company and publishing history on edition-lempertz.de
  9. ^ Gerhard Dietrich, Museum of Applied Arts Cologne: Chronicle 1888-1988 , 1988, p. 151
  10. ↑ Niklas Maak : Everything is really nice - but unfortunately not real in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , September 16, 2010
  11. ^ Inka Bertz, Michael Tormann: Robbery and Restitution: Cultural Property from Jewish Ownership from 1933 to Today , Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0361-4 , p. 102
  12. ↑ SPIEGEL ONLINE of September 3, 2007
  13. ↑ Niklas Maak: From dealing with art and customers In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 23, 2010, p. 27. Renate Meinhof: Who knew what when . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 22, 2010, p. 13. See also Stefan Koldehoff: The collection that never existed in: Welt am Sonntag , September 5, 2010.
  14. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 29, 2012, p. 37; Article: What is a Ordinary Auctioneer?
  15. ↑ Two million euros: Art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi has to pay millions in (dpa) in: Der Tagesspiegel from December 11, 2012
  16. ↑ Auction catalog 404 of December 12, 1939
  17. ↑ Online catalog for auction 1029, Cologne 2014
  18. ↑ Julia Voss: For art, he let robbery and murder . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 23, 2014, p. 11