Ludwig Justi

Ludwig Justi

Grave of Ludwig Justi in the Bornstedter Friedhof in Potsdam

Ludwig Albert Ferdinand Justi (born March 14, 1876 in Marburg ; † October 19, 1957 in Potsdam ) was a German art historian and director of the National Gallery in Berlin from 1909 to 1933 and director general of the State Museums in Berlin from 1946 until his death. It acquired particular importance through the establishment of the first museum for contemporary art in the Kronprinzenpalais .

Live and act

Justi came from an important Hessian family of scholars who had produced art scholars for two centuries . His uncle Carl Justi was one of the most important art scholars of his time.

Ludwig Justi was a son of the Marburg orientalist Ferdinand Justi and his wife Helene Schepp. In 1894 he passed his Abitur at the Philippinum High School in Marburg and then began studying art history at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin . He received his doctorate in July 1898 with the work of Albrecht Dürer and Jacopo de Barbari . He then became a research assistant at the Royal Museums in Berlin . He completed his habilitation in 1901 with a thesis on Albrecht Dürer and in 1902 became a private lecturer with Heinrich Wölfflin at Berlin University . From 1903 he taught as a professor at the University of Halle . In 1904 he was appointed director of the Städel Art Institute in Frankfurt am Main . During this time he acquired a first work by Claude Monet for the collection , as well as the painting " The Blinding of Simsons " by Rembrandt van Rijns . In 1905 he was followed by Georg Swarzenski as director of the Städel Art Institute , while Justi became the first permanent secretary of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. On November 2, 1909, Justi was appointed director of the National Gallery in Berlin as Hugo von Tschudi's successor .

After the First World War - Justi took an active part from 1914 to 1918 - he set up the New Department in the Kronprinzenpalais , which expanded the National Gallery for Modern Art and was considered the first and most important museum collection of its kind with a focus on Expressionism . In this function, Justi was involved in a long journalistic dispute about the program with Karl Scheffler , which went down in the cultural history of the Weimar period as the Berlin Museum War. From 1930 to 1933 he published the magazine Museum der Gegenwart , which claimed to be the mouthpiece for everyone interested in modern museum concepts, acquisitions, museum architecture and modern art in general.

After the seizure of power of the Nazis he was removed for political reasons 1933rd He refused early retirement and was demoted to curator , transferred to the art library and retired in 1941. However, he remained journalistic.

After the Second World War he tried to build on the tradition of the Kronprinzenpalais and was the driving force behind the establishment of a 20th century collection. The now 69-year-old Justi was appointed General Director of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in 1946. He initially wanted to fill the gaps in the area of ​​Expressionism by purchasing some major works, but this collided with trends that wanted to document current post-war art. All further efforts to rebuild his life's work became obsolete with the split of the magistrate in November 1948 and the establishment of the two German states in 1949. That is why the Galerie des 20. Century was founded a second time as a municipal gallery in West Berlin in 1949 and had to build up its inventory again. It went on in 1968 in the Neue Nationalgalerie . After the state museums split up, Justi remained director of the facilities in the eastern part of Berlin until his death in 1957, the later state museums in Berlin, the capital of the GDR , which in particular included the collections concentrated on Museum Island .

On February 24, 1949, Justi was elected a corresponding member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and was a full member in the same year.

Fonts

• The reorganization of the painting gallery in the Städel Art Institute in Frankfurt / Main. In: Museum Studies. 1, 1905.
• The future of the National Gallery. Berlin 1910.
• The expansion of the National Gallery. Berlin 1913.
• The renovation in the National Gallery. Berlin 1914.
• Open letter to Karl Scheffler. In: Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst. (Enclosure) 54, 30, 1918/1919.
• Habemus papam! Comments on Scheffler's bull "Berlin Museum War". Berlin 1921.
• New Art - a guide to the paintings of the so-called Expressionists in the National Gallery , Berlin 1921.
• Hans Thoma. One hundred paintings from German private ownership. Berlin 1922.
• Directory of the Schack gallery (preface). Munich 1923.
• From Corinth to Klee. German painting in the 19th and 20th centuries. A walk through the National Gallery. Berlin 1931.
• From Runge to Thoma. German painting in the 19th and 20th centuries. A walk through the National Gallery. Berlin 1932.
• Cat. Off. Reunion with museum items. Berlin 1946.
• Development of the Berlin museums. In: Journal of Art. 1, 1947.
• Obituary for Heinrich Wölfflin. In: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences. 1951.
• Masterpieces from the Dresden Gallery, exhibited in the National Gallery. Suggestions for closer inspection. Berlin 1955.
• Thomas W. Gaehtgens , Kurt Winkler (Ed.): Becoming - Working - Knowledge. Life memories from five decades. Berlin 2000. ISBN 3-87584-865-9 .

literature

• Peter Betthausen : "The School of Seeing". Ludwig Justi and the National Gallery. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-88221-688-2 .
• Werner Heiland-Justi: The "Jeheimrat". Ludwig Justi, his legacy and his family , Lindenberg: Kunstverlag Josef Fink 2020, ISBN 978-3-95976-242-7 .
• Annegret Janda, Jörn Grabowski (ed.): Art in Germany 1905–1937. The lost collection of the National Gallery in the former Kronprinzenpalais. Documentation. Mann, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-7861-1587-7 ( picture booklets of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Issue 70/72).
• Alexis Joachimides: The museum reform movement in Germany and the emergence of the modern museum 1880-1940. Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 2001, ISBN 90-5705-171-0 .
• Ludwig Justi - The conservative revolutionary. In: Henrike Junge (Ed.): Avant-garde and audience. On the reception of avant-garde art in Germany 1905–1933. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1992, ISBN 3-412-02792-8 , pp. 173-185.
• Wolfgang Freiherr von Löhneysen :  Justi, Ludwig. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , p. 706 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , p. 324.
• Kurt Winkler: Ludwig Justi's concept of the contemporary museum between avant-garde and national representation. In: Claudia Rückert, Sven Kuhrau (eds.): “The German Art…” National Gallery and National Identity 1876–1998. Verlag der Kunst, Amsterdam et al. 1998, ISBN 90-5705-093-5 , pp. 61–81.
• Kurt Winkler: Museum and Avant-garde. Ludwig Justi's magazine "Museum der Gegenwart" and the musealization of Expressionism. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 2002, ISBN 3-8100-3504-1 ( Berliner Schriften zur Museumskunde 17), (Partly at the same time: Berlin, Freie Universität, dissertation, 1994: Die Zeitschrift Museum der Gegenwart (1930–1933) and the musealization of the Avant-garde. ).
• Short biography for:  Justi, Ludwig . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Commons : Ludwig Justi  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ludwig Justi in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Ludwig Justi in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis

Individual evidence

1. ↑ see Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (HStAMR), Best. 915 No. 5555, p. 103 ( digitized version ).
2. ↑ Chronik Berlin: August 17, 1946 on landesarchiv-berlin-chronik; accessed on November 23, 2014.