Max Sauerlandt

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Max Sauerlandt around 1930
(Photo: Hugo Erfurth )

Friedrich August Max Sauerlandt (born February 6, 1880 in Berlin , † January 1, 1934 in Hamburg ) was a German art historian and director of the Museum of Art and Crafts in Hamburg.

Life

Max Sauerlandt was born as the son of the timber merchant Max Sauerlandt (* October 16, 1846 - January 20, 1884) and Marie. Plath (born January 27, 1850 - November 7, 1921). He grew up in Hamburg and studied in Marburg, Munich and most recently at the University of Berlin . He was married to Alice geb. Schmidt (born June 5, 1880, † September 19, 1972), who herself was a student of Käthe Kollwitz . They had six children: five daughters and one son.

In 1903 Sauerlandt received his doctorate from Heinrich Wölfflin with a paper on the subject of Giovanni Pisano's sculptures . After a brief activity in the editorial office of Thieme-Becker in Leipzig , he became a research assistant in 1905 and later assistant to Justus Brinckmann , director of the Museum for Art and Industry in Hamburg . In 1908 he was appointed director of the municipal museum for arts and crafts in Halle . Until 1919, Sauerlandt bought the pictures of numerous expressionists for this collection, but also works by Hans von Marées , Max Slevogt , Lovis Corinth , Max Liebermann , Wilhelm Lehmbruck and arts and crafts. This gave the Halle collection a modern character. As early as 1913 he acquired an early painting by Emil Nolde (“The Last Supper” from 1909) for the museum collection . It was the first Nolde painting to be bought by a public German art collection. In the subsequent scandal, Sauerlandt was criticized primarily by Wilhelm von Bode , the general director of the state art collections in Berlin .

Weimar Republic

During the First World War, Max Sauerlandt was drafted as a battery leader on the Eastern Front. As early as 1915, shortly after Justus Brinckmann's death, Sauerlandt was offered his successor at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, which he did not take up until after the end of the war, in spring 1919. He subsequently expanded the museum's holdings of works of art from German Expressionism , such as the artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , and secured the livelihood of the young artists through museum purchases and commissioning. Even lesser-known artists - such as Moissey Kogan or the Bauhaus master Naum Slutzky - could be sure of his support. He pursued the concept of a holistic museum in which handicrafts and fine arts should be exhibited together. Sauerlandt counted many artists among his friends and had extensive correspondence with them.

During this time, Sauerlandt built up an extensive private art collection - mainly through artist gifts - which contained works by the artists Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Rolf Nesch and Gustav H. Wolff . This collection was housed in his rented apartment at Loogestrasse 26, which he shared with his wife Alice and his six children. Ada and Emil Nolde were also frequent guests here. The art collector Sauerlandt owned five paintings by Nolde alone.

National Socialism

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , Sauerlandt was given a forced leave of absence as a museum director on April 5, 1933 under the law to restore the professional civil service , mainly because of his advocacy of modern art, which was referred to as " degenerate art ". Until the summer of 1933, however, he held a lecture published later on German art over the past thirty years at the University of Hamburg . Sauerlandt was banned from entering the Museum of Arts and Crafts . Sauerlandt, who was non-party until his death, saw this as a misunderstanding of the new regime: he interpreted Expressionism as a German art movement in line with the “new social order”. In particular, in a lecture at the conference of the German Museum Association in August 1933, he suggested National Socialist tones, but at the same time spoke out against the interference of the state in museum decisions. On September 30, 1933, he lost his chair at the University of Hamburg and the provisional management of the State Art School, which he had been assigned in 1930 . His membership in the commission of the Hamburger Kunsthalle was suspended.

On New Year's Day 1934, Max Sauerlandt died of gastric cancer - his friends claimed that the grief over time had killed him. While in 1937 his collection of contemporary art in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe was confiscated as "degenerate" and torn apart, his private collection remained undiscovered by the fate of his wife Alice Sauerlandt. Max Sauerlandt and his wife Alice are buried in the old Niendorf cemetery .

General

Sauerlandt wrote over 40 books on modern and classical art. His work on Michelangelo , first published by Langewiesche in Düsseldorf in 1911 , had a circulation of over 200,000 copies.

In 2013 a new street in Halle (Saale) was named after Max Sauerlandt.

Fonts

Max Sauerlandt: German Sculpture of the Middle Ages (1909)
  • About the sculptures of Giovanni Pisano. Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, Leipzig 1904 (= dissertation) ( digitized ).
  • Greek sculptures. Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, Leipzig 1907.
  • German sculpture of the Middle Ages. Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, Leipzig 1909
  • Michelangelo , with 100 illustrations: sculptures and paintings, Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, Leipzig 1911.
  • Emil Nolde. Kurt Wolff, Munich 1921.
  • as editor: North German Baroque Furniture. Verlag Alexander Schöpp, Elberfeld 1922.
  • Small sculpture of the German Renaissance. Langewiesche, Königstein / Ts. / Leipzig 1927.
  • The sofa image or the confusion of art terms. Riegel, Hamburg 1930.
  • The art of the last 30 years. A lecture from 1933. Edited by Harald Busch. Rembrandt-Verlag, Berlin 1935.
  • In the fight for modern art. Letters 1902–1933. Edited by Kurt Dingelstedt. Langen-Müller publishing house, Munich 1957.
  • Selected Writings. 2 volumes. Published by Heinz Spielmann. Hans Christians publishing house, Hamburg 1971–1974;
    • Volume 1: Travel Reports. 1925–1932 (= publication by the Lichtwark Foundation. Vol. 12). ISBN 3-7672-0007-4 ;
    • Volume 2: Articles and Papers. 1912–1933 (= publication by the Lichtwark Foundation. Vol. 13). ISBN 3-7672-0242-5 .

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Max Sauerlandt  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Andreas Hüneke :  Sauerlandt, Friedrich August Max. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 462 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ^ Gravestone in the Ohlsdorf cemetery.
  3. ↑ Sauerlandt, Alice. In: allegro.sub.uni-hamburg.de. Retrieved August 18, 2015 .
  4. ^ Anna Maria Strackerjan: Hamburg. In: www.strackerjan.de. Retrieved August 18, 2015 .
  5. ↑ Marlis Roß: The Exclusion of Jewish Members 1935. The Patriotic Society under National Socialism. Hamburg 2007, p. 30 (PDF; 1.7 MB).
  6. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 511.
  7. ↑ Max Sauerlandt: The current situation and the tasks of the museums in the new state . 1933 (typescript of the lecture).
  8. ↑ Maike Bruhns: Art in the Crisis . tape 1 : Hamburg art in the “Third Reich” . Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-933374-94-4 , pp. 602 .
  9. ↑ Doris Blum: The man who received almost everything for free. In: Die Welt , September 25, 2001.
  10. ↑ Allocation of the 4 new street names Max-Sauerlandt-Ring, Lili-Schultz-Weg, Friedrich-Chrysander-Weg, Paul-Frankl-Weg. In: buergerinfo.halle.de. Retrieved August 18, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Sauerlandt, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian and museum director
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1934
Place of death Hamburg