Max Westfeld

Max Israel Westfeld , later Max Westfield (born April 12, 1882 in Herford , Westphalia province ; † August 1, 1971 in Nashville , Tennessee ), was a German-American portrait , genre , still life and landscape painter from the Düsseldorf School .

Life

Westfeld was one of five children of the businessman Michaelis Westfeld (1840-1922) and his wife Jenny, née Seckel (1856-1939). Well-known brothers were Walter Westfeld , an art dealer in Wuppertal - Elberfeld from 1920 to 1936 , and Dietrich Westfeld (1880-1967), before 1933 a respected lawyer in Essen and father of the US economist Fred M. Westfield .

Westfeld attended the Friedrichs-Gymnasium Herford . He received artistic training as a painter at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . There he was a student of Eduard von Gebhardt . Westfeld settled in Düsseldorf , where he was a member of the artists' association Malkasten and the association of Düsseldorf artists . In the years 1907 to 1932 he regularly sent large German art exhibitions - especially portraits - such as the exhibitions in the Munich Glass Palace and the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf . He was also represented in private exhibitions, around 1924 in his brother Walter's gallery Westfeld . As early as 1912, the Düsseldorf Theater Week counted him, alongside Fritz Reusing , Wilhelm Schneider-Didam and Richard Vogts, among the most famous portrait painters in Düsseldorf. Westfeld was married to Rosa, née Löwenstein, who gave birth to their son Gerd.

Due to his Jewish descent, he was persecuted during the National Socialist era . He had been banned from painting since 1936. During the November pogrom of 1938 , which he did not personally experience because he was imprisoned as a result of a denunciation, his apartment in Düsseldorf at Grünstraße 16/18 was robbed. Many of his pictures and furnishings there were destroyed. While his small studio at Parkstrasse 76 remained undisturbed, pictures that he exhibited in Café Markus in Düsseldorf were also destroyed or badly damaged. Unlike his brother Walter, he and his family managed to leave the German Reich and emigrate to the United States in 1939 . In 1940 he settled in Nashville, Tennessee. There he established himself as a sought-after portrait painter under the name Max Westfield .

Westfeld mainly created portraits and still lifes with flowers, but also landscapes and genre representations. His best-known portraits include a portrait of the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck , which he painted in Germany in 1926 on behalf of the Düsseldorf B'nai-B'rith -Loge, and a portrait of Albert Einstein , which was created in the United States in 1944.

literature

• Westfeld, Max . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 35 : Libra-Wilhelmson . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1942, p. 451 .
• Westfeld, Max . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 5 : V-Z. Supplements: A-G . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1961, p. 119 .
• Westfeld, Max . In: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 385 (reading sample, books.google.de ).
• Kurt Düwell (Ed.): Expulsion of Jewish artists and scientists from Düsseldorf 1933–1945 . Reminder and memorial site Düsseldorf, Verlag Droste, Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 978-3-7700-1097-4 , p. 41.

Web links

• Max Westfeld , data sheet in portal rkd.nl ( Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie )
• Max Westfeld , short biography in the portal stiftung-volmer.de
• Max Israel Westfeld , data sheet in the portal discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk
• Max Westfeld , auction results on the portal artnet .de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michaelis West field (21.10.1922), Jenny West field born Seckel (02/18/1939) , data sheet in the steinheim-institut.de portal ( Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut ).
2. ^ Walter Westfeld , Yad Vashem data sheet, website in the portal nachvilleholocaustmemorial.org .
3. ↑ Lee Dorman: Nadhville's Jewish community . Arcadia Publishing, Charleston SC, Chicago IL, Portsmouth NH, San Francisco CA, 2010, ISBN 978-0-7385-6680-1 , p. 126 (reading sample, books.google.de ).
4. ↑ Annual report of the Evangelical Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Herford , school year 1896/97, p. 39 ( uni-duesseldorf.de ).
5. ^ Museum Kunstpalast : Artists of the Düsseldorf School of Painting (selection, as of November 2016, kunstpalast.de PDF).
6. ↑ Inventory list , website in the malkasten.org portal .
7. ↑ Werner J. Schweiger (1949–2011) , website in the sammlung-online.berlinischegalerie.de portal , accessed on February 2, 2018.
8. ↑ Düsseldorf art exhibitions. In: Düsseldorfer Theater-Woche. 3rd year (1912), issue 83, p. 11 ( uni-duesseldorf.de ).
9. ^ Entry in the address book of the city of Düsseldorf 1938 , Schwann, Düsseldorf, p. 184 ( uni-duesseldorf.de ).
10. ^ Bastian Fleermann, Angela Genger (ed.): November pogrom 1938 in Düsseldorf. Reminder and memorial Düsseldorf. Klartext Verlag, Essen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8375-0085-1 , p. 163.
11. ↑ Painting of Rabbi Leo Baeck by Max Westfeld , data sheet in the portal digital.cjh.org , accessed on February 2, 2019.
12. ^ Georg Heuberger , Fritz Backhaus (ed.): Leo Baeck. 1873-1956. From the tribe of rabbis . Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2001, p. 205.
13. ↑ Albert Einstein , data sheet in the portal npg.si.edu ( National Portrait Gallery Washington )
14. ↑ Portrait of Albert Einstein by Max Westfield , website in the portal npg.si.edu (National Portrait Gallery Washington).