Neumeister Munich art auction house

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Neumeister Munich art auction house
legal form GmbH & Co. KG
founding 1958
Seat Munich, Germany
management Katrin Stoll (sole owner since 2008)
Constantin Wunn (Commercial Director)
Number of employees 19 (2017)
Branch Auction house
Website www.neumeister.com

Neumeister Münchener Kunstauktionshaus GmbH & Co. KG is an auction house for old art, handicrafts and jewelry as well as modern and contemporary art in Munich . The company was founded in 1958 when Rudolf Neumeister (1925–2017) took over the auction house from Adolf Weinmüller . In 2008 his daughter Katrin Stoll took over the auction house and has been the sole managing partner since then . In 2017 the company had 19 employees. It is counted among the top ten art auction houses and among the most renowned auction houses in Germany.

history

Rudolf Neumeister established himself as a partner in the Neumeister & Gräf art dealer in Munich in 1951 and was, among other things, significantly involved in building up Georg Schäfer's art collection . In April 1958 Rudolf Neumeister took a stake in the Munich auction house Adolf Weinmüller , which had opened in 1936 in Palais Leuchtenberg , through the brokerage of Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank . On June 7, 1958, he and his wife Christa took over the remaining shares in the auction house. The previous company name was initially retained. The first auction with 3,000 objects took place in May 1958. The Neumeister auction house continued to operate with the addition of “formerly Weinmüller” until 1978, and the name was only changed to “Neumeister - the art auction house at the Pinakotheken” when it moved from the Almeida-Palais to its own house in Maxvorstadt , Munich .

In 1960, Neumeister auctioned the estate of the art collector and dealer Otto Bernheimer , a film producer from southern Germany had furniture and paintings by Wilhelm Leibl , Hans Purrmann and Carl Spitzweg auctioned off in 1963 . Among the buyers was Princess Soraya . In 1965 the company had twenty permanent employees and, in addition to the four regular auctions, a “Modern Art” auction was held for the first time. Rudolf Neumeister gradually involved his three daughters as limited partners in his auction house: Martina in 1979, Katrin in 1983 and Michaela in 1991. In 1983 Rudolf Neumeister's son-in-law Michael Scheublein, who had married his daughter Martina, joined the company. In 2000 Rudolf Neumeister transferred his remaining shares equally to his three daughters, in 2003 Rudolf Neumeister's wife Christa died. Michael Scheublein worked in the management until 2008. In that year Rudolf Neumeister's second daughter, Katrin Stoll, took over all of her two sisters' shares and became the sole owner and managing partner of the auction house. Rudolf Neumeister died in 2017. In 2009, Katrin Stoll commissioned the art historian Meike Hopp to review the Nazi history of the Weinmüller auction house . Meike Hopp published the results in 2012 in her dissertation “Adolf Weinmüller's Art Dealers in Munich and Vienna 1936-1945”. After finding old Weinmüller auction catalogs in spring 2013, they were digitally recorded and have been available to the public in the lost art database of the coordination office for the loss of cultural property since May 2014.

criticism

At the twelfth Heidelberg Art Law Day 2018, the legal scholar Erik Jayme criticized the fact that no provenance was recorded for a painting by Wilhelm Trübner , which he acquired in 2010 at the Neumeister auction house. He noticed this when years later he wanted to give away the painting. When asked by Neumeister, he did not receive any information. After his research, he learned from the catalog for a Trübner exhibition in Berlin in 1962 that the picture came from Wolfgang Gurlitt's collection . His Trübner pictures belonged to Berthold Nothmann , a Berlin art collector of Jewish origin who had been forced to sell his collection in 1939 in order to be able to emigrate. Jayme had no final certainty whether his Trübner picture also came from Nothmann's collection. The previous history and the interim history after Gurlitt had not been communicated.

In 2010 it became known that in 1991 Neumeister had auctioned a pastel by the German impressionist Lesser Ury for almost 50,000 marks, which it can be proven that it did not come from him. The auction house refused to compensate the owner for the damage. Neumeister did not breach his duty of care. Two experts checked the work at that time.

literature

  • Meike Hopp : Art trade under National Socialism: Adolf Weinmüller in Munich and Vienna. , Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2012, also dissertation at the University of Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-412-20807-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Imprint Neumeister Munich Art Auction House. Retrieved July 5, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Neumeister Münchener Kunstauktionshaus GmbH & Co. KG, 2017 annual financial statements in the Federal Gazette
  3. ↑ Neumeister Münchener Kunstauktionshaus GmbH & Co. KG, 2017 annual financial statements in the Federal Gazette
  4. ^ The German auction year 2015 faz.net
  5. ↑ The 10 most renowned auction houses in Germany kunstplaza.de
  6. ^ Rudolf Neumeister died | WORLD ART . In: WELTKUNST, the art magazine of ZEIT . February 24, 2017 ( weltkunst.de [accessed October 4, 2018]).
  7. ↑ K. Erik Franzen: Looking back ahead. artnet.de on May 14, 2012 , accessed June 22, 2012
  8. ↑ Milestone in provenance research: Business documents from the time of National Socialism online, press release from the Coordination Office for the Loss of Cultural Property from May 23, 2014, accessed on July 15, 2014 ( Memento from May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
  9. ↑ Erik Jayme: The discriminating provenance , in: Matthias Weller / Nicolai B. Kemle / Thomas Dreier (eds.): Handel - Provenienz - Restitution . Proceedings of the twelfth Heidelberg Art Law Day on October 20 and 24, 2018, Nomos, Baden-Baden 2020, ISBN 978-3-8487-6437-2 , pp. 11-13
  10. ^ Lawsuit against Neumeister: Worthless sunset sueddeutsche.de
  11. ^ The gruesome monopoly of Adolf Weinmüller in FAZ from January 8, 2013, p. 26.