Paul Cassirer

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Portrait of Paul Cassirer by Leopold von Kalckreuth , 1912

Paul Cassirer (born February 21, 1871 in Görlitz , † January 7, 1926 in Berlin ) was a German publisher , art dealer and gallery owner of Jewish origin in Berlin. The art trade with art salons and auctions existed in Berlin from 1898 to 1935, in Amsterdam until the 2000s. The Paul Cassirer Verlag existed from 1908 until the seizure of power of the Nazis in the year 1933rd

Life and Activity - The Beginning

Paul Cassirer was the son of the entrepreneur Louis Cassirer and his wife Emilie (née Schiffer). His brothers were Richard , Hugo and Alfred Cassirer , and he had two sisters, Else and Margaret. He studied art history in Munich and then worked for Simplicissimus , the satirical weekly published by Albert Langen Verlag . After moving to Berlin, he and his cousin Bruno Cassirer founded the “Bruno & Paul Cassirer, Art and Publishing Company” on September 20, 1898. Together they got to know the artists Max Liebermann and Max Slevogt , who introduced them to many culturally important personalities in Berlin. The painters were members of the Berlin Secession Artists' Association, which was founded on May 2, 1898 and to which the Cassirers were appointed as secretaries (including at the suggestion of President Liebermann). This brought them a prominent position not only within the association, but also on the art market.

Jury for the exhibition of the Berlin Secession, 1908: Paul Cassirer (fifth from left), also from left to right: Fritz Klimsch , August Gaul , Walter Leistikow , Hans Baluschek , Max Slevogt (seated), George Mosson (standing), Max Kruse (standing), Max Liebermann (sitting), Emil Rudolf Weiß (standing), Lovis Corinth (standing)

In the following three years the art dealers and publishers set themselves the primary goal of promoting the Impressionist art movement. In addition, the Vetter published works by Slevogt, Liebermann and Lovis Corinth , which in their opinion represented Germany's artistic avant-garde. After a falling out with Bruno Cassirer, Paul Cassirer continued to run the art business on his own from 1901. Both cousins ​​limited themselves to their respective business areas until 1908.

While his cousin stopped working in the "Secession", Paul Cassirer remained active and successfully ran for the first director in 1912. Many artists of the Secession were economically dependent on Paul Cassirer, as they sold their works through his art dealer, some of whom made their living from there.

With the lifting of the blocking period, the first title by Lovis Corinth was published by the publishing house. His handbook Learning to Paint was very successful and was able to go into the second edition that same year. In 1907 Cassirer brought Arthur Holitscher into his company as a lecturer, from whom he hoped to develop a feeling for new talent. In the years to come, Frank Wedekind , Carl Sternheim , Ernst Toller and Hermann Bahr could be won over as authors for the publishing house. From 1910 to 1913 even the complete works of Heinrich Mann were published here. The publisher's signet, a resting panther on a tree trunk, was designed by the artist Max Slevogt. The original painting from 1901 can be seen today in the Kunsthalle Bremen .

In the years that followed, the field of aesthetic literature included authors such as Adolf von Hatzfeld , Walter Hasenclever , René Schickele and Kasimir Edschmid . The poet and illustrator Else Lasker-Schüler , who was very much appreciated by the publisher, had her works published by Cassirer.

Paul Cassirer was the only art dealer who was ever accepted as a full member of the German Association of Artists .

The Paul Cassirer Art Salon

The Cassirer art dealer at Viktoriastraße 35 was founded in Berlin in 1898 by cousins ​​Paul and Bruno Cassirer. In a few years it became the leading gallery for French Impressionism in the Weimar Republic . In 1901 Paul Cassirer separated from his cousin Bruno and continued the art trade alone. His art salon in Berlin was one of the most important galleries for modern and contemporary painting in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, and from 1910 even one of the leading galleries in Europe. The slogan “Dreigestirn des German Impressionism” for the artists he represented Liebermann, Slevogt, Corinth was even adopted by art historians.

The art salon showed important works u. a. by Max Beckmann , Paul Cézanne , Camille Corot , Lovis Corinth , Honoré Daumier , Edgar Degas , Eugène Delacroix , Vincent van Gogh , Francisco de Goya , El Greco , Ferdinand Hodler , Oskar Kokoschka , Henri Matisse , Max Liebermann , Walter Leistikow , Édouard Manet , Claude Monet , Edvard Munch , Ernst Oppler , Camille Pissarro , Auguste Renoir , Alfred Sisley , Max Slevogt .

Initially the gallery consisted of only three medium-sized exhibition rooms and a reading room; soon a skylight room was added for larger paintings. In 1912 the gallery was greatly expanded and now consisted of spacious rooms on two floors with two skylight rooms.

From 1901 to 1914 Cassirer showed ten solo exhibitions of works by Vincent van Gogh. Of the around 120 works by van Gogh that were in Germany before the First World War, 80 went through the Paul Cassirer art trade. He also showed works by van Gogh in the Berlin Secession and organized Van Gogh touring exhibitions in Hamburg, Dresden and Vienna. In 1914, shortly before the beginning of the war, Cassirer installed a retrospective with 146 works by van Gogh in all of his rooms.

Over 2,300 works by Max Liebermann, who was also an important collector and customer of the gallery, passed through the hands of Paul Cassirer and his colleagues.

Cassirer showed not only works to sell, but also many that were not for sale in order to inform and educate the public. He cooperated with Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris, who over the years sent several hundred pictures from Paris to Berlin for exhibition purposes. Durand-Ruel lent Cassirer twelve Cézanne paintings as early as 1900. In 1904 Cassirer organized a Cézanne retrospective with over 40 works. In 1907, 1909 and 1913 further Cézanne exhibitions followed in the Cassirer Art Salon.

The newspapers in Berlin reported extensively and controversially on modern art, especially the one shown in the Cassirer art salon.

The First World War destroyed many values ​​in the art trade, and money fell victim to inflation. From 1916 to 1923 Leo Blumenreich was co-owner and director of the gallery. In 1924 his employees Walter Feilchenfeldt and Grete Ring became partners of Paul Cassirer. After Paul Cassirer's death in 1926, they paid off his daughter and took over the publishing house and art salon. After Paul Cassirer's suicide, exhibitions were rarely organized; the focus was now on the auctions that had been held since 1916.

In 1932, when the Nazi takeover was already within reach, Walter Feilchenfeldt and Grete Ring, together with the art dealer and gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim , organized three exhibitions of modern art in the Cassirer art salon as a statement against this: '' Living German Art ''. Representatives of Expressionism, New Objectivity, Bauhaus and abstract formalists were shown in 1932–33 - over 400 works in total.

In 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, Walter Feilchenfeldt and Grete Ring liquidated the Paul Cassirer stock corporation in Berlin by 1935 so that it could not be "Aryanized". Works of art and other property of the company were transported to Amsterdam and thus saved: The Paul Cassirer company had also existed in Amsterdam since 1923, where it was continued by Walter Feilchenfeldt and later by others until the early 2000s. Grete Ring converted the AG in Berlin into a sole proprietorship that existed until 1938. Then Grete Ring emigrated to London and founded the art dealer Paul Cassirer Limited.

The Paul Cassirer archive is now in Zurich owned by Walter Maria Feilchenfeldt. The archive includes the business books, exhibition catalogs, stock cards and protocol catalogs of the Paul Cassirer art dealer. Other documents, such as Cassirer's correspondence with artists, were unfortunately lost during World War II or were destroyed as fuel in Amsterdam.

The art historian Titia Hoffmeister wrote her doctoral thesis on the gallery activities of Paul Cassirer at the University of Halle in the 1980s. It was never published, but the results found their way into the four volumes by Bernhard Echte and Walter Maria Feilchenfeldt Kunstsalon Cassirer. The exhibitions (see literature).

The pan press

With the program of his company, the publisher set himself apart from the prevailing Wilhelmine conception of art and helped impressionist and expressionist artists to achieve a breakthrough. From 1908 he owned his own printing company, the "Pan-Presse", which he had founded under the direction of the xylograph Reinhold Hoberg and the printer Georg Schwarz. The press was supposed to unite the best artists of the time and to combine letterpress with original illustrations in lithography , etching and woodcut . The Kelmscott Press of the Englishman William Morris served as a model for this idea .

Logo of the publisher

The first publication of the Pan-Presse appeared in 1909 and immediately caused a stir. The huge leather stocking volume by James Fenimore Cooper contained over 150 lithographs by Max Slevogt, a cover and endpaper by Karl Walser as well as the initials drawn by Emil Rudolf Weiß . Only 60 copies were made of the A edition, which were hand-bound in red all-maroquine. Volume XVII, the marginal drawings for Mozart's Magic Flute by Slevogt, was another gem of the printing house . Only 100 copies were to be made in 1920 from the exclusive artist's books, which were completely out of stock before delivery. Leo Kestenberg's idea here was to use the handwritten score from the Berlin library as a printing template in order to avoid the difficult combination of printed music / etching.

Between 1909 and 1921 Paul Cassirer was able to win over the artists Lovis Corinth, Jules Pascin , Rudolf Großmann , Ernst Barlach , Max Slevogt , August Gaul , Max Oppenheimer , Willi Geiger , Emil Pottner , Otto Hettner and Max Pechstein for the pan press , which in the 19 works were represented several times. In addition, illustrations for other preferred prints of the publisher and numerous graphic single sheets were published here. Among others, Oskar Kokoschka , Walter Leistikow , Hermann Struck , Marc Chagall and Max Liebermann should be mentioned .

Exile in Switzerland

At the beginning of the First World War , the publisher volunteered for military service at the age of forty-three, but was soon shocked by his experiences in the hospital and on the Western Front. Due to his anti-war sentiments, he was  exposed to numerous - often anti-Semitic - hostility and finally fled to Bern with the help of Count Harry Kessler and other friends , where he was followed by his wife, the actress Tilla Durieux . Here he founded on November 16, 1917 with Max Rascher and Dr. Otto Rascher founded Max Rascher Verlags AG, which published pacifist writings by German and French authors, including the German translation of the novel Das Feuer by Henri Barbusse . In 1918 Cassirer and Tilla Durieux lived in a chalet in Spiez . Oskar Fried , Hermann Haller , Wolfgang Heine , Magnus Hirschfeld , Harry Graf Kessler, Leo Kestenberg , Annette Kolb , Marg Moll , Oskar Moll , René Schickele , Henry van de Velde , Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps , among others, frequented there .

In 1922, the Rascher Verlag and Cassierer separated, as the inflation in Germany had to accept severe financial losses. His company was meanwhile continued in Germany by Walter Feilchenfeldt . Works by Georg Lukács and Karl Kautsky were published . An outstanding achievement of the publisher during the post-war period was the publication of the Lassalle complete edition.

Return to Berlin

Returning to Berlin, Cassirer joined the USPD and was expressly committed to the publishing program .

During the period of inflation, the luxury expenses of the shop played a special role, as material assets were sought that represented a lasting consideration for the devalued mark.

In the 1920s, works by Ernst Bloch ( Spirit of Utopia , Through the Desert , Traces ), Franz Marc ( The Letters, Notes and Aphorisms ) and Marc Chagall ( My Life ) were published by Cassirer. The best-selling books of this time, which were published for the first time in 1908, were Bernhard Kellermann's Walks in Japan and Karl Walser's Sassa yo Yassa . The most important feat of those years, however, was the 14-volume edition Old Dutch Painting by Max J. Friedländer , which was published from 1924. The last three volumes, however, had to be published by a friendly Dutch publisher from 1935 to 1937 .

On January 7, 1926, Cassirer died as a result of a suicide attempt in Berlin. Until the handover of power to the National Socialists, the company was continued by its publishing partners Walter Feilchenfeldt and Grete Ring , who emigrated from Germany in 1933 and 1938 respectively. Grete Ring, a respected art historian, eventually closed the business completely. Neither you nor Feilchenfeldt managed to continue the publishing house. In the first years of the dissolution of the publishing house in their countries of exile (Holland, Switzerland and England) they were only able to maintain the art dealership for a short time.

Publisher's magazines

Together with Wilhelm Herzog , who was editor-in-chief at the publishing house between 1909 and 1911, Cassirer launched the cultural and political journal PAN in 1910 , which was later edited by Alfred Kerr . In 1911 he added Jung Ungarn , the cultural magazine for German-speaking Hungarians, to his program and was responsible for the distribution of the French fashion magazine La Gazette du Bon Ton in Germany from 1913 until the outbreak of war . During the First World War, the house published the patriotic magazine Kriegszeit (August 1914 to early 1916), which was a business success. Bildermann, on the other hand, (April to December 1916) had moderately pacifist topics and could hardly be sold. Between 1919 and 1920 he published the magazine Die Weißen Blätter with René Schickele .

Marriages and death

Funeral of Paul Cassirer on January 10, 1926; at the grave the widow Tilla Durieux
Honorary grave of Paul Cassirer in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend

Paul Cassirer's first marriage to Lucie Oberwarth (1874–1950) began in 1895. In 1904 the couple divorced. From this connection the children Suzanne Aimée (1896–1963, later a psychoanalyst) and Peter (1900–1919 suicide) emerged.

In 1910 he married the actress Tilla Durieux (1880–1971). After Tilla Durieux wanted to get a divorce, Paul Cassirer committed suicide in early 1926, before the divorce became final. As Durieux reports, he shot himself in the chest with a pistol during a divorce negotiation and died of the consequences a few days later in the hospital in the presence of his wife.

Max Liebermann and Harry Graf Kessler spoke at the funeral service on Sunday, January 10, 1926, which was attended by numerous representatives of Berlin's art scene. The burial then took place in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend . Although Cassirer's relatives and friends tried to prevent this from happening, his widow attended the funeral services. The grave monument was designed by Georg Kolbe , who had also removed a death mask. It is an unadorned, two-tiered sarcophagus made of shell limestone. The inscription is the quote from Goethe, “Born to see, ordered to look” (“Türmerlied”, Faust II , Fifth Act).

By resolution of the Berlin Senate , the last resting place of Paul Cassirer (grave location: field 5-D-4/5) has been dedicated as an honorary grave of the State of Berlin since 1992 . The dedication was extended in 2016 by the usual period of twenty years. 45 years after Cassirer's death, Tilla Durieux was buried next to him in 1971. Her final resting place (burial site: Field 5-C-3/4) is also an honorary grave of the State of Berlin.

literature

  • Walter Maria Feilchenfeldt: Vincent van Gogh & Paul Cassirer, Berlin: The reception of Van Gogh in Germany from 1901-1914 , Van Gogh Museum, Cahier 2, ed. Waanders, Zwolle, Amsterdam 1988.
  • Bernhard Echte, Walter Feilchenfeldt (Ed.): Show the best from all over the world / You stand there and marvel. Cassirer Art Salon. The exhibitions. Volume 1: 1898-1901. Volume 2: 1901-1905. Nimbus Verlag, Wädenswil 2011, ISBN 978-3-907142-40-0 .
  • Bernhard Echte, Walter Maria Feilchenfeldt (Ed.): A magical intoxication for the senses / Very strange new values. Cassirer Art Salon. The exhibitions 1905–1910. Volume 3: 1905-1908. Volume 4: 1908-1910. Nimbus Verlag, Wädenswil 2013.
  • Christian Kennert: Paul Cassirer and his circle: a Berlin pioneer of modernism . Frankfurt am Main, Berlin [a. a.]: Lang 1996, ISBN 3-631-30281-9
  • Eva Caspers: Paul Cassirer and the Pan-Presse: a contribution to German book illustration and graphics in the 20th century . Special print. Univ. Dissertation Hamburg 1986, Booksellers Association, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-7657-1542-5 .
  • Georg Brühl: The Cassirers: Warriors for Impressionism. Edition Leipzig, Leipzig 1991, ISBN 3-361-00302-4 .
  • Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt, Markus Brandis: Paul-Cassirer-Verlag Berlin 1898–1933: an annotated bibliography; Bruno-and-Paul-Cassirer-Verlag 1898–1901; Paul-Cassirer-Verlag 1908–1933. Saur, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-598-11711-6 .
  • Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt, Thomas Raff (ed.): A festival of the arts - Paul Cassirer: the art dealer as a publisher (for the exhibition of the same name in the Max-Liebermann-Haus, Berlin, February 17 to May 21, 2006). Munich: Beck 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-54086-8 ( review )
  • Renate Möhrmann : Tilla Durieux and Paul Cassirer: stage happiness and love death. 1st edition Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-87134-246-7 .
  • Karl H. Salzmann:  Cassirer, Paul. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 169 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Walter Maria Feilchenfeldt: Paul Cassirer Berlin. 81 auctions 1916–1932 , in: Heroes of the Art Auction , Ed. Dirk Boll, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern 2014, pp. 50–57.
  • Sigrid Bauschinger : The Cassirers - entrepreneurs, art dealers, philosophers. Biography of a family , CH Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67714-4 .

Web links

Commons : Paul Cassirer  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ s. List of members in the catalog of the 3rd German Artists Association Exhibition , Weimar 1906. p. 41 online (accessed May 30, 2017)
  2. ↑ Liberated from impressionism . In: The time . No. 51/1968 ( online ).
  3. ↑ DU, Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, No. 857, June 2015, pp. 48–61. Ed .: DU Kulturmedien AG, Zurich. ISBN 978-3-905931-53-2
  4. ↑ Tilla Durieux: My first ninety years. Herbig, Munich 1971, pp. 259-278
  5. ↑ Tilla Durieux, p. 265
  6. ↑ Tilla Durieux, pp. 271f
  7. ↑ From 1907 to 1916 Lucie Oberwarth was married to the first husband Ricarda Huch - Ermanno Ceconi (1870–1927). ( Online in Google Book Search)
  8. ↑ Tilla Durieux: A door is open. Henschelverlag, Berlin 1971, pp. 253f
  9. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 485.
  10. ↑ Harry Graf Kessler : The diary. Eighth volume. 1923-1926 . Edited by Angela Reinthal, Günter Riederer and Jörg Schuster. Cotta, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-7681-9818-9 . P. 710.
  11. ↑ Kessler: Diary 1923–1926 . P. 710. Paul Cassirer's grave . In: Jörg Haspel, Klaus von Krosigk (Ed.): Garden monuments in Berlin . Graveyards. Imhof, Petersberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-86568-293-2 . P. 35.
  12. ↑ Birgit Jochens, Herbert May: The cemeteries in Charlottenburg. History of the cemetery facilities and their tomb culture . Stapp, Berlin 1994, ISBN 978-3-87776-056-7 . Pp. 218-219.
  13. ↑ Senate Department for the Environment, Transport and Climate Protection: Honorary Graves of the State of Berlin (Status: November 2018) (PDF, 413 kB), p. 13. Accessed on November 8, 2019. Recognition and further preservation of graves as honorary graves of the State of Berlin (PDF , 205 kB). Berlin House of Representatives, printed matter 17/3105 of July 13, 2016, p. 1 and Annex 2, p. 2. Accessed on November 8, 2019.
  14. ^ Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial sites . P. 486.
personal data
SURNAME Cassirer, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher and gallery owner
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Goerlitz
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 1926
Place of death Berlin