Renate Gruber (collector)

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Renate Gruber 2019

Renate Gruber (* 18th July 1936 as Renate Busch in Cologne ) is a German collector of photographic art from Cologne. She is a recognized expert and promoter of photography and contemporary witness for the history of contemporary art in Cologne.

Life

Photography by

Annie Leibovitz

Renate and Leo Fritz Gruber, 1989

Link to the picture

(Please note copyrights )

Renate Busch was born in Cologne as one of her mother's eleven children. She was about to begin vocational training when she met Leo Fritz Gruber in 1958 , who from 1950 to 1980 organized the picture shows at the photokina photography fair . The couple married on June 5, 1959. At his side, Renate Gruber developed her knowledge of photography and the position of archivist for lifelong collection and documentation. For example, she co-curated the photo exhibition The Imaginary Photo Museum in the Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle , which accompanied Photokina in 1980 , which the German and international press described as “unique” and “unrepeatable”. Subsequently, a photo book for the exhibition was published under her editorship, which has been published in several languages ​​and countries.

Together with Gruber, she built up a large collection of materials and originals on the life and work of the artist Man Ray , with whom the couple had an intense twenty-year friendship. Further friendships, for example with Irving Penn , Helmut Newton and other photographers, came up over the years.

After the Museum Ludwig had bought around 800 sheets from the Gruber's collection in the 1970s under the head of the cultural department, Kurt Hackenberg (according to Renate Gruber, to compensate for their lack of pension provision), the couple donated the remaining objects in the collection to the museum, which in 2014 had around 4,500 Sheet included. Renate Gruber was in charge of the directory project for this collection, of which she is also the patron. She sold the Man-Ray Archive to the Museum Ludwig in 2012.

As an honorary member of the DGPh, she is considered “very active” even at an advanced age, advises the board of the Festival of the International Photoszene Cologne and gives lectures, for example on Man Ray. The Museum Ludwig produced a 21-part video series with their memories in 2017. In addition to the L. Fritz Gruber Collection, she looks after the entire documentary estate of the Gruber family (including 14,000 documentary photographs), which the couple had bequeathed to the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne in 1984 , and which in large parts was greatly increased after its collapse has been damaged or destroyed. Although she felt the alleged loss of the estate “almost like a second death”, in the following years she gave new photos to the Cologne archive - because she wanted to “set an example” for “our unbelievable archive [which…] was to be resurrected again " should.

Renate Gruber lives and works in Cologne. She says of herself that photography "enriched her infinitely and brought [her] together with a lot of interesting people". She never took a photo herself in her life.

Awards

  • Honorary member of the German Society for Photography (DGPh)
  • Honorary chairwoman of the jury of the photo competition L. Fritz Gruber Prize at the University of Cologne.

Publications

Participation

  • City of Cologne, Museum Ludwig (ed.): Pictures of the silence / Gruber collection, Museum Ludwig . Exhibition and catalog: Renate Gruber. Museum Ludwig, Cologne 1986.
  • Heinz Held: Cologne in times of economic boom . with contributions by Joachim Born and Renate Gruber. Ed .: Werner Schäfke. Emons, Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-89705-874-3 .
  • Eva Weissweiler for the Cologne authors' association AURA 09 (ed.): Klaus Kammerichs Captions: Photographs from 1948 - 1954 [Exhibition: January 11 - February 22, 2015, Church of Resurrection Cologne-Buchforst] . With an introduction by Renate Gruber. Free-Pen-Verlag, Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-945177-18-1 .
  • George Holz: Holz Hollywood: 30 years of portraits . Foreword by Renate Gruber. Daab, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-942597-32-6 .

Editing

  • Helmut Gernsheim: The Imaginary Photo Museum: Masterpieces from 140 Years of Photography / Renate and L. Fritz Gruber . Ed .: Renate Gruber (=  DuMont photo . No. 3 ). DuMont-Buchverlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7701-1359-4 .
    • The imaginary photo museum / Renate and Fritz Gruber. with 457 photographs from 1836 to the present. Harmony Books, New York 1982, ISBN 0-517-54844-5 (English, original title: Das imaginary Photo-Museum . Translated by Michael Rollof).

literature

  • Because photographers like to eat. Renate and Fritz Gruber collected and donated photographs . In: THE TIME . tape 41 . Hamburg October 4, 2007, p. 69 ( archive digitalization at zeit.de ).
  • Michael Kohler: A couple from the picture book; When manners and photography were still classic - an encounter with Renate Gruber . In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . No. 180 . Cologne August 4, 2016, p. 21 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d The DGPh congratulates you on your birthday . In: German Society for Photography (Ed.): DGPh intern - Newsletter . July 2011, p. 7 ( digitized at dgph.de [PDF]).
  2. ↑ a b Sabine Oelze, Marion Ritter: Renate Gruber - Audio Archive Art. Retrieved on August 16, 2019 (German).
  3. ↑ a b c d Agency photomarketing.de in cooperation with the Goethe Institute Istanbul, İstanbul Fotoğraf Müzesi (Ed.): Foreign and yet familiar - The human face in the course of time and the media - . Symposium on the occasion of the “990 Faces” exhibition in Istanbul. Istanbul 2014.
  4. ↑ a b c Hanna Styrie: An intense friendship; "The Rays and the Grubers": Lecture by Renate Gruber in the Max Ernst Museum . In: Kölnische Rundschau . No. 52 . Cologne November 30, 2013, p. 52 .
  5. ↑ a b Bettina Janecek: Widow of the Photokina founder in Cologne: The young woman Gruber for a lifetime. September 15, 2014, accessed on August 17, 2019 (German).
  6. ↑ More than just the beautiful woman at his side . In: Rheinische Post . January 24, 2013.
  7. ↑ Photo Museum . In: KUNST magazine . tape 21 , 1981, ISSN  0340-1626 .
  8. ^ Books . In: Popular Photography . tape 90 , no. 3 , March 1983, ISSN  1542-0337 , p. 174 ( p. 174 on Google Books ).
  9. ↑ City of light and colors . In: Patrick Krause (Ed.): Qvest Metropolen Issue N ° 3 Cologne . tape 3 . Cologne January 2017 ( interview text as digitized version at fritz-gruber.de [PDF]).
  10. ↑ Man Ray. The special archive of an extraordinary relationship. In: museum-ludwig.de. 2013, accessed August 17, 2019 .
  11. ^ Stefan Koldehoff: Historical archive: Seventy meters of picture stories . In: The time . March 12, 2009, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed on August 17, 2019]).
  12. ↑ WORLD: Archive collapse in Cologne: The 17-year-old Kevin K. died in his sleep . March 8, 2009 ( welt.de [accessed August 17, 2019]).
  13. ↑ Nora Koldehoff: Knowledge disappears. In: meinuedstadt.de. Meine Südstadt UG, March 5, 2019, accessed on August 17, 2019 .
  14. ^ Christoph Gehring: The Gruber Photography Collection in Cologne [Series: Patrons in Germany]. In: deutschlandfunkkultur.de. January 26, 2010, accessed August 17, 2019 .
  15. ↑ No photo taken myself in my life . In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . No. 183 . Cologne August 8, 2016, p. 27 .
  16. ^ L. Fritz Gruber Prize of the University of Cologne Exhibition of the 20 best works. In: (invitation). 2016, accessed August 16, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Gruber, Renate
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Busch, Renate
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German collector and promoter of photo art
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne