Salomon B. Slijper

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Salomon B. Slijper ( Salomon Bernard "Sal" Slijper; born January 20, 1884 in Amsterdam , † August 9, 1971 in Laren ) was a Dutch real estate agent and art collector who was best known for his purchases of works by Piet Mondrian . In his will he bequeathed his entire holdings to the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag , which means that the museum houses the world's largest collection of Mondrians.

life and work

Childhood, school days and first years of employment

Slijper was born as the son of the diamond broker Bernard Ezechiël Slijper (1843–1903) and his wife Elisabeth Benedictus (1851–1888) into a Dutch-Jewish family. After the death of his mother, the maid Mathilda Cohen (1869-1943) took over the upbringing of the 4-year-old and married Solomon's father on February 28, 1889. After six years of elementary school in the Netherlands, Salomon Slijper went to the Hoogere Burgerschool (higher civil school, HBS, a kind of grammar school) for three years and then to the Openbare Handelsschool (public business school) in Amsterdam for three years and from 1900 worked for the Amsterdamsche Bank for six years . When his father died in 1903, he left the almost 19-year-old an inheritance that made him financially independent. From 1908 to 1912 he worked first for the real estate agent JH de Roode and then became self-employed as a real estate agent in Amsterdam.

Acquaintance with Piet Mondrian

In September 1916, Slijper met Piet Mondrian in Laren , an artists' village whose painters were referred to as a group of the Laren School . They met in the Pension De Linden run by Catharina Hannaert (1868–1946) ; Hannaert was an admirer of Mondrian. In October 1917 Slijper moved to Blaricum , where his stepmother lived. Mondrian visited him there quite often, especially on Sundays, when many young people came to the Slijper house and Mondrian could occasionally dance with a pretty girl, have lunch and bring a drawing or sketch as a thank you for the hospitality. Shortly before Mondrian's departure from Laren in June 1919, Slijper, who throughout his life had a fondness for the representational period of Piet Mondrian, bought three so-called checkerboard compositions from the artist from 1919. He also bought the pre-war paintings, which Mondrian followed on his departure Paris left behind in The Hague . After Mondrian returned to Paris in 1919 and found his studio as it was when he left it, he sent all available naturalistic and cubist paintings as well as two oval works to Sal Slijper, who paid a total of 965 guilders for them.

At Sal Slijper's suggestion, Mondrian repeatedly created flower drawings between 1922 and 1925, each with a single flower, which the visitors to his studio liked so much that he was able to sell additional copies for 100 francs each. In 1922, on the occasion of Piet Mondrian's 50th birthday, Slijper organized a retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam together with the painter Peter Alma , the architect Bob Oud and HJ Wolter, a former student of Mondrian . Many of the works exhibited at the time came from the extensive Slijper collection. In March 1922, Slijper, Peter Alma, the Stieltjes family and Willem Steenhoff decided to financially support Piet Mondrian by paying him a quarter of the rent for his studio for two years, in return for which they received a painting from the artist each year . These paintings should be donated to a public collection. In the name of this group of four, Slijper presented the painting Mill in the Evening from 1917 to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on May 20, 1923 .

The global economic crisis that began after Black Tuesday in 1929 not least affected Slijper's economic situation. The author Mandy Prins suspects that he was such a staunch Mondrian collector as early as 1930 that he turned down Helene Kröller-Müller's offer to buy Mondrian's main work from 1911, the triptych Evolution . Instead, he preferred to sell his house and move into a tenement house.

Second World War

During the Second World War , 35,000 of 150,000 Dutch Jews who were Jewish escaped the Holocaust . Slijper belonged to this minority because he could go into hiding in his apartment building. Without contact to his family, friends or the neighborhood, his housekeeper Johanna Hamdorff (1886–1976) provided him with essentials. Sal Slijper survived the so-called hunger winter of 1944/45 , when there was no fuel, food or electricity for the inhabitants of the Netherlands. He owed his life to his housekeeper, who risked her own life for it - because rescuers of the Jews were treated like Jews under the German occupation. In 1947 Sal Slijper and Johanna Hamsdorff married. Slijper's Mondrian collection survived the war unscathed, wrapped in newspaper and stacked under some old carpets in the attic of the neighboring Kuier family. This “simple neighbor help” was in reality life-threatening. “Safekeeping of confiscated Jewish property” and “ degenerate art ” were often punished with imprisonment or even deportation.

After the Second World War

Slijper, now 61 years old, will have learned of Mondrian's death on February 1, 1944 shortly after the end of the World War. His previous friendship with the artist, combined with his already large collection of Mondrian works, determined Slijper's everyday life from now on. From October 1945, Slijper helped design a Mondrian memorial exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which took place a year later and was also shown in the Kunsthalle Basel . He came into contact with other collectors and gallery owners such as Sidney Janis and Peggy Guggenheim and traded and collected strategically, including from auctions.

Death and inheritance

The Gemeentemuseum The Hague

When Slijper died in 1971, the Dutch art world worried whether Slijper's collection would be preserved in the Netherlands. The responsible director of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag , Louis Wijsenbeek , who permanently exhibited large collections of Slijper on loan, feared that the pictures would be preserved because, as far as is known, Slijper had never uttered any binding word on the future of his Mondrian collection. When the will was finally opened, it turned out that Slijper had bequeathed all 197 Mondrian works from his possession to the Gemeentemuseum as early as 1957. It may have played a role that Wijsenbeek was also a survivor of the Holocaust. The Gemeentemuseum thus became the parent house of Mondrian paintings and received many dozen of his works from other collectors.

Exhibition and television documentary

In 2010, the exhibition Gedurfd Verzamelen (Daring to Collect) was shown at the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam, dedicated to the three art collectors Andries van Wezel (1856–1921), Willem Wolff Beffie (1880–1950) and Sal Slijper. On the occasion of the exhibition, a 33-minute television documentary produced by the Joodse Omroep (Jewish radio) was broadcast on the Dutch television station Nederland 2 on March 14, 2010 , focusing on Sal Slijper's collecting activities.

literature

  • Mandy Prins: Salomon B. Slijper (1884–1971), vriend, verzamelaar en mecenas van Piet Mondriaan. In: Huibert Schijf & Edward van Voolen (eds.): Gedurfd verzamelen. Van Chagall dead Mondriaan. Waanders, Zwolle 2010, ISBN 9789040076626 , pp. 144–165 ( excerpt as PDF; 14.3 MB )
  • Pien van der Werf: Het archief van Sal Slijper. In: RKD Bulletin. No. 2, 1996, pp. 12-16

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Salomon B. Slijper (1884–1971) . In: kubisme.info. Retrieved February 6, 2011
  2. ↑ Michel Seuphor: Piet Mondrian. Life and work. Publisher M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1957, p. 129
  3. ↑ Michel Seuphor: Piet Mondrian. Life and work. Cologne 1957, p. 190
  4. ↑ Michel Seuphor: Piet Mondrian. Life and work. P. 162
  5. ↑ Mandy Prinz 2010 in a television interview, see online, from 11:14 pm
  6. ↑ Annie Kuier in a TV interview 2010, online, from 11:14 pm
  7. ↑ Jacques Presser : Ondergang. The vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940–1945. Staatsuitgeverij, Den Haag 1985, p. 186 ( online )
  8. ↑ Gerard Aalders: Roof - de ontvreemding van joods bezit tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. SDU Uitgevers, The Hague 1999.
  9. ^ Anne Frank website: Ook other doken onder (section Verraad )
  10. ↑ Mandy Prins: Salomon B. Slijper (1884–1971), vriend, verzamelaar en mecenas van Piet Mondriaan. In: Huibert Schijf & Edward van Voolen (eds.): Gedurfd verzamelen, van Chagall tot Mondriaan. Waanders Uitgevers, Joodsch Historisch Museum, Amsterdam 2010, pp. 144–145
  11. ↑ D. Giltay Veth & AJ van der Leeuw: Report door het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie uit brought aan de Minister van Justitie inzake de activiteiten van drs. F. Weinreb gedurende de jaren 1940–1945, in het licht van nadere Gegevens bezien. 2 volumes. Staatsuitgeverij, 's-Gravenhage 1976, ISBN 90-12-01068-3
  12. ↑ Jewish Historical Museum: Gedurfd Verzamelen. Van Chagall dead Mondriaan (with video; 7:07 min )
  13. ↑ Joodse Omroep: Schitterende collecties (from min 23:14)
personal data
SURNAME Slijper, Salomon B.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Slijper, Salomon Bernard; Slijper, Sal
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch broker and art collector
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 1971
Place of death Laren