Oskar Reinhart Collection "Am Römerholz"
The Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” is an art museum in Winterthur in the Swiss canton of Zurich . The museum is subordinate to the Federal Office for Culture (BAK) in Bern.
history
Oskar Reinhart , who comes from a wealthy merchant family, enjoyed a musical education in his youth. His father Theodor Reinhart promoted Swiss artists and his older brother Georg had started to build up his own art collection. Oskar Reinhart joined the Volkart family company at the age of 18 and was able to deepen his interest in art in Switzerland and during extended work stays abroad. He visited almost all the important museums in Europe and was familiar with many private collections. His trained eye was focused on the quality of the individual works and not on the pure accumulation of well-known names. For example, he had already admired Edouard Manet's work Im Café in the Otto Gerstenberg collection in Berlin in 1923 , but was only able to acquire it in 1953. Presumably in 1906 Oskar Reinhart saw the exhibition of the century of German art organized by Hugo von Tschudi , Alfred Lichtwark and Julius Meier-Graefe in Berlin , which brought together the most important artists active between 1775 and 1875. This exhibition had a decisive influence on Reinhart's entire purchasing activity. This affected both his collection of French painting, especially the Impressionists , as well as later works by German, Austrian and Swiss artists.
In Berlin, Reinhart also got to know the collection of French impressionists that Hugo von Tschudi had set up in the National Gallery . Like Julius Meier-Graefes, the three-volume History of the Development of Modern Art , published in 1904, was shaped by the selection of pictures there for the development of his collection. After the death of his father in 1919 and his exit from business life in 1924, the targeted expansion of his collecting activities began. In the same year he acquired the villa "Am Römerholz", built between 1913 and 1915 by the Geneva architect Maurice Turrettini for the industrialist Henri Sulzer-Ziegler . Reinhart mostly acquired works of art directly from other private collections, occasionally buying from art dealers such as Paul Cassirer , Alfred Flechtheim and Fritz Nathan or from the well-connected Winterthur painter Carl Montag , who lives in Paris . Reinhart von Turrettini had his own gallery wing added for the collection of paintings that had grown in the meantime. After many of his works had already been exhibited in various Swiss museums in the 1930s, Oskar Reinhart bequeathed the villa and the collection to the Swiss Confederation in his will in 1958. Reinhart decreed that works from the “Am Römerholz” collection could neither be sold nor loaned. After the collector's death in 1965, minor alterations were made to the villa and in 1970 the museum was opened to the public.
As early as 1951 he left part of his collection, which mainly consists of German, Austrian and Swiss art, to the city of Winterthur. These works can be seen today in the Oskar Reinhart Museum in Winterthur city center. Caspar David Friedrich's chalk cliffs on Rügen as well as Wilhelm Leibl's village politician are among the top works of this museum .
On the occasion of the exhibition of his collection in Bern in 1939, Oskar Reinhart said: Even if such works are legally owned by an individual, in a higher sense they belong to the general public, and their owner can only see himself as their trustee.
collection
Reinhart's focus on 19th century French art was based on his predilection for the painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Edouard Manet and Paul Cézanne . There were also the immediate forerunners of impressionism and some works by older masters. The Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” has works by the following artists: Jacques-Louis David , Théodore Géricault , Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , Eugène Delacroix , Camille Corot , Jean-François Millet , Honoré Daumier , Gustave Courbet , Renoir , Alfred Sisley , Claude Monet , Camille Pissarro , Paul Gauguin , Manet , Edgar Degas , Cézanne , Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , Vincent van Gogh , Edouard Vuillard , Maurice Utrillo and Pablo Picasso . Works by the sculptor Aristide Maillol can also be seen in the villa. The group of old master paintings and drawings includes works by Hans Holbein the Elder. J. , Matthias Grünewald , Frans Hals , Lucas Cranach the Elder Ä. , Jacobo Bassano , Peter Paul Rubens , Nicolas Poussin , El Greco , Jean Siméon Chardin , Francisco de Goya , Jean-Honoré Fragonard , Claude Lorrain , Quentin Massys , Gerard David , Francesco Guardi and Jacopo Tintoretto .
Exhibited works
Edgar Degas: dancer in her box
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: La Clownesse Cha-U-Ka-O in Moulin Rouge
Aristide Maillol: La Méditerranée
Théodore Géricault: mentally ill with military megalomania
Special exhibitions
Since the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” cannot borrow any works of art itself, the organization of special exhibitions with loans from other institutions is a welcome juxtaposition. Since 2005, the museum has been devoting itself to small exhibitions in small exhibitions every one to two years of the collection in an art-historical context with other works. It all started with Edouard Manet's work Au Café , the history of which is shown in the exhibition Manet meets Manet. Divided, reunited was made clear. The presentation Venite, adoremus followed in 2007 . Geertgen tot Sint Jans and the Adoration of the Magi , in which a medieval panel from the collection was the focus. In 2008, the show Eugène Delacroix : Spiegelungen. Tasso im Madhouse juxtaposed a work by Delacroix from the museum with a version with the same motif from a private collection. With Corot : L 'Armoire secrète - A reader in context , there was a long time 2011 show on the figure paintings of Corot. In 2015, Victor Chocquet, a friend and collector of the Impressionists, was the first to honor the personality of Victor Chocquet in an exhibition. Renoir's portrait of Monsieur Chocquet from the “Am Römerholz” collection was shown in connection with other pictures from the former Chocquet collection.
Edouard Manet: Au Café
Camille Corot: Reading Girl , around 1850
Eugène Delacroix: Tasso in the Madhouse , 1839
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Portrait of Victor Chocquet , around 1876
literature
- Matthias and Christina Frehner: Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur. Swiss Institute for Art Research SIK, 1993, ISBN 3-908184-14-2 .
- Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice: Oskar Reinhart Collection "Am Römerholz", Winterthur. Schwabe, Basel 2003, ISBN 3-7965-1952-0 .
- Juliet Wilson-Bareau , Malcolm Park: Manet meets Manet. Divided, reunited . Schwabe, Basel, 2005, ISBN 978-3-7965-2202-4
- Margret Stuffmann, Norbert Miller, Karlheinz Stierle: Eugène Delacroix. Reflections. Tasso in the madhouse . Hirmer, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7774-4515-1 .
- Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice: Corot. L'Armoire secrète. A reader in context . Hirmer, Munich 2011/2012 ISBN 978-3-7774-3421-6 .
- Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice: Victor Chocquet. Friend and collector of the impressionists . Hirmer Verlag, Munich, 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2416-3 .
Web links
Coordinates: 47 ° 30 '40 " N , 8 ° 43' 54" E ; CH1903: 697 403 / 263,065