Siegfried Kramarsky

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Siegfried Kramarsky (born April 14, 1893 in Lübeck , † December 25, 1961 in New York City ) was a German-American banker , art collector and patron . From 1923 he headed a bank in Amsterdam and in 1938 he moved to the United States via Canada . His extensive art collection included several paintings by Vincent van Gogh and an important collection of porcelain and ceramics.

Life

Siegfried Kramarsky was born in Lübeck in 1893. In 1915 he moved to Hamburg and worked for the Lisser & Rosenkrantz bank. Within a few years he rose professionally and soon became a partner in the bank. In 1921 he married Violet (called Lola) Ingeborg Else Popper. From this marriage the daughter Sonja and the sons Werner and Bernard emerged. In 1923 the family moved to the Netherlands, where Siegfried Kramarsky took over the management of the bank's Amsterdam branch. In the years that followed, he and his wife built up an important art collection.

As a German Jew living in the Netherlands, Kramarsky observed the developments in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and decided to emigrate to America. Through his friend Chaim Weizmann , who later became the first Israeli president, he and his family managed to emigrate to Canada in 1938. In 1940 the family was able to settle permanently in New York City. In New York, Kramarsky was involved in numerous Jewish organizations. These included the non-profit umbrella organization United Jewish Appeal , the American Jewish League for Israel , and the women's organization Hadassah , of which his wife Lola served as president for several years. He also supported the Weizmann Institute for Science in Israel and was a member of the American Friends of Hebrew University in Jerusalem .

Art collection

The best-known pieces in the Kramarsky Collection included four paintings by Vincent van Gogh , including two pictures that were previously in German museums. From the Berlin National Gallery , the painting was originally The Garden Daubigny and in Frankfurt ' that hung above Portrait of Dr. Gachet . Both pictures were confiscated as so-called “ degenerate art ” in 1937 and came into the collection of Hermann Göring , who sold them to the Amsterdam banker Franz Koenigs to procure foreign currency . Before the Second World War, Koenigs sold the painting Der Garten Daubignys to Siegfried Kramarsky. It later ended up in the collection of the Hiroshima Museum of Art . The exact circumstances, such as the painting Portrait of Dr. Gachet came into the possession of Kramarsky are unclear. In 1990 the picture was auctioned at Christie's New York auction house , where it changed hands for $ 82.5 million - the highest amount ever paid for a painting at auction. As early as 1987, Kramarsky's daughter Sonja put Van Gogh's painting The Bridge of Trinquetaille from her parents' collection up for auction at Christie's in London. It went to a collector whose name was unknown for $ 20.2 million. Today (2013) the picture is on loan at the Kunsthaus Zürich . Another painting by Van Gogh, Shoes , was sold by the Kramarsky heirs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1992 .

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    Portrait of Dr. Gachet
    1890, private collection

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    The Daubignys Garden
    1890, Hiroshima Museum of Art

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    The Trinquetaille Bridge
    1888, private collection, loan from the Kunsthaus Zürich

  • Vincent van Gogh:
    Shoes
    1888, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Other works in the collection were the Impressionist gouache work Jeune paysanne à sa toilette by Camille Pissarro , as well as the paintings Gondola, Venice and Buste de femme nue by Pierre-Auguste Renoir . The collection also included the watercolor Portrait de Vallier, a work by Paul Cézanne and the Dutch painter Jan Sluijters was represented with the painting Portrait of Two Children . In the field of older art, Kramarsky owned the painting The Journey of Cardinal Infante Ferdinand of Spain from Barcelona to Genoa in April 1633 by Peter Paul Rubens , which he sold in 1942 to the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge . In memory of his parents, Bernard Kramarsky and his wife donated a drawing of the head of a woman by Antoine Watteau to the Morgan Library & Museum .

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
    Gondola, Venice
    1881, private collection

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
    Buste de femme nue
    around 1879, private collection

  • Paul Cézanne:
    Portrait de Vallier
    1904–1906. Private collection

  • Peter Paul Rubens:
    The Journey of Cardinal Infante Ferdinand of Spain from Barcelona to Genoa in April 1633
    1635, Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum

In addition, the Kramarsky collection included handicrafts such as porcelain and ceramics to a large extent. The collector couple specialized primarily in Meissen porcelain , but also brought together pieces from the Vienna Porcelain Manufactory , including early works from the Du Paquier period , as well as the Höchst Porcelain Manufactory , the Fulda Porcelain Manufactory and the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory . There were also pieces from the Ansbach faience factory and the Manufacture royale de porcelaine de Sèvres . Important items from her collection of German faience jugs from the 17th and 18th centuries were published in a catalog in 1983.

literature

  • Helmut Bosch: German faience jugs of the 17th and 18th centuries, Hans Cohn collections, Los Angeles, Siegfried Kramarsky, New York . Von Zabern, Mainz 1983, ISBN 3-8053-0754-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dates of birth and death in the American Jews Archives (PDF; 2.6 MB)
  2. ^ A b c Siegfried Kramarsky, Noted Zionist, Dead; Private funeral hero. in Jewish Telegraphic Agency December 27, 1961
  3. ^ Siegfried Kramarsky, Noted Zionist, Dead; Private funeral hero. in Jewish Telegraphic Agency December 27, 1961
  4. ^ Jeanette Greenfield: The Return of Cultural Treasures . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Ma. 1889, ISBN 0-521-33319-9 , p. 289.
  5. ↑ Cynthia Saltzman: Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece . Viking, New York 1998, ISBN 0-670-86223-1 .
  6. ↑ Michael West: Van Gogh fetches second highest price of 20.24 million . Associated Press Archives.
  7. ↑ Description of the painting Shoes with information on the provenance on the homage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  8. ↑ Jeune paysanne à sa toilette in the archive of the Christie's auction house
  9. ↑ Gondola, Venise in the archive of the Christie's auction house
  10. ↑ Buste de femme nue in the archive of the Christie's auction house
  11. ↑ Portrait de Vallier in the archive of Christie's auction house
  12. ↑ A portrait of two children in the archives of Christie's auction house
  13. ^ Description of the painting on the Harvard Art Museum homepage
  14. ↑ Description of the drawing on the Morgan Library homepage ( Memento of the original dated June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.themorgan.org
  15. ↑ For porcelain see the archive of the Christies auction house , for faience Helmut Bosch: German faience jugs of the 17th and 18th centuries .
personal data
SURNAME Kramarsky, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Banker, art collector and patron
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Lübeck
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1961
Place of death New York City