Walter Cohen

Walter Cohen (born February 18, 1880 in Bonn ; died October 8, 1942 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a German art historian , art collector and curator .

Life

Walter Cohen was the youngest of eleven children of Friedrich Moritz (1836–1912) and Helena (1839–1914) Cohen. His brother was the future bookseller and publisher Friedrich Cohen . Walter Cohen was hard of hearing from childhood, so he usually had to read the words from his mouth. Coming from a Jewish family, he was baptized and received a Protestant upbringing. At the municipal Progymnasium with secondary school, he made his Abitur in 1898.

From 1898 Cohen studied art history , classical archeology and philosophy first in Bonn, then Munich and Berlin and finally in Strasbourg , where he received his doctorate in 1903 under Georg Dehio . After a lengthy study trip abroad, he worked for the editorial staff of the Thieme-Becker artist lexicon in Leipzig in 1904/05 . 1906 followed a traineeship at the Staatliche Museen Berlin (Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum and Kunstgewerbemuseum). He found employment from 1908, first as a scientific assistant, then as assistant director at the Provincial Museum under Hans Lehner in Bonn. Here he rearranged the departments of medieval art and new art and initiated the merger of the picture gallery with the Wesendonk collection .

When August Macke came from Tegernsee in 1911 and set up his studio in Bonn on Bornheimerstraße, it became the meeting place for the art scene. He quickly expanded his network in Bonn: one of them was Walter Cohen, who worked at the Provincial Museum in Bonn, and his two older brothers Friedrich and Heinrich, who ran a book and art shop across from the university. Cohen became friends with Macke, as well as with many artists. “Walter Cohen's cheerful character, open to everything that was truly alive, and personality in need of communication meant that he entered into a close and friendly relationship with many artists of his time. In Bonn, alongside Max Ernst, it was the circle of Rhenish Expressionists headed by Macke and Seehaus, for whom he also wrote appreciations. In an art city like Düsseldorf, his dealings with young artists were particularly fruitful, for whom he stood up with passion when he had recognized their value. "( PO Rave : Biographisches Handbuch Deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil p. 91)

Cohen took part in the preparations for the International Art Exhibition of the Sonderbund , which opened in Cologne on May 25, 1912 and , from today's perspective, was one of the pioneering art exhibitions of the early 20th century. This exhibition was preceded by the association of artists, museum directors, collectors and dealers, founded in Düsseldorf in 1909, who had come together to open the art of the avant-garde to a wide audience. The chairman was Karl Ernst Osthaus , the board included Walter Cohen.

A planned employment at the Berlin museums failed in 1912 due to his hearing loss. In 1914 Cohen moved to the municipal art collection in Düsseldorf and in 1920 became curator of the painting collection. Karl Koetschau , the director, wanted to supplement the collection of old art with acquisitions. Together with the curator Walter Cohen, he acquired modern German works.

Cohen coined the name " Das Junge Rheinland ", the modern artists' association founded in 1919. In 1918 he had organized the first exhibition with the group at the Kölnischer Kunstverein . 113 artists have already exhibited there, with the number of members growing rapidly.

Walter Cohen was a collector of numerous works by leading German expressionists by artists from the artists' associations " Brücke ", " Der Blaue Reiter " and "Das Junge Rheinland", such as Max Beckmann , Otto Dix , Käthe Kollwitz , Paula Modersohn-Becker , Emil Nolde and Otto Pankok , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , Gabriele Münter , Erich Heckel , Christian Rohlfs and many other artists. Cohen not only collected, but was also a committed supporter of the avant-garde of the time, including the artists Dix, Rohlfs, August Macke and Gerhard Marcks .

He had a friendly and professional relationship with the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim . For the reopening of the Flechtheim Gallery after the First World War, Easter 1919, with a first exhibition on the Expressionists , he made his contribution with a preamble.

In 1924 he published his work Hundred Years of Rhenish Painting , in which forty artists, mainly from the 19th century, were presented. Walter Cohen enjoyed wide recognition in the 1920s as a far-sighted museum curator, brilliant art critic and committed patron.

In 1928 he set up the newly opened museum building at the Ehrenhof . But then the Nazis came, confiscated 137 purchases and fired Cohen. His private collection of contemporary art was also defamed as Degenerate Art by the National Socialists . Despite his baptism and Protestant upbringing, Cohen was forcibly retired and dismissed from museum service as a non-Aryan under Section 3 of the Civil Service Restoration Act in 1933 , and lost his civil service status and a large part of his pension. A reinstatement lawsuit was denied. In the following years he worked as an appraiser in the art trade. Difficult economic conditions bothered him, and he also had problems with his health.

Under all the pressure, his marriage to his non-Jewish wife Margarete Umbach (1892–1960), herself an artist and collector, whom he married in 1920, also broke up. A lawsuit for alleged image falsification ended in acquittal. However, Cohen was taken into protective custody and taken to the Dachau concentration camp , where he was murdered.

His wife Margarete Umbach hid the collection in a town near Mulhouse in Alsace , but it was almost completely destroyed. Together with her second husband, Richard Vogts (1906–1984), son of the Düsseldorf portrait painter Richard Vogts , after the war she tried to reconstruct the collection and continue it in the spirit of Walter Cohen. The collection of the “Cohen-Umbach-Vogts” foundation in the Dreiländermuseum in Lörrach includes around 200 expressionist prints by artists such as Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Erich Heckel and tragically mirrors the life and fate of their three collectors in Germany 20th century history.

Publications (selection)

August Macke . Young Art Series, Volume 32, published by Klinkhardt & Biermann , 1922

• Studies on Quinten Metsys . Inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate from a high philosophy faculty at the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Strasbourg. Munich: Alphons Bruckmann, Munich 1904.
• Catalog of the Gemäldegalerie . Mainly the Wesendonk collection. Provincial Museum in Bonn. Commission publisher by Friedrich Cohen, 1914.
• August Macke . Klinkhardt & Biermann. Leipzig 1922.
• A hundred years of Rhenish painting . Art books of German landscapes, Cohen Verlag, Bonn 1924

Journal articles (selection)

• Alfred Rethel. In: The Rhineland . 1918
• Düsseldorf and Frankfurt art at the "Exhibition of German Painting in the Nineteenth Century" in Dresden. In: The Rhineland . 1919
• Memory of Seehaus. In: The art window . 1921

literature

• Reichs Handbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft - The handbook of personalities in words and pictures . First volume, Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, ISBN 3-598-30664-4
• Martina Sitt: A picture also needs a lawyer. Walter Cohen - Life Between Art and Law . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-422-06128-2
• “Degenerate - Destroyed - Reconstructed”: The Cohen-Umbach-Vogts Collection , Ed. Markus Moehring and Barbara Hauss, Lörracher Hefte, Vol. 9 (Red Series of the Dreiländermuseum), Verlag W. Lutz, Lörrach 2008, ISBN 978-3- 922107-81-1
• Erich Cohen: Stored life under protective hands . Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3-930250-30-6 , p. 502ff.
• Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 1: A – K. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 91-95.
• Cohen, Walter. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 5: Carmo – Donat. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-598-22685-3 , pp. 191-193.
• Helga Fremerey-Dohnau and Renate Schoene, arrangement: Jüdisches Geistesleben in Bonn 1786–1945 , Verlag Ludwig Röhrscheid, Bonn 1985, ISBN 3-7928-0489-1 , pp. 32–34, picture p. 3.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Two expressionist summers in Bonn. rheinische ART 12/2013 , on rheinische-art.de, accessed May 23, 2015
2. ^ Reopening - Easter 1919. I. Exhibition Expressionists. Düsseldorf Königsallee 34. Potsdam, Berlin: Gust. Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1919.
3. ^ Museum Kunstpalast: A new picture for the anniversary. , at wz-newsline.de, accessed May 23, 2015
4. ^ "Degenerate - destroyed - reconstructed" - The Cohen-Umbach-Vogts Collection , special exhibition February 6 - April 10, 2011, Burgsaal der Wewelsburg.

Web links

Wikisource: Walter Cohen  - Sources and full texts