Werner Merzbacher

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Werner Merzbacher (born 1928 in Öhringen ) is a Swiss fur trader and art collector of German origin.

Life

Werner Merzbacher is the second son of the doctor Julius Merzbacher (1890–1943) and his wife Hilde, nee. Haymann (1898-1943). He is the younger brother of the Holocaust orphan Rolf Merzbacher and grew up in Öhringen. His father was Jewish, after the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933 and the professional ban on doctors and lawyers, his father was initially allowed to continue his medical practice as a World War II participant and medalist of the Knight's Cross of the Friedrich Order . At the end of 1937 the father was sentenced to two months in prison in Heilbronn after he had reacted to an anti-Semitic provocation of a Hitler Youth with slaps and cane slaps. Rolf and Werner were housed with their grandparents Ida and Jakob Haymann in Constance . The parents gave up the doctor's practice in Öhringen and moved to Constance. Julius Merzbacher was arrested there after the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 and held for a month in the Dachau concentration camp .

In Constance, the parents prepared for the family to emigrate to the United States and tried to obtain the necessary entry documents. But they had not yet succeeded in doing this until 1940. And when the Germans conquered Alsace-Lorraine and the Reichsgau Baden " free of Jews " made and the Jews living there in the Wagner-Bürckel action in the on 22 October 1940 de Camp Gurs in southern France deported , was among them besides the parents and the Grandmother from Constance, while the mother's siblings managed to escape via Switzerland. Merzbacher's parents were transferred to Camp de Rivesaltes in September 1942 and to the Drancy assembly camp in October 1942 . They were transported from there to the Majdanek concentration camp on March 6, 1943 on the 51st transport, where they became victims of the Holocaust . From then on every trace is lost, her death is later officially set for March 31, 1943.

Stumbling block in Constance

Rolf Merzbacher attended primary school in the neighboring Swiss town of Kreuzlingen since 1937 and stayed with a Swiss family there. Werner Merzbacher was allowed to enter Switzerland with a group of Jewish children on February 16, 1939 and was brought up in Zurich by two women in Christianity. He got a scholarship for middle school, worked as an extra and chair setter at the Schauspielhaus Zürich and dreamed of a career as a film director.

Since Switzerland refused naturalization for him and his sick brother even after the end of the war , he emigrated to the USA in 1949. He married Gabrielle Mayer in 1951 and after completing his military service in Alaska , worked in the leather skin trade. He soon switched to the fur trade , where he discovered his talent for financial transactions. In 1964 the couple moved to Zurich with their three children, where they became partners in the company Mayer & Cie. which became one of the leading addresses in the international fur business during the economic boom in the post-war years. Merzbacher became sole owner of the company in 1989.

Werner Merzbacher and Gabrielle Merzbacher-Mayer began to build up an art collection based on their own preferences in the 1960s, when Merzbacher bought it, the appearance of color played the main role. Part of the joint art collection comes from the legacy of the fur merchant Bernhard Mayer (1866–1946), the grandfather of Gabrielle Mayer, who was able to save the majority of his collection in 1941 while fleeing the German persecution of Jews in the USA. Bernhard Mayer had started building a collection of contemporary art in the 1920s.

Merzbacher also volunteered on the collection commission of the Kunsthaus Zürich and on the board of the Vereinigung Zürcher Kunstfreunde. In 1986 the couple donated the “Dr. Julius and Hilde Merzbacher Gallery for Israeli Art ”. After completion of the extension to the Kunsthaus Zurich, 65 pictures from the collection are to be shown there for twenty years.

  • Alfred Sisley: Willows on the banks of the Orvanne

  • Hermann Scherer: Mendrisiotto with Obino Church

  • Lyubow Popowa: Cubist urban landscape

  • Olga Rozanova: The port

  • Amedeo Modigliani: Jeanne Hebuterne

  • Vincent von Gogh: garden with weeping willow

  • Vassily Kandinsky: Dorfstrasse in Murnau (1908)

  • Vassily Kandinsky: Improvisation 27, Liebesgarten II (1912)

Note: Only images in the public domain can be shown here, i.e. before the term of protection expires, not images by Pablo Picasso , Arthur Segal and others.

“The Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher Collection” contains well over 100 works, including works by Max Beckmann , Umberto Boccioni , Georges Braque , Alexander Calder , Paul Cezanne , Sonja Delaunay-Terk , André Derain , Alexandra Exter , and Sam Francis , Vincent van Gogh , Natalia Gontscharowa , Alexej von Jawlensky , Wassily Kandinsky , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Paul Klee , František Kupka , Fernand Léger , Kasimir Malewitsch , Henri Matisse , Gabriele Münter , Ernst Wilhelm Nay , Pablo Picasso , Emil Nolde , Ljubow Popova , Olga Rozanova , Maurice de Vlaminck .

In 1999, Gabrielle and Werner Merzbacher publicly exhibited pictures from their collection on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem under the title The joy of color . The collection was presented in four Japanese cities in 2001, in 2002 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London under the title Masters of Color , in 2006 at the Kunsthaus Zürich under the title Festival of Color and in 2012 under the title le mythe de la couleur by the Pierre Fondation Gianadda in Martigny . Merzbacher was able to attract outstanding curators for the exhibitions . In 2013 the Merzbachers returned to Israel with a selection of their Fauvists .

Merzbacher, who collects without an agent and buys at art auctions himself , was accused of a lack of care in determining the provenance when purchasing the painting Servant with Samovar (1914) from Kasimir Malewitsch in 2013 .

In Germany, Merzbacher does not show his collection for historical reasons, but in a few cases he lent out individual pictures for exhibitions.

In 1991, a street in Öhringen was named after his father, Merzbacher visited his hometown on this occasion - after there had previously been controversial debates in the local council on the occasion of the naming. In 2011, at Schottenstrasse 75 in Konstanz, Stolpersteine ​​were laid for members of the Haymann and Merzbacher families .

Exhibition catalogs (selection)

  • Stephanie Rachum; Ziva Amishai-Maisels (Ed.): The joy of color: the Merzbacher collection. Cologne: DuMont; Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1998.
  • Tobia Bezzola ; Linda Schädler (Ed.): Festival of Color. The Merzbacher-Mayer Collection. Dumont, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8321-7683-7 .
  • Stephanie Rachum; John Gage (Ed.): Masters of Color: Derain to Kandinsky; masterpieces from The Merzbacher Collection. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2002.
  • Jean-Louis Prat (eds.): Van Gogh, Picasso, Kandinsky: collection Merzbacher, le mythe de la couleur. Pierre Gianadda Foundation, Martigny 2012. dossier de presse

literature

  • Gregor Spuhler : Saved - broken. The life of the Jewish refugee Rolf Merzbacher between persecution, psychiatry and reparation. Chronos, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-0340-1064-1 ( publications of the Archives for Contemporary History ETH Zurich. Volume 7).
  • A fate of Öhringen. The life picture of the Öhringen doctor Dr. Julius Merzbacher. City of Öhringen, Öhringen 1991.

Web links

Commons : Werner-und-Gabrielle-Merzbacher-Sammlung  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Gerhard Mack: In the Fireworks of Colors , NZZ , 25 August 2002
  2. ↑ In 1996 z. B. the now unhappy Pimpf who once gave rise to Dr. Merzbacher's conviction and which his child sin caught up with again and again because his full name was in the newspaper on the occasion of the Merzbacher trial. Walter Meister, lecture on November 8, 1998 in Öhringen
  3. ↑ The case of Dr. Merzbacher: the "decent Jew" at alemannia-judaica
  4. ^ Stephanie Rachum: A story from two collections: Bernhard and Auguste Mayer / Werner and Gabriele Merzbacher , in: Bezzola; Schädler: Festival of Color , 2006, pp. 14–28
  5. ↑ Christian Klemm (Ed.): The Bernhard Mayer Collection: Exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, June 19 to August 23, 1998 . With an introduction by Harald Szeemann . Zurich: Kunsthaus 1998
  6. ↑ a b c Ulrike Schleicher: Merzbacher Collection: Later Triumph over the Nazis , at Deutsche Welle , August 22, 2013
  7. ↑ a b Adina Kamien-Kazhdan (curator): Color Gone Wild: Fauve and Expressionist Masterworks from the Merzbacher Collection ( Memento of the original from April 30, 2014 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. , at Israel Museum @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.imj.org.il
  8. ↑ Philipp Meier: Triumphzug der Farbe , report, in: NZZ, May 26, 2018, p. 24
  9. ↑ Ulrike Schleicher: Werner Merzbacher shows his collection in Israel , Südwestpresse , August 1, 2013
  10. ^ Brigitte Hürlimann: Art collector in good faith. Merzbacher keeps Malewitsch , NZZ, May 14, 2012
  11. ↑ Merzbacher has to return Malevich , Bündner Tagblatt , June 26, 2013 (sda)
  12. ↑ Bought looted art? Judgment 5A_372 / 2012 of April 18, 2013; BGE publication. , NZZ , June 26, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Merzbacher, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss fur trader and art collector
DATE OF BIRTH 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Öhringen