Alfred Flechtheim (1878-1937)

 

 

Life and Fate

 

 

Alfred Flechtheim was one of the most famous art dealers and art collectors in Germany during the inter-war period. He was born in 1878 into a Jewish merchant family in Muenster, Westphalia, Germany, and was the son of a successful wheat dealer.

As of 1913, when he started a unique career as an art dealer, opening his own gallery

in Duesseldorf, he not only became a central figure in the German art market in the 

Weimar Republic, but also an internationally known global player, dealing with what

was called the ‘Modern Art’ at that time. Next to Paul Cassirer, Paul Rosenberg and

a handful of other influential art dealers in Europe, Flechtheim was and is considered

among the most important patrons of avant-garde art ever. By the early 1900s he had

already amassed a respectable library and art collection. Following the First World War,

in which Flechtheim served as a cavalry officer, he, after the re-opening of his gallery,

first in Duesseldorf, he then moved on to Berlin in the early 1920s, one of the European

cultural capitals of that time. Within only about fifteen years, before the Nazis ruined

him, he held more than one hundred and fifty exhibitions and shows with his galleries,

and successfully represented the French cubists, like Pablo Picasso, George Braque,

Juan Gris, Fernand Léger in addition to German artists like, for instance, George Grosz,

Willi Baumeister, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee and others.

 

His success drew unfavorable anti-Semitic hatred and the early Nazis despised him.

Flechtheim`s collection included masterpieces of Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger,

George Braque, of Degas, Derain, Hofer, Kandinsky, Matisse, Renoir, Rousseau and of

Vlaminck.

 

In 1921, the same year that Adolf Hitler acquired all shares in the Völkischer Beobachter, making him the sole owner of the publication and using that newspaper to publish artistic criticism furthering the party’s cultural ideology in addition to commentary on the politics     and economics of the time, Flechtheim began publishing a cultural magazine entitled Der Querschnitt.

 

 Der Querschnitt printed literary works by writers such as Hemingway and Joyce often accompanied by illustrations from leading artists, as well as images of some of the finest artworks of the period. He enriched the Berlin society: “If I was a painter”, the famous German heavy-weight boxer Max Schmeling writes in his homage to Flechtheim at his 50th birthday in 1928, “I want to be in Flechtheim’s stable”. Between 1921 and 1933, Flechtheim’s business flourished. He opened further dealerships in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Vienna and he also strengthened his partnerships with other dealers such as Kahnweiler in France.

Very early, many years before the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, he, who was proud of his Jewishness, became the target of anti-Semitic propaganda. One month after the last free election in Germany until 1949 and just several weeks before the NSDAP seizure of power, on December 10, 1932 the cover of the Illustrierter Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s weekly illustrated newspaper,                              featured an image of Alfred Flechtheim as the prototypical Jew. Flechtheim’s profile appeared next to the contentious headline Die Rassenfrage ist der Schlüssel zur Weltgeschichte (“The Race Question is the Key to World History”). So he was bombarded with hate articles by Nazi authors who despised Alfred Flechtheim’s role regarding art that the Nazis soon                                                                                                  would label“degenerate”.

                                               

Flechtheim’s final activities in Germany, a sale at auction, was scheduled for March 11, 1933

and organized in conjunction with Hugo Helbing and Georg Praffrath, and was disrupted and

stopped by Rosenberg’s established Militant League for German Culture. Merely two week

later, Flechtheim’s former protégé, Alex Voemel, a certified member of the NSDAP and the

SA, the Nazi ‘storm troopers’, took over the facility which housed Flechtheim’s Duesseldorf

firm, in move that has been deemed nothing short of Aryanization. Vömel opened a dealership

at Flechtheim’s site under his own name, a clear sign that all hope was lost for Flechtheim to

remain in Germany unscathed.

 

Then on April 1, 1933, the Nazis carried out the first nationwide Judenboykott, which launched

the process of eliminating Jews from German economic life, a fundamental tenant of Nazi

ideology. Flechtheim, the quintessential Jew according to Nazi principles, was immediately

subjected to the Nazis’ wrath. On the day of the boycott, the Volksparole, the Nazi party

newspaper in Düsseldorf, published a disparaging and inflammatory article about Flechtheim

and his dealership, calling upon the German people to exterminate him and two other

unwanted museum directors close to Flechtheim.

 

Due to the Nazis’ intense interest and focus on Flechtheim, fear for his life drove him to flee Germany in the spring of 1933. Within several months of leaving his homeland, in November 1933, Flechtheim’s dealerships were formally closed and liquidated under the supervision of Alfred E. Schulte, an ‘Aryan’ accountant and tax expert.

 

Unfortunately, lack of funds resulting from his loss of business, prevented him from paying the punitive exit taxes for his wife, and so Flechtheim was on the run alone, while his wife remained with her sister Clara, her niece Rosi, Alfred’s father and other relatives in Germany. First he went to Zurich and, via Paris, he ended up in London. From summer of 1933 until his death in early 1937, he was a man on the run, travelling back and forth between France, Italy, Switzerland, Great Britain, being forced to return to Germany many times, desperately trying to keep and to get back control of the liquidation of his company, trying to secure his assets and taking care of his wife and family, who were left behind, unable to leave the country

Ostensibly, his holdings in Germany, if not being confiscated or ‘arayanized’, were liquidated for financial reasons, but in reality, he was terrorized into fleeing Nazi racial persecution and could only take a small part of his massive collection with him.

 

 

A surviving letter by Flechtheim, written in early October 1933 to his old friend George Grosz, who was living as a refugee in New York City at that time, provides a deep insight into Flechtheim’s life and descent:

 

"6 October 1933

My dear Grosz, I'm in Paris; I had to abandon my galleries. This is because I am and all the art that I represent is being defamed and there is no possibility to earn a living in Berlin anymore. /.../ I need to earn money, because I'm broke and penniless. /.../ Your paintings do not sail under my flag, otherwise there would be no other way to get them out of the country. /.../ The “Fuehrer” decreed that people like us, like Mies [Mies van der Rohe], like Klemperer [Victor Klemperer] (and many other Jews) must be locked up in prison or in a madhouse. We have to take this very seriously, because these are not idle threats and could really happen. /.../ My wife is abandoning our apartment and then intends to join me. /.../ We are as poor as church mice and nervous."

Life as a refugee proved difficult for Flechtheim and he was effectively destitute while in exile. Moving from hotel to hotel, and city to city, Flechtheim was also forced to sell some of his beloved paintings in order to pay his day-to-day expenses, though finding buyers to pay fair market value for the works proved unfeasible; indeed many knowingly took advantage of Flechtheim’s precarious situation.

 

Finally, Alfred Flechtheim died pennyless in London on the 9th of March 1937, due to blood poisoning and the results of a leg amputation resulting thereof.

 

In effect, most of his paintings and artifacts had been stolen or sold after the impact of Nazi persecution. The remainder were stolen from his estate later on. While Alfred was in exile his family in Germany continued to be persecuted by the Nazis. His wife Betty, his sister-in- law Clara and her daughter Rosi lived a miserable life.

 

In the early 1940’s they all committed suicide in Berlin after receiving deportation notifications informing them of their imminent deportation to the death camps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sadly, not even in death was Flechtheim free of Nazi persecution. On June 30, 1937, Goebbels empowered Adolf Ziegler as part of a six-man commission to travel throughout the Reich, confiscating art they deemed dangerous, subversive, or “degenerate.”

 

Nearly 16,000 pieces were purged culminating in the July 19, 1937 Entartete Kunst Ausstellung – the Degenerate Art Exhibit which took place in Munich (the show then traveled to several other German cities and lasted for four years).

This show was an official condemnation of modern art. Not only did the show denounce works of art and the artists but those who dealt in “Degenerate Art” as well. Works featuring Flechtheim were used to illustrate precisely what the Nazis’ deemed to be indecent, perverted, and unhealthy art, posthumously defaming Flechtheim and the artworks he cherished.

 

The Flechtheim heirs live in the United States and the United Kingdom. An international legal team led by the well known Art Restitution lawyer Markus H. Stoetzel from Germany, and assisted by the Holocaust Restitution lawyer Mel Urbach in the United States, represents them.

 

While the whereabouts of many paintings from the Flechtheim collection are still unknown, with many kept in private collections today, more than a hundred of them are in museums in America, France, Germany and other European countries.

 

The Washington Principles of 1998 call for the restitution of many of these paintings. The Flechtheim heirs, through their legal team, have advanced several claims for restitution in Germany, in the United States and in other countries. And museums, the art market and private collectors meanwhile have started to acknowledge Flechtheim’s fate and the claims of the family.

 

Some examples of works of art from the former Flechtheim collection, which had been subject matter of restitution settlement agreements or of in recent years:

 

Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Tilla Durieux (1910) Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, painting returned to Flechtheim Estate in 2013

Paul Adolf Seehaus, Leuchtturm mit rotierenden Strahlen (1913) Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, claim settled in 2012

Emil Filla, Still Life dedicated to Alfred Flechtheim (1928) Private Collection, Europe, claim settled in 2011

Max Beckmann, Löwenbändiger (1930), Private Collection, Europe, claim settled in 2011

 

All of these losses had resulted from Nazi persecution.

 

Therefore all of these cases, dealing with the dissolution of the former Flechtheim art collection after 1933, meet the criteria of the Washington Principles of 1998, of the AAMD Guidelines and of the German equivalent, the “Joint Declaration” of 1999 and therefore call for faire and just solutions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Markus H. Stoetzel, Rechtsanwalt, Uferstrasse 11, D-35037 Marburg, Germany, +49-6421-794560 - rastoetzel@aol.com

Law Offices of Mel Urbach 275 Madison Ave, Suite 1105, New York N.Y. 10016 - +1-212-984-4720 - MelUrbach@me.com