A collection’s many journeys
The works in this family collection were carefully brought together by a passionate collector and enthusiast of the arts over a period of almost thirty years, starting in the early 1960s. German art of the 1920s was at the heart of the collector’s interest, and included the social satire of George Grosz and Otto Dix, as well as important works of the Neue Sachlichkeit, Dada and Constructivism. Most of the artists represented in this collection, who had lived through the horrors of World War I and established themselves as artists during the Weimar Republic, found themselves defamed as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi regime. Some were driven into exile, such as George Grosz, and many of those who remained in Germany were banned from working.
Much of the artists’ work had to be hidden from the ‘Entartete Kunst’-purge, and many of the paintings, works on paper and prints in this collection are rare survivors of this feverish and fascinating, yet doomed period of German art.
Amongst the printed works, the etchings and drypoints of Otto Dix stand at the centre of the collection, oscillating – therein representative of the collector’s wider tastes and choices – between unsparing realism, fierce social criticism, collage-like elements inspired by the Dada-movement, and the surreal and the grotesque, all served up with a generous dose of black humour (see lots 78-89).
The works in this outstanding collection were bought after much consideration from a few trusted gallerists, occasionally at auction and, whenever possible, from the artists themselves. Some emerging artists of the post-war period, for example Friedensreich Hundertwasser (lot 91), were supported with occasional purchases of a work, but above all with boundless generosity and hospitality. The collector would drive through the night across Germany and Switzerland to visit artist friends, attend museum openings or see auction previews. Each new purchase was shown to the family and explained and discussed before finding its place on the walls of the family home.
This was not investment, this was a ceaseless passion. The collection was to be enjoyed amongst friends and family at home, but also by the general public – no museum loan request was declined, and as the reputation of the rarities in this private collection grew, more museum loan requests would follow. There was a constant stream of shippers arriving at the door collecting loans for museums across Germany and the United States. The collection’s journey has continued for another thirty years in the hands of the collector’s family after his passing. Some of the masterpieces in the collection found their way to prestigious museum collections, while others are now being sold, so that they can continue on the next phase of their journey.

Otto Freundlich, born into a Jewish family in Stolp in Pommerania, Prussia (today Słupsk in Poland), in 1878, was trained in economics, then began to study dentistry but switched to art history. He attended art lessons in Berlin and finally, in 1908, moved to Paris to pursue a career as an artist. He lived in the Bateau Lavoir and got to know many artists of the French avant-garde. The first World War forced him to move back to Germany. He served as a medical orderly during the war, but returned to France in 1924. Throughout his life, he believed strongly in the socially reformative power of art and was associated with left-wing political and artistic circles, including Dada in Berlin and Cologne, the Progressive Artists' Group in Cologne, and abstraction-création and Cercle et Carré in Paris. The Nazi regime declared his art 'degenerate', and it was a photo of his sculpture Der Neue Mensch that became the face of the infamous exhibition 'Entartete Kunst', being chosen as the cover illustration of the catalogue. At the beginning of World War II, he was arrested as a German living in France and interned in several prison camps, then during the German occupation was once again interned and moved between various camps and house arrests. He managed to escape to the Pyrenees in 1942, but was finally captured in 1943, deported to Sobibor concentration camp and murdered, presumably on the day of his arrival.
This lot includes five woodcuts: Kopf (HvW 441, 1916), Aufschwung (HvW 442, 1917), Figürliche Komposition (HvW 444, circa 1918), Vegetative Kompositon (HvW 467, circa 1919-20) and Komposition (HvW 469, circa 1920). Two of them, Kopf and Aufschwung, were published, presumably as reprodcutions, in the magazine Die Aktion in August 1917 (issue nos. 31/32 and 33/34 respectively). This progressive weekly for 'liberal politics and literature' was published by Franz Pfemfert in Berlin from 1911-1932. Although the woodcuts were created over a period of approximately four years, it seems that the present group were all printed at the same time, in or after 1920, on the same paper stock, as proofs or part of a small, unnumbered edition.