Art patron Hanna Bekker vom Rath within the Brücke Museum | EUROtoday

AIn {a photograph} from March 1956, Hanna Bekker vom Rath will be seen on the opening of the touring exhibition “German Contemporary Art” in Jaipur House in New Delhi. A lady in a sari stands subsequent to her, behind her a person in a go well with and tie. In the correct half of the image hangs a portray by the German expressionist Christian Rohlfs: “Withered Bouquet”. It dates from 1923.

Three issues are fascinating in regards to the photograph: the portray, which was now not up to date by the mid-Nineteen Fifties; the place, the previous palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur within the Indian capital; however above all of the curator. Hanna Bekker vom Rath, daughter of a significant industrialist from Frankfurt am Main, was sixty-two years previous on the time the photograph was taken. She organized the exhibition herself and included works from her non-public assortment and her Frankfurt artwork gallery; According to a different photograph, the “picture box”, a metallic suitcase during which she transported the reveals and which she painted with geometric shapes, in all probability weighed a number of dozen kilos. And, in collaboration with German cultural institutes and the accountable embassies, she additionally chosen the route for the year-long touring exhibition. In addition to India, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Peru and South Africa are on the agenda.

To describe Hanna Bekker vom Rath as a up to date witness to inventive modernism in Germany can be an understatement. Instead, she performed a significant position in figuring out the destiny of artwork in her atmosphere – how a lot is proven in an exhibition that the Berliner Brücke-Museum designed along with the Chemnitz State Art Collections. It presents solely a handful of authentic works by the collector and patron, who took artwork classes from Ottilie Roederstein in Hofheim am Taunus in 1913 and later with Ida Kerkovius in Stuttgart, in addition to nearly 100 work and sculptures from her assortment, which are actually in numerous museums (primarily the Landesmuseum Wiesbaden) is distributed. The result’s a picture much less of a life's work than of a style that hardly modified over six many years till Hanna Bekker vom Rath's demise in 1983.

His focus is expressionism. When Hanna vom Rath left her dad and mom' home after the First World War as a result of she met the music critic and opera director Paul Bekker, he was the main German artwork motion, and even when New Objectivity, Abstraction and Surrealism started to problem him for this place, the younger lady held on collector sticks to her preferences. Even as an artwork pupil, she acquired works by Heckel and Kirchner. Her first essential protégé was Alexej von Jawlensky, to whose help she based her personal help group in 1928.

Two years later, similtaneously her marriage resulted in divorce, she met Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The friendship between the 2 lasted till the painter's demise in 1976. Hanna Bekker von Rath not solely purchased Schmidt-Rottluff's footage, she additionally took him in within the “Blue House”, the Hofheim villa that she took together with her after her separation from Paul Bekker inhabited by her three kids. When Schmidt-Rottluff was banned from working beneath National Socialism, she let him work for her; After the Second World War, she constructed him his personal studio home in her backyard. Every fourth image within the exhibition is by him, together with three portraits of the patron.

But Hanna Bekker vom Rath additionally collected Klee and Kandinsky, Feininger, Macke, Beckmann and Nay. The visitor guide of her Berlin condo, the place she held forbidden non-public exhibitions till February 1943, is a who's who of inner emigration. Invitations had been solely given in individual or over the phone; a single informant would have introduced your complete firm into the camp. But everybody stayed tight.

After the warfare, Hanna Bekker vom Rath based her “art cabinet” in a bombed-out home in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel. The first exhibition pays tribute to the late Käthe Kollwitz. Heckel, Jawlensky, Kirchner, Nay observe, but in addition new names like Hein Heckroth and Graham Sutherland. After transferring to Börsenstrasse, the gallery turns into the middle of Frankfurt's artwork scene. In 1955, Hanna Bekker vom Rath started her eight-year journey as an envoy of modernity. Your final tour takes you to the Eastern Mediterranean. “Applause in Salonika, Athens and Beirut” reported the FAZ on February 8, 1963. The exhibition within the Brücke Museum proves that the applause was deserved.

Hanna Bekker from Rath. An rebel for the fashionable age. Bridge Museum, till June sixteenth. The catalog prices 39.90 euros.