Kōjirō Matsukata offered all the paraphernalia of the Western gentleman: In 1916 he posed for his friend, the Welsh artist Frank Brangwyn, in a brown, three-piece suit with a stand-up collar, tie and pipe. The message is clear, someone is signaling their fondness for western culture. 13 years earlier, Karl Ernst Osthaus had had his portrait taken by the early modernist Ida Gerhardi, who, like him, came from Hagen in South Westphalia. The banker’s son is standing in his office in tails and a silk waistcoat. The Greek vase on the table in front of him, the books, the small paintings with which he surrounds himself here all indicate the main interests of this very wealthy art historian.
Both portraits are currently hanging next to each other in the first room of the exhibition “Renoir, Monet, Gaugin. Pictures of a Flowing World”, which is the prelude to the celebrations for the centenary of the Folkwang Museum in Essen. A suitably gigantic show of 120 paintings, sculptures, Japanese prints and specially commissioned contemporary installations to kick off the anniversary year. And an appropriate, albeit temporary, neighborhood of two important patrons who are amazingly similar across all cultural borders.
Both had plenty of money, both wanted to put it into new art
In life, one might say, Matsukata and Osthaus were like two ships with similar cargo passing each other on the high seas. The two collectors never met, they probably knew each other. How could it be otherwise when cultivating the same highly specific and costly interests? Matsukata, born in 1865, was president of the Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha shipping line, on whose lines Japan’s trade with the West was promoted. The company also built ships and airplanes itself. Osthaus, nine years his junior, the sensitive son of a banker in Hagen and the daughter of an industrialist, inherited millions from his grandfather, a screw manufacturer, in 1896.
Vincent van Gogh: “Portrait of Armand Roulin” (1888).
(Photo: Museum Folkwang)
Both men had, at least at times, plenty of money. Both wanted to put that money into art, especially contemporary western art. The National Museum Of Western Art in Tokyo was created from Matsukata’s private collection in 1959. Osthaus immediately collected for a self-founded museum, which opened in 1902 in his native town of Hagen. The Neo-Renaissance building was designed by the Berlin architect Carl Gérard, but Osthaus commissioned the Belgian Henry van de Velde with the interior design. To this day, even without the lavish collection, what remains of its interior, which oscillates between Art Nouveau and Art Nouveau, conveys an impression of incomparable aesthetic unity.
The Folkwang Museum, which kicked off the anniversary celebrations this weekend with a ceremony attended by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is only the second station in the collection that Osthaus began to assemble with the help of his legacy. The building on Essen’s Museumsplatz, expanded by David Chipperfield in 2010, has (almost) the same name as the original building in Hagen. But today’s Osthaus Museum was actually the Folkwang Museum. The collection did not reach its present location until 1922, after Osthaus had died the year before at the age of just 46. At that time, the heirs sold everything, including the rights to the name “Folkwang”, to the city of Essen and the museum association there.
“Fólkvangar” in Old Norse mythology was the name of the palace of the goddess Freya, whose privilege it was to house half of the heroes killed in battle there (Odin took the other half to Valhalla). Above all, Osthaus saw Fólkvangar as a hall for the people. He stood in the tradition of museum reformers like Alfred Lichtwark, who strived to demystify art and ensure that museums reach out to the general public as far as possible. What is now the goal of all museum education as “cultural participation” was already the core of the Folkwang idea. The fact that it pursued this goal with the work of contemporary artists makes the Hagen House the first in the world to be oriented towards modern art in addition to natural history, antique and applied art objects.
The anniversary exhibition in Essen not only shows the works of the three artists in the title, but also those of many other artists who are just as important, such as Corot, Courbet, van Gogh, Pissarro and Signac. In this opulence, it has what it takes to be a blockbuster. At the same time, it tells the story of two parallel collections that grew out of a similar spirit, one Japanese and one German, and brings them together in one place for the first time.
The curators manage the balancing act of presenting a rich selection of complementary works from both collections and at the same time always bringing the complex art and collection-historical context closer to the visitors. Among other things, the Essen show tries to partially understand the selection of the “Great Picture Hall” in the Hagen Museum. Initially mixed with history and landscape paintings from the Düsseldorf school of painting, this room on the upper floor was ultimately dedicated entirely to the French. Paul Signac’s “The Port of Saint-Tropez” (1901/02) hung there, was exchanged with other works in 1971 and is now in the collection of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. Now it is returning to Germany for the first time, temporarily.
They visited the same galleries and worked with the same artists
Osthaus and Matsukata frequented the same galleries and worked with the same dealers and artists. However, while Osthaus collected continuously from 1898 until his death in 1921, Matsukata did not begin his acquisitions until 1916, during a visit to London. From then on he pursued an almost frenetic acquisition strategy. Frank Brangwyn, who had portrayed him in such a western way, was trusted by the collector as an agent. Van de Velde played a similarly central role in Osthaus’ curatorial decisions, for example when purchasing “The Harvest, Cornfield with Reaper” (1889) in 1902, the year in which Folkwang was founded in Hagen. It was the first painting by Vincent van Gogh ever to be shown in a German collection arrived.
Gauguin: “Petites Bretonnes” (1889)
(Photo: The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Matsukata Collection)
14 years later, Kōjirō Matsukata and his Welsh advisor first visited numerous galleries in London and between 1916 and 1918 bought around 1000 works of art, mostly of British provenance. With the help of Léonce Bénédite, director of the nascent Musée Rodin in Paris, Matsukata began buying Rodin sculptures. A separate room in Essen is dedicated to the small and large-format sculptures that were created in the context of Rodin’s central work “The Gates of Hell”. Karl Ernst Osthaus had already acquired two important Rodin sculptures in 1903, “The Bronze Age” and “Eva”.
A phase began for Matsukata in which he focused on French Impressionism. This is also where his temporarily superior purchasing power became apparent: Not only did he meet the then 80-year-old Claude Monet twice in 1921, the year Osthaus died. He also bought 34 of his paintings, which Osthaus had always been denied. Wonderful works such as the ethereal winter picture “Schnee in Argenteuil” (1875) and the summery “Auf dem Boot” (1887) can now be seen in Essen. These works fit seamlessly with the two first-rate Monets, including a late 1916 water lily pond, which the Essen Museum was only able to acquire in the 1960s and 1970s.
Osthaus was able to stick to his selection of Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts. Matsukata, who once owned around 8,000 of these traditional “Images of a Floating World” (as the term is translated), had to sell them again because of financial difficulties. His wish to show them together with the European Impressionists was never fulfilled.
These woodcuts, now in Tokyo’s National Museum, were not allowed to leave the country because of their national importance. But at least those from Osthaus’ collection are on display – in the same room as Matsukata’s Monets. It is a worthy, high-quality and historically dense show. And it corresponds entirely to the thoughts of Karl Ernst Osthaus, who found: “The more people participate in art, the higher the community is. It is social to strive for this condition.”
Renoir, Monet, Gauguin. Pictures of a flowing world. Folkwang Museum, Essen. Until May 15th. The catalog costs 42.80 euros.