In the autumn of 1910, the industrial heir and founder of the Hagen Folkwang Museum, Karl Ernst Osthaus, traveled to Vienna. Among the artworks purchased on this tour were two drawings by a young painter named Egon Schiele. In the following year, Schiele, who was only twenty, wrote several letters to Osthaus in which he urged the collector (“I beg you sincerely!”) to buy more works, a few of which he had sent with him. He urgently needs 200 crowns: “Take 6 or 8 as much as you want.” Osthaus took all the pictures and offered 250 crowns.
A showcase with the correspondence between Vienna and Hagen, which unfolded in the years that followed up to Egon Schiele’s early death in October 1918 (Schiele’s letter in jagged Sütterlin, the replies from Osthaus’ secretary typed), are a highlight of the exhibition “Expressionists at the Folkwang”. With her, the Essen Museum Folkwang sets the Celebrations on the occasion of its centenary continued, which began with an Impressionist show in the spring.
The inventory here was based on the collection originally assembled by Osthaus in Hagen and sold to the city of Essen and the local museum association after his collection; this also included the works of Egon Schiele. His letters are determined by a lack of money. Osthaus always answers politely, even concerned, and buys, among other things, the painting “The Little City I (Dead City VI)” where he is financially able. In 1912, Osthaus also organized Schiele’s first solo museum exhibition in Hagen, and the only one during the artist’s lifetime.
Rarely shown: delicate sheets by Egon Schiele
Some of the sheets that the Essen curators suspect were in Osthaus’ collection were loaned from the Leopold Museum in Vienna, and the “Tote Stadt”, now in Zurich, is also on display. A self-portrait on paper catches the eye in particular, from which Schiele with a thick red head of hair stares at the viewer with eyes that are just as red. A rare opportunity, such works are usually stored in depots due to their sensitivity to light. This “Viennese room”, in which, among other things, a Kokoschka drawing by Alma Mahler can be seen, would be worth a visit to Essen on its own.
Delicate paper works such as Erich Heckel’s color woodcut “Two Resting Women” (1909) are rarely shown.
(Photo: Erich Heckel estate, Hemmenhofen/Museum Folkwang, Essen)
However, the whole exhibition is extremely worthwhile. This is of course partly due to the fact that the works shown by artists such as Edvard Munch, the painters of the Blue Rider and the Bridge and Paula Modersohn-Becker, by sculptors such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Ernst Barlach are almost all of the highest quality. What is special about this show, however, is the close, endlessly fascinating historical connection to the history of the Folkwang collection.
In the meantime, it was scattered to the four winds due to the confiscation of around 1,400 works classified as “degenerate” by the Nazi regime – the largest single bundle of this clear-cutting. Some could be bought back, many ended up in private or other museum collections. Understanding the complicated provenance of the works shown is fascinating. A separate room is devoted to the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, and the huge list of confiscated works takes up an entire wall. There were around 500 works by Emil Nolde alone, who had a particularly close personal relationship with Karl Ernst Osthaus, and his Due to his political affinity with National Socialism, his biography was highly compromised will also be highlighted in the Essen exhibition.
The exhibition is definitely worth seeing because of the quality of the exhibits, such as Wassily Kandinsky’s “Landscape with Church (Landscape with Red Spots I)” from 1913.
(Photo: Museum Folkwang, Essen)
However, before the confiscation took a deep toll, the genesis of the original collection had to be dealt with first: Osthaus tried harder than almost anyone else to promote contemporary artists, and this is also reflected in the works. There is, for example, the delicately contoured “Head of a Boy”, which Wilhelm Lehmbruck made in his Paris studio in 1912 when Osthaus’ wife Gertrud was visiting him, as a portrait sculpture of her son Wilhelm. For unknown reasons, the bust did not end up in the Folkwang collection and is now in the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. However, in April of the same year, at the same time as the Schiele exhibition, several other sculptures by Lehmbruck were shown in Hagen.
The “Bridge” had offered the collector passive membership
The two central groups of artists, the painters of the “Brücke” and the “Blauer Reiter” were particularly eager to work with Osthaus. As early as 1908, after a visit to the Folkwang Museum, August Macke enthused about a “selectively beautiful collection of a kind that rarely comes about”. Franz Marc, who described the museum as “in its own way a model for our train of thought”, exhibited in a solo exhibition in Hagen in 1911. Osthaus then bought Marc’s Grazing Horses IV. In June and July of the following year, the “First Exhibition of the Editors of Der Blaue Reiter” made a stop in Hagen, and Osthaus bought Kandinsky’s “Improvisation 28”.
In 1906 the “Brücke” had offered the collector “passive membership”. He did not accept this, but organized two “Brücke” exhibitions in 1907 and 1910. A hall in Essen is dedicated to this show. It is curatorial, which is unusual for Expressionists in particular, but not necessarily about showing groups of artists together. With the “Bridge” members, for example, the focus is clearly on Ludwig Kirchner. He remained in very close contact with Osthaus after the union ended. For example, he tried to get Kirchner a public commission for a heroic sculpture during the First World War. Not surprisingly, this project failed. But Kirchner’s connection to Folkwang remained, even after the death of Osthaus and the move to Essen.
Karl Ernst Osthaus was closely connected to artists of the bridge like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, here his “Doris with ruff” (around 1906). He organized two Brücke exhibitions at the same time.
(Photo: Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)
Some wonderful and unexpected works by Kirchner from the Folkwang collection, including the print “Wintermondnacht” (1919) in spectacular shades of blue and red, can be seen in the show. A project for which Kirchner was supposed to decorate the Essen museum with murals, which ultimately also failed to materialize, is also made comprehensible on the basis of sometimes very heated correspondence with Folkwang director Ernst Gosebruch.
In 1958 the critic described the “sin of omission that burdened all of our consciences”. time, Eduard Trier, on the occasion of the large “Brücke” exhibition in Essen, the treatment of the Expressionists in Germany before and during the Nazi era. Of course, there was no question that this sin had been “erased”, as Trier put it, with the beginning of the reassessment after the war. The lack of understanding with which these artists were met, and then the ban on their work, would take decades to process and classify. This classification of Expressionism continues to this day. The fact that one of the results is such an aesthetically captivating, art-historically surprising exhibition as the Essen Jubilee Show proves once again what a daring, visionary spirit Karl Ernst Osthaus was.
“Expressionists at the Folkwang: Discovered – ostracized – celebrated” at Museum Folkwang, Essen, until January 8, 2023. museum-folkwang.de. The catalog costs 38 euros