“Discovered – Banned – Celebrated”: The Museum Folkwang and Expressionism

Hhat there ever been an art theft that was documented with more meticulousness by its perpetrators? It was about sixteen thousand works of art, neatly listed in two nondescript typescripts on which, among other things, the name of the artist, the title of the work of art, the place where it was stolen and its further fate were recorded: “V” stands for sale, “T” for sale Exchange”, “X” for destruction. From the Folkwang Museum in Essen alone, which emerged in 1922 from the Karl Ernst Osthaus collection initially based in Hagen, the National Socialists’ inventory lists 1,273 works of art that were branded as “degenerate” in order to be able to confiscate and sell them. Probably no other museum suffered more from this type of foreign exchange procurement measure under the guise of a cultural-political cleansing measure than the Essen house, which had dedicated itself to modernism and especially expressionism.

Heckel, Kirchner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Munch and Kokoschka all had personal contact with Osthaus, who quickly made a name for himself as a collector and museum founder. As early as 1906, Heckel had described the Folkwangmuseum in a letter as a “modern facility that is exemplary for us” and envisaged it as an exhibition venue for the artists’ association “Die Brücke”, which had been founded the year before. Osthaus did not respond to Heckel’s suggestion to join the “Brücke” as a passive member, but in 1907 and 1910 two joint exhibitions by the Brücke artists took place in Hagen. When Henry van de Velde, who worked for Osthaus as an architect but also as an important advisor, wanted to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Hagen Museum with an “honorary gift” for Osthaus in 1912, more than fifty artists were willing to participate with their own works of the portfolio, including Pechstein, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Franz Marc and August Macke.

The “best modern museum”

Osthaus, who discovered the French forerunners of the German Expressionists early on and campaigned decisively for them, not only bought smaller and larger works, but also actively sought to be close to the artists by writing to them, visiting them in their studios, closely followed their development. Egon Schiele’s praise that the Folkwang was “the best modern museum” was primarily directed at its founder.

Osthaus was not a procrastinator. In the summer of 1910 he saw an exhibition by Oskar Kokoschka at Paul Cassirer in Berlin, and in December of the same year the Folkwang was the first museum ever to acquire a work by this artist. Osthaus not only supported living artists. He was the first German museum director to buy works by van Gogh, and in 1913, six years after her death, he organized an exhibition of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s (mostly for sale) works, which were subsequently shown in four other locations. He himself acquired the famous “Self-Portrait with Camellia Branch”, which is still part of the Folkwang collection today, as well as five drawings. The artist herself had visited the Folkwang two years before her death and wrote about it in a letter: “For me, the most beautiful thing in Hagen was the museum owned by a Mr. Osthaus. He has the latest art gathered around him: Rodin, Minne, Maillol, Gauguin, van Gogh, an old Trübner, an old Renoir and many other beautiful things”.