/ Bröhan 100 /
Edited by Tobias Hoffmann and Anna Grosskopf Bröhan-Museum, Landesmuseum für Jugendstil, Art Deco und Funktionalismus
/ Contents /
I
Introduction Bröhan 100: Looking Back, Looking Forward — 6 A Favorite Piece: KPM Decorative Plate — 18
II
Catalogue French Art Nouveau — 20 Japanism — 42 Arts and Crafts — 52 The World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 — 64 International Art Nouveau — 84 Jugendstil and Reform Art in Germany — 98 The Darmstadt Artists’ Colony — 108 Berlin in 1900 — 118 The Berlin Secession — 136 The Werkstätten Movement — 164 Viennese Design — 176 French Art Deco — 190 The Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, Paris 1925 — 216 German Art Deco — 222 Industrial Design and Functionalist Design — 236
III
Appendix Authors — 260 Illustration Credits — 262 Acknowledgements/Cover — 263 About this Publication — 264
/ Bröhan 100: Looking Back, Looking Forward /
The collector Karl H. Bröhan in the 1970s
1 Karl H. Bröhan, “Zum Geleit,” Porzellan: Kunst und Design 1889 bis 1939, Vom Jugendstil zum Funktionalismus, ed. Bröhan (Berlin, 1993), 7.
In 1993, Bröhan quoted Goethe about the nature of collections: “Collections are usually amassed by private individuals, but later they are best in public ownership. For only then can they fulfill their genuine function. . . . The management should provide quality catalogues for the visitors, preferably in historical succession.” 1 Today, in 2021, we would like to fulfill Goethe’s demand once again with this volume. The cause for its publication is the centennial anniversary of the birth of our museum’s founder Karl H. Bröhan (1921– 2000), who served simultaneously as collector and director of the museum. The jubilee year provides us an opportunity to take stock: the last employees hired by Bröhan personally are now retiring, one after another. For the first time since the founding of the museum, most of the people working at the museum did not have the chance to know the collector personally. The museum today is a different one, and yet all the same, as a public museum with 80,000 visitors annually, with new themes and emphases, Bröhan-Museum has been able to preserve the intimate character of a private institution. Some can still
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Exhibition rooms in the Privatmuseum Sammlung Karl H. Bröhan
2 Karl H. Bröhan, “Rückblick,” Zum 25-jährigen Bestehen des Bröhan-Museums, eds. Ingeborg Becker and Dieter Högermann (Berlin, 1998), 8.
3 Ibid., 7. The catalogue here referred to is Karl H. Bröhan, Porzellan-Kunst (Berlin, 1969).
today report of the early years on Max-Eyth-Straße, where Bröhan-Museum opened in 1973 deep in the Western part of the divided Berlin. It must have been an especially charming and inspiring place, well-suited to preserving beautiful things of an almost forgotten era and carefully returning them to public awareness. In addition, but behind the scenes, it was a place of research on once important manufacturers, pioneering techniques of craftsmanship, and all the details of true connoisseurship that made the early catalogues a gospel for an entire generation of collectors. The history of Bröhan-Museum began in 1965 when Karl H. Bröhan moved with his small family to West Berlin. Not from a wealthy background, Bröhan made a fortune as the owner of a dental wholesale business and now, at midlife, was in search of new challenges beyond his entrepreneurial success. Berlin promised the new beginning he was looking for: a major city with an impressive past, destroyed and divided by the Second World War, traumatized and yet full of life. For four years now, a wall ran through the divided city, John F. Kennedy spoke in 1963 at Rathaus Schöneberg, the seat of West Berlin’s government, the Rolling Stones played at the Waldbühne, and the students were in uproar. Gigantic construction projects shaped the city in East and West. Here, Bröhan found what he missed in comparatively settled Hamburg: “Openness, intellectual excitement, unconventionality, artistic wealth and diversity.” 2 To build up an art collection in this city, at that time? An audacious plan. The collection began as they do: as a hobby, with occasional private purchases. But he soon began to professionalize and emphases began to take shape. Bröhan’s first passion was eighteenth-century Berlin porcelain, both by KPM, founded in 1763, and its predecessor manufactories Wegely and Gotzkowsky. In just a few years, he assembled a collection of museum quality that was exhibited in 1969 at Schloss Charlottenburg accompanied by an extensive catalogue that Bröhan later called his “apprentice piece.” 3 The exhibition and catalogue had two parts: the first, “Berlin Porcelain from the Rococo Period to the Empire,” represented a complete collection, while the second, “Artistic Porcelain and Ceramics from ca. 1900” represented a new area of interest for the collector. Shortly thereafter, Bröhan sold his collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century porcelain, retaining a focus on the period around 1900 for the rest of his life.
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“I had noticed that the period around 1900 was a scarcely known treasure that was just waiting to be unearthed,” the collector wrote in retrospect in 1998. Bröhan acquired porcelain, glass, ceramics, furniture, and metalwork of the art nouveau and art deco periods, in addition to functionalist design from its beginnings in the nineteenth century until the 1930s. He defined the temporal framework of his collection quite precisely: from the Paris Exhibition in 1889, where art nouveau appeared for the first time, until the start of the Second World War in 1939, which set an end to the last great epochal styles. In the process, he took his orientation from important figures, institutions, and events of the period, purchasing objects from the circle of Siegfried Bing’s Paris gallery L’Art Nouveau and Meier-Graefe’s La Maison Moderne, by designers of the Deutscher Werkbund and artists of the Wiener Werkstätte. Still today, red underlining in now archived historical journals show how intensely he studied these publications to identify important designs and manufacturers. Parallel to design, Bröhan was also interested in the art of the Berlin Secession: here too, it was necessary to return forgotten works and figures back to the public light. He focused first on Hans Baluschek, Karl Hagemeister, and Willy Jaeckel, later adding Walter Leistikow to the “Great Three.” Karl H. Bröhan’s wife and partner in building up the collection and the museum, the art historian Dr. Margrit Bröhan, focused her attention on this area in particular, and in the years to follow published highly regarded monographs on Hans Baluschek, Walter Leistikow, Franz Skarbina, and Karl Hagemeister. Collecting and research went hand in hand. A library and an archive were developed alongside the collection. Bröhan, now long since an expert in the area, hired a small team to catalogue his growing collection and published several volumes. Eight appeared during his lifetime, the last, Glaskunst 1889–1939, was published in 2010. As the collection grew, the desire for a permanent place of exhibition increased, and so Bröhan acquired a residence in Berlin-Dahlem that opened in 1973 as the private museum Sammlung Karl H. Bröhan. The 550 square meters of the former home of bank director Ludwig Berliner from 1922 were just enough for part of the collection, but it offered a congenial framework: “In the elegant rooms of this stately residence under
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4 Bröhan, “Rückblick,” 9.
5 Ibid.
6 Tilmann Buddensieg, “Zum Tod des Kunstmäzens und Berliner Museumsgründers,” Tagesspiegel, Jan. 4, 2000.
the trees of Grunewald we were able to present the artistic sensitivity of a demanding cultivated bourgeoisie before the Second World War in a exquisite way.” 4 At the first Bröhan-Museum, the collector developed a presentation concept to which he would remain faithful from then on: furniture, paintings, and sculpture, arts and crafts, and design objects were exhibited together in completely furnished settings to underscore the equal importance of all artistic disciplines. On a historical photo of the museum, we can see furniture by Louis Majorelle and a floor vase from Sèvres alongside paintings by Karl Hagemeister; at the foreground a case displaying art nouveau porcelain by KPM. “Every collector is one day confronted with the question of what should happen to his hoard.” 5 Karl H. Bröhan opted for an act of philanthropy: to mark his sixtieth birthday, he donated the collection to the city of Berlin, the only conditions being that the collection remain intact and be provided a permanent home. With the opening of Bröhan-Museum at today’s location in Charlottenburg’s Schloßstraße on October 14, 1983, both became reality. The late classical barracks building, which belongs to the architectural ensemble of Schloss Charlottenburg and had been used since the First World War in a variety of different ways, was well-suited to the needs of the new museum. At first, only the ground floor was used to host the constantly growing collection and several special exhibitions, in 1990, the fourth floor was added, the second followed in 1998. In 1994, BröhanMuseum became a public foundation of the Land Berlin, the Landesmuseum für Jugendstil, Art Deco und Funktionalismus (State Museum for Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Functionalism), as it was now named, had become a fixture in the cultural landscape of the reunited capital. Karl H. Bröhan was awarded numerous honors and distinctions, including the Bundesverdienstkreuz (German Federal Order of Merit) and an honorary professorship. He remained director of the museum and continued to expand the collection with additional purchases. When Bröhan died on January 2, 2000 after a brief illness at age 78, he left behind not only a “well ordered and complete life’s work,” 6 as the art historian and collector colleague Tilmann Buddensieg wrote in his obituary, but with Bröhan-Museum a place that has become a second home for numerous collectors of his generation and those to follow.
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Today’s Bröhan-Museum in Berlin-Charlottenburg
7 Bröhan, “Rückblick,” 7.
8 Ibid., 12.
It is impressive how many people Karl H. Bröhan inspired with his joy of discovery, his researching spirit, and his sense for form, material, and aesthetics. Still today, owners of small or large “satellite collections” contact us and report of their experiences of inspiration before the display cases at Bröhan-Museum or how exhibitions, lecturers, and encounters with the collector triggered a lifelong passion for an artist or designer, a certain craft or manufacturer. Frequently these collections make their way to Bröhan-Museum as a gift or bequest. “As a collector, I was never interested in pursuing paths that were overtrodden or well known,” as Bröhan wrote in 1998.7 “When looked at closely, BröhanMuseum houses a number of special collections. . . . Over a fifty-year period, the formal language that we still live with today developed against the empty formulas of historicism, from art nouveau to industrial design.” 8 What a collection, and what a pleasure to work with it today! Since 2013, with Dr. Tobias Hoffmann Bröhan-Museum has had a new director who did not come from the founding collector’s circle. Dr. Margrit Bröhan had followed her husband in 2000, and her successor was the longtime deputy director Dr. Ingeborg Becker, who both set their own accents, but remained very true to the original program. But what is the fundamental orientation of Bröhan-Museum and how can it be situated in Berlin’s museum landscape today? A museum, like everything else in life, needs to grow. There is nothing worse or sadder than museums that get stuck at a certain point in their development and no longer change. In recent years, we have done a great deal to counteract that: the collection has expanded and, despite deplorably low public acquisition funding, we have succeeded in securing several important works and object groups for the museum. Important additions have been made particularly in the realm of industrial and functionalist design, such as an extensive collection on the New Frankfurt including a Frankfurt Kitchen, Berlin tubular steel furniture, and furnishings and lighting from Czech functionalism. With the acquisition of various furnishings and objects by designers such as Edward William Godwin, William Morris, Charles F. A. Voysey, and Ambrose Heal, the arts and crafts movement could be decisively expanded, as it was underrepresented in the collection previously in relation to its importance. The
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collection’s focus on graphic design and poster art has also developed in an enormously positive way in recent years, with additions of works by Eugène Grasset, Alfons Mucha, Jules Chéret, Pierre Bonnard, Fidus, Ludwig Hohlwein, Willi Baumeister, and George Grosz, just to name a few artists. In addition, there have repeatedly been discoveries beyond the canon of art history, like the work of Martin Brandenburg, a painter of the Berlin Secession who had been previously little researched: the museum now owns four important works by the artist. Entirely in the tradition of its founder, Bröhan-Museum collects “anti-cyclically,” avoiding the “overtrodden paths” that already bored him. Margrit Bröhan and the association she founded, Freunde des Bröhan-Museums e.V., have often been an essential help in this area. The special exhibitions of recent years have expanded the museum’s spectrum of subjects, increasingly placing art and design from the turn of the century in dialogue with contemporary works. The amazing diversity and adaptability of the Bröhan collection, which touches on questions of aesthetics, cultural history, politics, and other fields, enables and virtually demands this. For example, in exhibitions such as Do It Yourself Design (2016), Berliner Realismus (Berlin Realism, 2018), Von Arts and Crafts zum Bauhaus (From Arts and Crafts to the Bauhaus, 2019) or Luigi Colani und der Jugendstil (Luigi Colani and Art Nouveau, 2020), we have been able to contextualize our holdings in ever new ways. The tasks of a museum are today defined differently than they were twenty years ago. Beside the classical activity of collecting and exhibiting, museums increasingly take on social responsibility by ensuring low threshold, inclusive access and engage critically with the history of their own collection. With education and outreach as well as provenance research, new fields were opened and these important future subjects were anchored in the museum in terms of personnel. The collectors Karl and Margrit Bröhan chose Berlin twice. Once, when they came to Berlin at a nadir in the city’s history right after the erection of the Berlin wall, and then in the early 1980s, when they chose Berlin despite other options to be the recipient of their donation of the collection. Yet the city and thus the role of the museum have changed dramatically since then. Today’s Berlin, as the German capital, is Germany’s most important museum location, becoming more and more impor-
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Exhibition view of the permanent collection, 2020
tant with the gradual economic recovery of the city. In this unique museum landscape, it is vital that BröhanMuseum defines and communicates its fundamental orientation clearly. So once again we return to the question of the basic orientation of the museum: although it has an impressive collective of art nouveau and a remarkable collection of paintings by artists from the Berlin Secession, Bröhan-Museum is not the ultimate art nouveau museum or the museum of the Berlin Secession. Instead, as Karl H. Bröhan noted, Bröhan-Museum was from the very beginning “a museum that houses a number of special collections.” What unites the collections is their outstanding status as examples of applied art or design. The reform style of the late nineteenth century, with the arts and crafts movement in England and then art nouveau across all of Europe, developed as a reaction to the changes due to industrialization and new technologies, which created an entirely transformed social situation in Europe at breathtaking speed. One of the results of this process was the birth of a new profession. No longer was the craftsman or, in the case of mechanical production, the engineer alone responsible for the appearance of an object. At first, artists participated in the emergence of these objects, but soon, the profession of an expert especially trained in the arts, crafts, and technology, for providing form began to emerge, the designer. Vitra Design Museum, founded in 1989, was the first museum in Germany to even use the term “design.” Bröhan-Museum is not a museum of applied art in the traditional sense, for it does not collect from the Medieval Period until now. The collection begins with the development of the modern concept of design. Step by step, from artists who in art nouveau begin to design their homes and furnishings, through the Deutscher Werkbund to functionalist design of the 1920s and 1930s, which was now conceived for industrial production, shows the development that internationally can be understood as the birth of design and its successive establishment and differentiation. But Bröhan-Museum is not just a design museum. From the very beginning, the Bröhans were interested in the interaction of the applied arts and the fine arts. From art nouveau artists who worked in applied art through Gropius’ demand for “art and technology, a new unity,” the role of concrete art at HfG Ulm, the re-fusion
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9 Ibid., 12.
of art and design in Memphis and the new German design of the 1980s until the design art movement in the early 2000s, the development of design was shaped by an intense dialogue of the disciplines. A separation between art and design, as practiced by almost all museums, not only makes no sense, but is also counterproductive for understanding design. But in the early 1980s it was virtually revolutionary for the Bröhans to open a museum dedicated to art and design equally. This is what makes Bröhan-Museum unique and thus an answer to the question of the museum’s fundamental orientation. Bröhan-Museum represents the development of design from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century and spotlights in particular the links between the realms of design and the fine arts. Bröhan-Museum is a museum for design and fine art, and in this order, for the design part of the collection is much larger. The collection presents around fifty years of development from 1890 to 1940, which were definitive for the entire twentieth century. In this period, as Karl H. Bröhan noted, “the aesthetic of the twentieth century developed … the formal language that we still live with today … from art nouveau to industrial design.” 9 It is thus necessary, based on the issues that are explored in the collection, to search repeatedly for the relevance of this question today or for contemporary responses to this question. For it is almost shocking how much the issues of one hundred years ago are similar to today’s problems. From the new relevance of the social question to the image of nature in the age of climate change and the role of woman and the implementation of emancipation. The questions have remained the same, only the answers have changed. / Tobias Hoffmann /
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/ Anna Grosskopf /
Exhibition view of the permanent collection, 2020
17 / Bröhan 100: Looking Back, Looking Forward
/ 001 / Decorative Plate with Locust, 1901
Royal Porcelain Manufactory Berlin (KPM) Porcelain with gold relief and enamel décor Dia. 15.4 cm Inventory No.: 77-178
Every collection has its favorite pieces; often, the pieces a collector loves the most are not even the large and impressive main creations. On the contrary: small, intimate treasures that can be picked up and examined closely seem to exude a special fascination. For example, this delicate plate, only around 15 cm wide, made by Berlin’s KPM, Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur (Royal Porcelain Manufactory): it is said that this was one of Karl H. Bröhan’s favorite works. The plate is painted with gold and enamel, both specialties of KPM around 1900.The Berlin porcelain manufactory was always highly experimental in a technical sense, a world leader in the development of art glazing and thus was the first porcelain manufacturer to master the fusion of colorful glass fluxes on porcelain. The objects created using this technique belong temporally and stylistically to the threshold between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: one example being this plate, which combines historicist design aspects with the new formal language of art nouveau. A historicist spiral ornamentation decorates the edge as a narrow ribbon that is interrupted at regular intervals by geometric decorative motifs and stylized flowers. A careful advance toward art nouveau, in contrast, is the representation of an only slightly stylized locust sitting on a tender berry branch; at first glance, an unspectacular natural detail, almost coincidental in appearance, which here, preciously framed and vividly emphasized with shimmering shades of gold, yellow, and orange stands out from the dark glaze. The asymmetry and liveliness of the miniature scene reveal the influence of Japanese depictions of nature, which were very important for art nouveau’s own take on the natural world. For KPM, objects of this kind marked the start of modern design. In 1902, the manufactory turned increasingly to art nouveau under the influence of Theo SchmuzBaudiß, who later would direct the company. / AG /
18 · 19 / A Favorite Piece
/ About this Publication / This catalogue is being published to mark the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the birth of Prof. Karl H. Bröhan (1921–2000), the founder of Bröhan-Museum, on July 6, 1921. EDITORS: Tobias Hoffmann, Anna Grosskopf IDEA AND PLANNING: Tobias Hoffmann, Anna Grosskopf TEXTS: Layla Fetzer, Anna Grosskopf, Julia Hartenstein, Simon Häuser, Sylvia Hinz, Tobias Hoffmann, Johannes Honeck, Alexandra Koronkai-Kiss, Sabine Meister, Nils Martin Müller, Fabian Reifferscheidt PROOFREADING AND COPY EDITING: Anna Grosskopf, Alexandra Koronkai-Kiss TRANSLATOR: Brian Currid VISUAL EDITOR: Anna Grosskopf DESIGNER: Gerwin Schmidt IMAGE EDITING: Florian Zech, Eberl & Kœsel Studio GmbH PROJECT MANAGEMENT, PUBLISHER: David Fesser, Deutscher Kunstverlag PRODUCTION, PUBLISHER: Jens Lindenhain, Deutscher Kunstverlag PUBLISHER: Deutscher Kunstverlag GmbH Berlin München Lützowstraße 33 10785 Berlin www.deutscherkunstverlag.de A subsidiary of Walter de Gruyter GmbH Berlin Boston www.degruyter.com Bibliographic Information, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek; detailed bibliographic information available online at www.dnb.de. All rights reserved. © Bröhan-Museum. Landesmuseum für Jugendstil, Art Deco und Funktionalismus © 2021 Deutscher Kunstverlag GmbH Berlin München and the authors and translator Printing and binding: Eberl & Kœsel GmbH & Co. KG, Altusried-Krugzell VG Bild-Kunst is responsible for the assertion of claims for the reproduction of images of the exhibits/works pursuant to § 60h of the German Copyright Act. ISBN 978-3-422-98710-4 Publication of Bröhan-Museum no. 41
264 / About this Publication