UAnd so the young man wrote: “What else could the guiding thought of my life be than – beauty?” The grandfather held the letter with trembling hands: “Don’t try to change my mind. No dams are able to hold on to these long-restrained waves that have finally broken loose.”
No, nothing and nobody will ever be able to capture Karl Ernst Osthaus. The grandparents didn’t, and certainly not the strict father, who had intended his son to have a decent commercial job. An apprenticeship in the spinning mill, at least that’s what you owe the reputation of the bankers and industrialists who made the name Osthaus ring out so beautifully in Hagen, Westphalia.
After a few months of everyday working life, the sensitive soul reacts piqued. “Nervous breakdown” is the contemporary diagnosis. Now nothing stands in the way of studying art history. Proving once again that one only needs to be rich and stubborn enough to afford a life of beauty.
If you want to go all the way back to the beginning of the success story, the best thing to do is travel to Hagen-Eppenhausen to the Hohenhof, the country villa that Henry van der Velde designed for Karl Ernst Osthaus and his wife Gertrud at the beginning of the last century. The fact that the Nazis resided in the graceful Art Nouveau house shouldn’t disturb the walk in the park. There, in front of the family’s chapel-like tomb, is the right place to leaf through the biography you brought with you, in which Rainer Stamm and Gloria Köpnick follow the broad footsteps of the Hagen artists.
Right in the middle of the culture war era
It has become an entertaining, entertaining book that does justice to the small anecdote just as it recapitulates the rock-solid judgment on the lifetime achievements of the collector, museum founder and reform educator from a critical distance. In any case, while reading, one is once again in the middle of that culture-war era, in which robust temperaments and not inconsiderable resources were required to secure a place in the public eye for the contested modern age. And after 34 vividly narrated chapters, it is hard to understand what crucial details the somewhat acidic FAZ reviewer may have missed in the notes section of the book, which is rich in material.
With all the appeal of opening the full Osthaus life file again, the main benefit is the time stage that the biography sets up with praiseworthy care. Because the fact that painter heroes like Cézanne, van Gogh, Seurat or Matisse, who today inspire their millions of audiences worldwide, were once considered unwelcome invaders in Germany, that sounds like a fairy tale from an improbable time.
In the collection of the Museum Folkwang: Paul Cézanne, “La carrière de Bibémus”, around 1895
Source: Museum Folkwang, Essen
It was still in Wilhelmine Germany shortly before the national disaster of World War I when a group of patriotic artists with 123 signatories published their pamphlet against the supremacy of French art. In Gothic script and in a tone of nationalistic hurt, the Bremen painter Carl Vinnen lamented the institutional blindness to the signs of decay of a French-dominated modern age: “And since it is supposed to be forced upon us by a large, well-financed, international organization, the serious warning is probably justified…” Today they call it a “conspiracy theory”, but back then, in 1911, it was polemical chauvinism.
Promising symptom of European friendship between peoples
The answer was published in the same year by Munich-based Piper Verlag: “But we few, who thank the French spirit and French creative power for the decisive values of our personality, will not desist from seeing a promising symptom of European friendship in the back and forth of artistic suggestions. Hagen i W., signed Karl Ernst Osthaus”.
Despite unfinished studies in Berlin, Strasbourg and Vienna, among other places, Karl Ernst Osthaus remained a self-made man who only needed academic encouragement to secure his stubborn and completely non-negotiable preferences. He certainly had his well-meaning whisperers, the Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde, the painters Emil Rudolf Weiß and Christian Rohlfs, and yet the radicalism with which he took the artistic revolutions in France as his yardstick is all the more astonishing as he was politically more was at home on the right side and professed to be conservative bourgeoisie all his life.
Accordingly, the collector began cautiously. The painters of the Düsseldorf school of painting offered a respectable debut without much risk. But the landscapists of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Auguste Renoir, Henri Edmond Cross, Théo van Rysselberghe and Paul Signac, quickly followed, and by the time Osthaus discovered van Gogh and Gauguin, pretty much all of the inherited reservations about the impetuous self-liberation of contemporary painting were gone used up. Van Gogh’s painting “The Harvest” from 1889, acquired from Paul Cassirer in the spring of 1902, is probably the first painting by the painter in a German collection.
“The Harvest” (1889) by Vincent van Gogh
Source: Jens Nober/Museum Folkwang
And how determined Osthaus approached his acquisitions is documented by notes in letters to his wife – before Renoir’s magnificent “Lise”: “Today with van de Velde in the Secession, a Renoir fabulous, 18,000 marks, lady with parasol in the forest, museum piece, 3 times worth so much.” And the following day: “But now: I am 18,000 marks lighter. What do you say? The Renoir is so incredibly beautiful that I couldn’t resist it.” Of course, Gertrud had no objections.
Unlike some major collectors of the 20th century, Osthaus never hoarded his treasures solely for private pleasure. Their presentation in a museum was already planned with the first purchases. In 1902 he opened the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, set up by van de Velde, as “the world’s first museum for contemporary art”, as the Time.news still proudly reports.
The house can be even more proud of its commitment to non-European art. For the first time, testimonies to African tribal art, objects from Islamic countries in North Africa and the Orient, along with outstanding examples of Japanese decorative arts, were on display together with contemporary Western art – without the usual differences in valuation and without the patriotic arrogance that determined cultural strategies before the war.
The Folkwang, which takes its name from the palace of the goddess Freya in the Edda, was avant-garde in the best sense of the word. And Osthaus was an avant-gardist not least in his pedagogical endeavors to oblige art and life to act as one. His universalistic ideas, the founding of the “Folkwang” school, a kind of preliminary course for the Bauhaus that would later emerge, or the development work in the Deutscher Werkbund – initiatives that may seem even more important than the ravingly beautiful Renoir.
From the Osthaus Collection: “Lise – La femme à l’ombrelle” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted in 1867
Source: Museum Folkwang, Essen
The fact that the “Hagener Impulse” did not last long is due to the early death of the impresario. He was not yet 47 when he died in 1921 as a result of a war-related illness. It is not without tragedy that the heirs sold the collection to Essen in 1922, where it has been appropriately housed to this day in the new “Museum Folkwang”. Because without the exemplary art at their side, the art educational institutions in Hagen would also have to lose their life model function.
Now it comes alive again in front of the grave monument in Hohenhofer Park and the new biography under the arm, the memory of an art and artist friend who thought of life as his painters painted it.