Not less than three works from Ismar Littmann's highly important collection are offered in this catalog. Just like another painting, Pechstein's masterpiece "Die Ruhende“ (Resting Woman), which is presented as a museum restitution in the Evening Sale (Lot XX), the works by Lovis Corinth, Paul Kleinschmidt and Wilhelm Schmid are eloquent testimonies to this once splendid collection. It was compiled by Ismar Littmann, a merchant's son born in Groß Strehlitz in Upper Silesia in 1878, a successful lawyer who lived with his wife Käthe in Breslau. They had an open house, the legendary "Bohemian artists from Breslau" came and went, and quite a few painters were personally acquainted with the collector. Ismar Littmann was passionately committed to the modern art of his contemporaries, and from the late 1910s he selected the works for his art collection with a keen eye for the exceptional. However, the tragic end of the Littmann Collection soon became apparent. Like many others who were suffering under the global economic crisis in the late 1920s, Ismar Littmann consigned a larger bundle of prints from his collection, which had grown to almost 6,000 works of art, to the Paul Graupe auction house in Berlin. However, four selected works of art by Lovis Corinth were presented parallel to this auction in a small cooperation catalog by Graupe and the antiquarian Ball. Among them was Corinth's present "Self-Portrait" (Lot XX). However, these were more than bad years for art sales, and the work returned to the Littmann Collection unsold.
It was probably still there when the National Socialists seized power in 1933 and things changed dramatically. As a Jewish lawyer, Dr. Ismar Littmann was heavily persecuted, and by the spring of 1933 he found himself robbed of his livelihood. In the fall of 1934, Littmann committed suicide in despair. leaving his widow and four children behind. In February 1935, the family was forced to sell the art collection through the auction house Max Perl. This way the self-portrait by Wilhelm Schmid (Lot XX) and the painting Paul Kleinschmidt had made of the Littmann family (Lot XX) got lost.
In 2023, all three works are offered without pending restitution claims. Together with Pechstein's "Ruhende", we see four works of art from one of the most important collections of modern art reunited - a rare opportunity for art lovers and collectors today.
Based on several versions of a portrait of his mother, "Schloss Burgau bei Wasserburg am Inn" (Burgau Castle near Wasserburg am Inn) is one of the first paintings by Paul Kleinschmidt. In her catalogue raisonné, Barbara Lipps-Kant lists it as number 8. However, this wonderful landscape is not only a particularly early work, it also is exemplary for Kleinschmidt's unmistakable painting style between Realism, Expressionism and New Objectivity. It reveals enormous artistic progressiveness and outstanding avant-garde potential, considering that the year the work was created, the "Brücke" style and thus German Expressionism were still in the fledgling stages, while the clearly reduced, objectified representations of New Objectivity, which was born only after the First World War, was still a long way off.
It is therefore not surprising that Kleinschmidt's Schloßhof, which he rendered on the canvas with an expressive line and at the same time with a clear view, was part of the important collection of the lawyer and modern art lover Dr. Ismar Littmann in Breslau. There are numerous works by Paul Kleinschmidt, one of Lovis Corinth's “spiritual students”, in the collection. 42 paintings by the artist alone are listed in Littmann's inventory in 1930, including this work with the number 163. The work is fittingly described here: "Energetic brush strokes, their movement capturing space and light differentiation, and also grasp the materiality with a sure instinct.
Later the work found a home with Littmann's friend Erich Cohn, who also came from Breslau but had emigrated to the USA. He was also a true Kleinschmidt expert and the artist's most important patron. In his essay "Kunstbolschewismus? Kleinschmidts Werke als >entartete< Kunst" (Art Bolshevism? Kleinschmidt's works as 'degenerate' art)", Andreas Hünecke wrote: "Modern art was often referred to as 'Jewish-Bolshevik' because - as was claimed - it was only 'made' by Jews , meaning it was promoted on the market by Jewish art dealers and art critics. It was not even registered, how well Kleinschmidt fit in. He was promoted by Julius Meier-Graefe, and his two most important collectors - the Breslau lawyer Ismar Littmann and the New York manufacturer Erich Cohn - were Jews." (quoted from: Paul Kleinschmidt, ex. cat. Kunsthalle Tübingen et al. 1997/98, p. 34.).
Erich Cohn may have acquired the painting in the Max Perl auction, where it was offered as lot number 2502 in 1935. The whole tragedy of this sale is hidden behind a simple abbreviation, the consignor number 36: "Nachlass L., in B." (Estate L., in B.).
The painting remained in the Cohn family through inheritance, today it can be offered without pending restitution claims on the basis of a "fair and just solution" of the heirs of Erich Cohn and the heirs of Ismar Littmann. [JS/AT]