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Lot Essay
Owner of a successful shoe manufacturing business based in Erfurt in Germany, Alfred Hess, alongside his wife Tekla, was equally known as an enthusiastic and engaged art patron. With a keen eye particularly for modern artists of their day, the Hess couple amassed an enormous collection of over 4,000 expressionist works of art – paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints - often acquired directly from artists to whom the doors of the Hess home were often open. Their visitors’ book included sketches and notes from Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger amongst others, and the family shared their passion for art through generous loans and donations to the Angermuseum in Erfurt.
Alfred’s sudden death in 1931, at the age of 52, presaged a dark turn for the family, whose business was hit by the global economic crisis and as the hateful rhetoric of the Nazis spread through Germany. The family, who were Jewish, were impacted immediately when the Nazi party took power in 1933 and began to implement anti-Jewish measures. Alfred and Tekla’s son Hans lost his job at Ullstein publishing house and his apartment was ransacked; he fled Germany immediately after, making his way to the United Kingdom.
Tekla stayed behind to look after her mother and also to take steps to safeguard the art collection. Unfortunately, despite her efforts, many artworks were sold under duress to help the family’s situation and the high profile of the Hess collection also attracted the attention of the Nazis, who forced its further dispersal; many pieces were also later stolen from the Cologne Art Union after the building was bombed. Artworks donated by Hess family to the Angermuseum were amongst those purged as so-called ‘degenerate’ art in 1937.
Without income from the now-aryanized, liquidated Hess business and in the wake of the so-called “The Night of Broken Glass” or November pogrom in 1938, Tekla fled to Britain in 1939. Reunited, Tekla and her son Hans, who later became a museum curator in Leicester and York, used what remained of their collection to showcase expressionist German art, illustrating that a vibrant and progressive side of Germany still remained, with four works from the collection laying the foundation for the German Expressionist art collection of the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.
Years later, the Mueller print would make its way into the collection of Lois Torf, another lover of German expressionism and one of America’s greatest print collectors. During the early 1960s, Lois Torf entered uncharted territory when she sought to build what would ultimately become one of America’s most significant print collections. Entirely self-taught, the collector and philanthropist possessed a confident eye, powerful intuition, and an expressive voice that rendered her a force in the tight-knit print community and larger Boston art scene.
One of the prominent threads in Torf’s collection stemmed from her love for strong, black-and-white images, which began with early German Expressionism.
Nearly every inch of wall space in the Torf’s home — a Brutalist-style concrete house designed by architects Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty in 1971 — was covered with prints hung salon style. Downstairs, hundreds more were stored in museum-quality flat files and frequently examined.
‘I think of it as my mother’s ritual: handling the prints, bringing them out of the files, laying them down, removing the glassine to get as close as possible,’ remembers Adrienne, Torf’s daughter who is a nonprofit financial consultant and professional pianist and composer. ‘Handling the prints like that also gave my mother a chance to tell the story behind each one. These are really the pages of her life story,’ explains Adrienne, adding how in her later years, her mother’s memory remained remarkably sharp. ‘She remembered when she bought each print, from whom, and could tell a little anecdote about it.’
In this distinctive Mueller print, two prestigious collections with a shared passion are brought together.
Alfred’s sudden death in 1931, at the age of 52, presaged a dark turn for the family, whose business was hit by the global economic crisis and as the hateful rhetoric of the Nazis spread through Germany. The family, who were Jewish, were impacted immediately when the Nazi party took power in 1933 and began to implement anti-Jewish measures. Alfred and Tekla’s son Hans lost his job at Ullstein publishing house and his apartment was ransacked; he fled Germany immediately after, making his way to the United Kingdom.
Tekla stayed behind to look after her mother and also to take steps to safeguard the art collection. Unfortunately, despite her efforts, many artworks were sold under duress to help the family’s situation and the high profile of the Hess collection also attracted the attention of the Nazis, who forced its further dispersal; many pieces were also later stolen from the Cologne Art Union after the building was bombed. Artworks donated by Hess family to the Angermuseum were amongst those purged as so-called ‘degenerate’ art in 1937.
Without income from the now-aryanized, liquidated Hess business and in the wake of the so-called “The Night of Broken Glass” or November pogrom in 1938, Tekla fled to Britain in 1939. Reunited, Tekla and her son Hans, who later became a museum curator in Leicester and York, used what remained of their collection to showcase expressionist German art, illustrating that a vibrant and progressive side of Germany still remained, with four works from the collection laying the foundation for the German Expressionist art collection of the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.
Years later, the Mueller print would make its way into the collection of Lois Torf, another lover of German expressionism and one of America’s greatest print collectors. During the early 1960s, Lois Torf entered uncharted territory when she sought to build what would ultimately become one of America’s most significant print collections. Entirely self-taught, the collector and philanthropist possessed a confident eye, powerful intuition, and an expressive voice that rendered her a force in the tight-knit print community and larger Boston art scene.
One of the prominent threads in Torf’s collection stemmed from her love for strong, black-and-white images, which began with early German Expressionism.
Nearly every inch of wall space in the Torf’s home — a Brutalist-style concrete house designed by architects Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty in 1971 — was covered with prints hung salon style. Downstairs, hundreds more were stored in museum-quality flat files and frequently examined.
‘I think of it as my mother’s ritual: handling the prints, bringing them out of the files, laying them down, removing the glassine to get as close as possible,’ remembers Adrienne, Torf’s daughter who is a nonprofit financial consultant and professional pianist and composer. ‘Handling the prints like that also gave my mother a chance to tell the story behind each one. These are really the pages of her life story,’ explains Adrienne, adding how in her later years, her mother’s memory remained remarkably sharp. ‘She remembered when she bought each print, from whom, and could tell a little anecdote about it.’
In this distinctive Mueller print, two prestigious collections with a shared passion are brought together.