The Art Collection of the Publisher Rudolf Mosse
In Edenic innocence, the naked youth walks along the beach, arm-in-arm with two barely clad girls. The young women’s brightly colored dresses billow in the wind of spring storm while ribbons flutter. There is a sense in the air of awakening, of liberation from social conventions. Ludwig von Hofmann’s large-format painting “Frühlingssturm” (Spring Storm) was snapped up by the Berlin publisher Rudolf Mosse in August 1898 after the Nationalgalerie decided against purchasing it. The painting, which came to represent the Art Nouveau movement, was a major work of Mosse’s collection, which focused on German art of the late 19th century and includes two other treasures of German painting: Adolph Menzel’s pastel, “Emilie Menzel, die Schwester des Künstlers, in roter Bluse” (Emilie Menzel, the Artist’s Sister, Wearing a Red Blouse), and Leibl’s “Bildnis des Appellationsrates Stenglein” (Portrait of the Appellate Judge Stenglein).
Rudolf Mosse was not exactly raised to become a connoisseur of the visual arts. Born on May 8th, 1843 in Graetz (Grodzisk Wielkopolski) near Posen (Poznań), Mosse was one of 14 siblings and learned early how hard it was for his father Markus Mosse to feed the large family as a physician. Markus Mosse’s most important gifts to his children were Prussian virtues like hard work and modesty, a liberal worldview, and the confidence to stand up for their Judaism. After an apprenticeship as a bookseller in Posen (Poznań), Rudolf moved to Berlin in 1861, where he became advertising sales representative of the illustrated newspaper Die Gartenlaube. In 1867, he established his own advertising agency, “Annoncen-Expedition Rudolf Mosse.” His timing was felicitous; after the unification of the German Reich in 1871, Berlin began its transformation from a provincial hive of Prussian civil servants into not only the German capital, but a true global metropolis. Rudolf Mosse seized the opportunity, showing great instincts and tremendous diligence. In December 1871, his first newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, was published. It quickly established itself as the flagship paper for Berlin’s liberal bourgeoisie. Among the papers that Mosse would publish in his career were the newspapers Berliner Morgen-Zeitung and Berliner Volks-Zeitung, and the Jewish-interest magazine, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. He also published over 130 specialty journals and books like the Bäder-Almanach, and the Deutsches Reichs-Adressbuch für Industrie, Gewerbe, und Handel (Directory for Trade and Industry in the German Reich). By 1912, with a fortune valued at 40 million marks and an annual income of 2.54 million marks, the publisher Rudolf Mosse was the second richest man in Prussia.
As early as in 1882, he was already so wealthy that he commissioned the architects Ebe and Benda with designing a city palace in the style of a French hôtel particulier at Leipiziger Platz 15 in the center of Berlin. Ebe and Benda had built a magnificent home at Wilhelmstrasse 67 for the railroad magnate Rudolf Pringsheim, whose son Alfred Pringsheim would become Thomas Mann’s father-in-law, as well as a villa in the Tiergarten district for the coal and steel tycoon Franz Hubert Graf von Tiele-Winckler. Completed in 1884, Mosse’s neo-baroque, three-story townhouse was crowned by the sculptor Max Klein’s relief, “Die Erhebung des deutschen Genius” (The Exaltation of German Genius), which faced Leipziger Platz. The wing of the building that abutted Vossstrasse and enclosed the cour d'honneur took an additional four years to complete after Mosse requested changes. They called for the first floor of this east wing of the building to include a gallery, in which a “small number of valuable paintings” were hung in 1889. These might have included the paintings “Der Gorner Grat” by Eugen Bracht and a seascape by Eugen Dücker, both about the same size and painted in 1888.
In the early years, the gallery may have been large enough to hold Mosse’s entire art collection. The first opportunity to expand the collection presented itself in 1897, when the Turkish Consulate left the rental apartment on the second floor. By 1902 at the latest, reference works mentioned the art collection of Rudolf Mosse, and by 1904 such references included notes like “paintings and sculptures by modern masters, (O. Achenbach, W. Gentz, C. Gussow, Knaus, Leibl, Lenbach, A. Menzel, Max Liebermann, E. Bracht, Hans Thoma, Kallmorgen etc.)”. The first catalogue for the collection appeared in 1908 and listed an inventory of works in twenty galleries. Visiting the collection was “permitted upon advance registration.” The art critic Adolph Donath was among the first visitors in 1908. Even Donath, rather conservative but very well-disposed toward Jewish artists and collectors, reported “the impression that sometimes a piece that lacked the character of indubitable artistic merit disrupted the harmony of the galleries.” He explained this sense of imbalance as a consequence of Mosse’s acquisition policy, in which “human motives” sometimes played a role. By that, he meant that Mosse sought not just to collect the work of important artists, but also to acquire paintings whose subjects moved him, or that he would support young, unknown artists financially by purchasing their work. And Donath pointed out correctly that Mosse expanded his collection even in years of “less than abundant harvest in the art world.”
By building a magnificent art collection, Mosse was following a trend of the late-19th century economic boom years known as the Gründerzeit. His collection contained not only contemporary German art, but also Old Masters, Egyptian antiquities, and Benin Bronzes. Unlike other renowned Berlin art collectors like the coal magnate Eduard Arnhold or the painter Max Liebermann, the publisher was not interested in French impressionism, which had begun its conquest of the German capital after Hugo von Tschudi acquired the first paintings by Manet and Monet for the Nationalgalerie. It remains uncertain whether Rudolf Mosse personally selected all the artworks he acquired. He was one of the first art collectors to employ, at least for a time, an advisor in the person of the Berliner Tageblatt art critic Fritz Stahl (1864–1928). And in fact, is that not a logical step to take? Art played no role in Mosse’s childhood, and he lived in a time when successful industrialists hardly had time for their own families, much less for admiring pictures.
When and where precisely Mosse acquired the works in his collection is unknown. He collected the way many others do; he brought paintings and sculptures as mementos from the cities where he had traveled on business. He liked to buy art at the major exhibitions in Berlin and Munich, but he rarely patronized art dealers. Mosse appears to have stopped collecting during the First World War. Since his son-in-law never changed the collection, it was on display for 20 years just as Max Osborn described it in 1912. After interior renovations in the Mosse-Palais by the architect and the government building commissioner Regierungsbaumeister Alfred Breslauer, the father of the photographer Marianne Breslauer, and a rearrangement of the artworks by Fritz Stahl, visitors were greeted in the reception hall on the ground floor by Wilhelm Leibl’s “Bildnis des Appellationsrates Stenglein” (Portrait of the Appellate Judge Stenglein). Also on display were “Nana” by Anselm Feuerbach, “a fine Spitzweg, ‘Eremit und Rabe’ (Hermit and a Raven), Stuck’s ‘Tanz’ (Dance), stylized to look like a relief, and the flickering lights of Liebermann’s ‘Schweinestall’ (Pigsty).”
Liebermann, who lived just a few meters away on Pariser Platz, was the leading figure of a realistic school of artists whose range of subjects also extended to “low” motifs, like a pigsty. Rudolf Mosse saw in Liebermann a “kindred spirit with a progressive attitude,” as was later declared. That phrasing overstated Mosse’s affinity for Liebermann somewhat, given that Mosse did not follow Liebermann in his pivot toward impressionism. In 1899, the same year the Liebermann-led Berlin Secession mounted its first exhibition, Mosse had his dining room bedecked with the enormous historicizing mural “The Banquet of the Mosse Family” – painted by none other than Liebermann’s rival, Anton von Werner, the Kaiser’s loyal director of the Königliche Akademie der Künste (Royal Academy of the Arts) and member of the association of artists Verein Berliner Künstler. Mosse, an associate member, apparently felt closer to its milieu of conservative artists than the Avant-garde set that organized the Berlin Secession.
One image that can be viewed as programmatic for Mosse’s conception of art is the painting “Durch die Nacht zum Licht” (Through the Night, Toward the Light) by the Dutch-Jewish painter Jozef Israel. The villagers bear the departed patriarch in a coffin toward the door while his weeping wife stays back in despair, her daughter triying in vain to console her. Mosse and his wife loved images, like Israel’s, that expressed sympathy for the poor and a belief in a better future. Their concern for such matters went far beyond their taste in art. The Mosse-Stift in Berlin-Wilmersdorf was built 1893–1895 and was home to hundreds of Jewish and Christian orphans. The Mosses endowed it with 2.5 million marks. Their philanthropy focused first and foremost on social welfare, while academic research and support for individual artists were secondary. But no request for donations went unheard. Mosse accepted Tzedakah, or the obligation of each Jew to give aid to the needy, as his responsibility. He was also active in the Jewish Reform Community in Berlin, which advocated German-language prayer, women’s suffrage, and organ music during worship. The importance Mosse placed on access to education is evident from the fact that in 1913/14 he acquired the library of the recently deceased Germanist Erich Schmidt, hired a librarian, and made the books available to the public on the ground floor of his home on Leipziger Platz.
Next to Israel’s painting hung the only painting by Adolph Menzel that Mosse owned when that great German artist died in 1905. It was an early work, now lost, entitled “Der Werber” (The Recruiter). After Menzel’s death, Mosse acquired “several valuable gouaches,” by which Osborn means the portrait of a “Sitzender Herr” (Seated Man) immersed in his own thoughts as well as our captivatingly beautiful pastel, which depicts “Emilie Menzel, die Schwester des Künstlers, in roter Bluse (Emilie Menzel, the Artist’s Sister, Wearing a Red Blouse), who seems similarly appreciative of solitude. Continuing past a number of sculptures, including the bust of Mosse by Fritz Klimsch and the Egyptian-styled limestone sculpture of a “Ruhender Löwe” (Resting Lion) by August Gaul, and further past images like Arnold Böcklin’s “Die hehre Muse” (The Noble Muse) and Carl Blechen’s “Blick auf das Kloster Santa Scolastica bei Subiaco” (View of the Santa Scolastica Monastery near Subiaco), the visitor passes “through a series of felicitously arranged adjoining galleries” before reaching the cupola, which contained another programmatic work for Mosse. “Caritas” or “Charity” was hewn in Belgian granite by Hugo Lederer, the sculptor of the Bismarck Monument in Hamburg. And it must be said that plastic works comprise a distinctive aspect of Mosse’s art collection, both in number and in quality. In one hall dedicated exclusively to sculpture, Osborn noted: “The key piece is Reinhold Begas’ ‘Susanna,’ one of his most tender and liveliest figures. She is surrounded by Fritz Klimsch’s ‘Salome,’ the appealing group ‘Amor and Psyche’ by Eberlein before his descent into empty bombast, and a number of older pieces.”
“The upper floors, where the artworks are displayed both in dedicated museum-like galleries and in the private rooms of the owner, are also characterized by the best German art of recent decades,” Max Osborn wrote in 1912, adding the qualifying statement, “up until the threshold into impressionism.” Among the many artists often forgotten today, outstanding works on the upper floors included canvases by Max Liebermann (the pastel, “Lesendes Mädchen” (Reading Girl)), Walter Leistikow (the painting “Buchenwald” (Beech Forest)), and Fritz von Uhde, who was represented by his most popular painting, “Gang nach Bethlehem” (The Walk to Bethlehem). And where was Ludwig von Hofmann’s “Frühlingssturm”? In the music parlor, where it sounded a “festive, joyful note.”
All these works adorned the Mosse-Palace on Leipziger Platz. We do not know which artworks hung at Mosse’s country estates, Schenkendorf Manor near Königs Wusterhausen, Dyrotz Manor in Osthavelland, and Gallun Estate in Kreis Teltow. He did bequeath some art to his adopted daughter Felicia, who lived on Maassenstrasse in Schöneberg with her husband Hans Lachmann. Rudolf’s son-in-law Hans, who went by the name Lachmann-Mosse, took the helm at Mosse’s companies after the founder died on September 8th, 1920. Lachmann-Mosse’s artistic interests went more toward music and architecture than painting. It was he who commissioned the architect Erich Mendelsohn to rebuild the Mosse Publishing headquarters at the intersection of Schützenstrasse and Jerusalemer-Strasse after it was destroyed in the Spartacus uprising. Mendelssohn’s dynamically curved expressionistic entrance to the building, built 1921–1923, became a piece of architecture history. The Mosse Gallery, in contrast, was “preserved in honor like a monument.” In 1929, it remained “in the exact condition its founder had left it on the day he departed this world” (Donath). The proof of this can be found in the catalogue of Mosse’s collections that was published in German and English, probably in 1929, but possibly only for the occasion of the World Economic Conference in 1932 in Berlin, which was opened with a reception in the Mosse-Palais on April 30th. Just six months later, the Mosse Group had to declare bankruptcy due to the global economic crisis.
Shortly after the seizure of power by Hitler on January 30th, 1933, the National Socialists crushed the already stricken business empire. Hans Lachmann-Mosse had to emigrate to France in April of 1933 and was forced to watch from afar as the Nazi-appointed “Rudolf Mosse-Treuhandverwaltung” (what bitter irony in that name, pretending a trusteeship!) auctioned off his father-in-law’s art collection on May 29th and 30th, 1934 at Rudolph Lepke’s auction house in Berlin. Lachmann-Mosse’s own collection was auctioned off a week later at the Berlin auction house “Union.” By publishing the auction catalogue (which only included the best works in the collection), the National Socialists unwittingly erected a monument to Rudolf Mosse as a patriotic German who proved that “not every member of the Jewish grand bourgeoisie preferred modern (French) painting and sculptures” (Peter Paret). The three restituted artworks from the collection that are now at auction, Adolph Menzel’s “Emilie Menzel, die Schwester des Künstlers, in roter Bluse (Emilie Menzel, the Artist’s Sister, Wearing a Red Blouse), Wilhelm Leibl’s “Bildnis des Appellationsrates Stenglein” (Portrait of the Appellate Judge Stenglein), and Ludwig von Hofmanns “Frühlingssturm” (Spring Storm), are a testament to the great significance of Rudolf Mosse’s collection of modern German painting.
Stefan Pucks
Literature
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