Stormy times with Adolph Menzel – a gift from Tel Aviv to Berlin
Lesezeit 12 Minuten
The Kupferstichkabinett received a work on paper by Adolph Menzel. Why did the family of the collector from Tel Aviv decide to donate the sheet to the Berlin museum?
In November 2023, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin received a generous offer from Israel: Tamar Munz Kaplan wanted to donate a work from the collection of her Berlin grandfather Heinrich Münz, a work on paper by Adolph Menzel (1815-1905).
It depicts 14 people who are apparently being exposed to a violent storm. On the far left, leaning forward, someone seems to be trying to dive under the wind. His coat billows out backwards, his unprotected legs seem barely able to keep his balance. In a different position, the next person is trying to defy the weather. She stands bolt upright, but her hair and robe are also caught up in the storm. To her right is a gentleman with a top hat and cane. He has tied his coat tightly around his body and is marching towards the storm. The figure next to him assumes a dancing posture, followed by a group of four people – another man in a top hat, a child and two ladies – who are hooking themselves together to better withstand the wind. At the very center of the composition is a gentleman in the back, wearing a hat and jacket. He has to hold on to his hat, otherwise he would suffer the same fate as the young man to his right, whose hat has been torn off his head by the wind and who now has to chase after it. Another striding figure follows, then a gentleman bent over to protect himself from the wind. Next to him is a boy who is trying to take the young man’s cap, which has been carried away by the storm, back from the wind. And finally, on the right-hand edge of the row, a woman whose cape has been blown upwards and whose skirt is being blown forward by the wind. The work is signed Menzel 1843.
Tamar Munz Kaplan, 2024, Photograph by Munz family
Heinrich Münz was born in Nuremberg in 1908. The Jewish family soon moved to Berlin and he spent his childhood in the big city. He studied medicine at Friedrich Wilhelm University, which today bears the name of the Humboldt brothers, and met his future wife Ilze there. But dark political clouds were gathering and changes were on the horizon that would have serious consequences for the Münz family. In 1933, the National Socialists came to power. With its fascist, anti-Semitic and racist policies, this party had succeeded in increasing its share of the vote in elections since 1930, first to 18%, then to over 30%, and finally to the position of providing the Reich Chancellor. For Jews and other minorities in particular, this was the bitter reality of what had already been foreshadowed in the final years of the Weimar Republic: social exclusion, economic repression and political persecution as precursors to expulsion and ultimately physical extermination in the Holocaust. Ilze already experienced marginalization at university, where she was not allowed to finish her studies because she was Jewish. In 1933, Heinrich and Ilze Münz managed to do what probably saved their lives: flee to Palestine. The couple settled in Tel Aviv, Heinrich was 25 years old at the time.
Heinrich Munz in Berlin, around 1930, Fotografie Familie Munz
The Ü in Münz stayed behind in Germany
So much lay behind them, but life lay ahead. They left the Ü in their surname behind in Germany, and from then on the family was called Munz. Heinrich became a doctor and embarked on a career as a cardiologist. His passion was art. This great love found expression in his collection, which he had already begun to build up in Berlin and had partly taken over from family possessions. He had to leave some works behind or sell them through dealers in order to finance his emigration. But the couple managed to take some of them with them to Israel, including the Menzel sheet.
Handover of the etching in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, from left to right: Yaron Munz, Noam Munz, Anna Pfäfflin, Georg Josef Dietz, photo: Katrin Falbe
It was initially unclear exactly what the work offered for donation was: at first glance, the virtuoso depiction looked like a drawing.
However, the motif is known as sheet 2 of the portfolio „Radir-Versuche“ by Adolph Menzel, published by Louis Sachse in Berlin in 1844 and reissued in 1874 due to popular demand. It is therefore a print, or more precisely: an etching. In fact, etchings can look like pen and ink drawings, as in this case. Unlike hand drawings, of which there can only ever be a single original, however, prints appear in editions, so that several copies of the same motif exist.
In the second edition the publisher explained: “It is a pleasure for the publishing house to inform the admirers of Professor Adolph Menzel of the surprising news that the plates of his so-called: Radirversuche, which had long been considered missing, destroyed or lost, – that these plates have been found unharmed and well-preserved during the clearing of our stacks, where they have now come to light shortly before the move to our new building.” (Elfried Bock, Adolph Menzel. Verzeichnis seines graphischen Werkes, Berlin 1923, p. 505).
No similar work in the Kupferstichkabinett
There are already several copies of this etching plate in the collection of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett – but none of them correspond exactly to the copy owned by the Munz family. This is closest to the number 1139-V in Elfried Bock’s catalog raisonné, who carefully analyzed Adolph Menzel’s prints in 1923.
Above the group in the storm are portrait studies of three men, a young man on the right and two older men to his left. As with the group in the storm below, these are also individual studies; the figures do not interact with each other, but are nevertheless related to each other compositionally.
All other variants in the holdings of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett were obviously created before this. For example, the sheet in Bock’s catalog raisonné 1139-IV, on which the man ducking under the storm is still missing from the left edge of the lower group in the storm.
Just as in the sheet owned by the Munz family, a certain part of the composition was therefore also copied separately here. However, it should be emphasized that the present sheet is a variant that was not documented by Bock in the catalog raisonné. It seems as if he was not even aware of it. The print thus possibly represents an experiment, a unique piece and closes a gap that we were not even aware of before.
Not a drawing, but an etching
At the very beginning of Menzel’s work on this study sheet, the composition was completely different: Under the numbers Bock 1139-I and 1139-II, a different group has been chosen for the lower row of figures: Half-length portraits of people with headscarves, hoods and caps, with their coat collars turned up or down. In sheet Bock 1139-I, in addition to a huge etching stain – damage that occurred during the preparation of the plate for printing – a small reclining head can also be seen on the left edge.
When Yaron and Noam Munz, brother and nephew of Tamar Munz, visited the Kupferstichkabinett’s study room on May 13, 2024, Georg Josef Dietz, Head of the Conservation/Restoration Department, was able to point out clear features that identify the sheet by Heinrich Munz as an etching:
Explanations of the etching technique, from left to right: Yaron Munz, Noam Munz, Georg Josef Dietz, Anna Pfäfflin, photo: Katrin Falbe
“Normally, reproductions of intaglio prints, which include etchings, have impressions of the plate edges in the paper. This is not the case with Menzel’s etching from the Munz Collection. This is because the paper used as a printing support was smaller than the printing plate / did not completely cover the printing plate. The fact that it is clearly not a drawing, but an impression of the known etching, is shown not only by the accumulation of ink on the paper surface, but also by several vertical lines – especially at the top of the sheet in the left half of the picture. These are extensions of the group of gentlemen above the storm scene on the plate and thus prove their common origin. The very thin, long-fibered and supple paper on which the storm scene was printed is striking. It is clearly of Asian origin. These high-quality papers were often used, as they cling flexibly to the plate and are thus able to lift the ink from the finest motif lines and produce particularly detailed prints.”
Very few Menzel-etchings exist
Elfried Bock, the author of the catalog raisonné, gave a further clue in 1923 that helps with the dating: “The proofs and the prints of the 1st edition are probably always printed on copperplate paper, those of the 2nd edition on China paper rolled onto copperplate paper or on yellowish paper rolled onto copperplate paper, or on copperplate paper without overlay”. (Bock 1923, p. 506). The etching owned by the Munz family can thus be dated to 1874.
Adolph Menzel created only a few etchings in his oeuvre. From 1844 – at the age of 28 – he was a regular visitor to the study room at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, where he was particularly interested in etchings by Dutch 17th century painter Rembrandt Harmesz. van Rijn (1606-1669). In a letter to his friend Carl Heinrich Arnold in Kassel on April 23, 1844, he wrote: “I spend a lot of time at the Kupferstichkabinet [sic.], enjoy the etchings of the Dutch, especially Rembrandt, who is and remains the solitaire of them all, the more often one looks at him, the more awe one gets of him […].” (Adolph Menzel, Briefe, ed. by Claude Keisch and Ursula Riemann-Reyher, Berlin/Munich 2009, letter no. 156). Rembrandt was and is regarded as the undisputedly most virtuoso etching artist. In the same year, Menzel’s etching experiments were published by Louis Sachse. 66 years later, in 1900, Menzel received the Grand Medal of Honor for his etching art at the Paris World Exhibition.
Collector with an autobiographical interest
The Menzel sheet now donated to the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett comes from an illustrious collection that Heinrich Munz put together during his lifetime. Emigration and persecution were reflected in its profile, revealing his interest above all in Parisian artists whose biographies were marked by fate in a similar way to his own: Moshe Kisling (1891-1953) had moved from Krakow to vibrant Montmartre in 1910, enjoyed success there and, as a Jew, was forced to flee the French capital for the south of France after the German occupation in the Second World War. Michael Kikoine (1892-1968), the son of a banker from Russia, who also lived and worked in France and was forced to go into hiding near Toulouse under the Vichy regime due to his Jewish origins. Or Jules Pascin (1885-1930), who was defamed as “degenerate” by the Nazis and whose works were confiscated from the Berlin National Gallery and the Kupferstichkabinett in 1936. The life of Mordecai Ardon (1896-1992), a native of Galicia, was similar: after 1930, he worked as a painting teacher in Berlin until he was forced to flee Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine.
They were all represented in Heinrich Munz’s collection. Another focus was on artists dedicated to Jewish identity and the development of art in Israel: The Polish-Jewish realist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1979), who died at the age of 23. Or Abel Pann (1883-1963), Mane Katz (1894-1964) and Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel (1899-1981) – they had traveled to Palestine from Paris in the 1920s and some found a home there. In addition to these motifs, the collection also included many French artists: Henry Hayden (1883-1970), Adolphe Monticelli (1824-1886), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958). Against the background of this international collection and the very special biography of his work, a provenance in turbulent times, Menzel’s Group in the Storm takes on a symbolic significance that goes beyond the work itself. Heinrich Munz died in 1984, and his family’s gift to the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett in memory of their grandfather, who had emigrated to Palestine, is a generous gesture that has much to do with reconciliation and the history of Jews in and towards Berlin and Germany.
Dagmar Korbacher, Director of the Kupferstichkabinett, feels the same way: “It is this gesture by the family towards our museum that makes the sheet so special, apart from its art-historical value. Together with the Berlin Zentralarchiv, we are continuously and proactively researching the provenance of the works that came into our collection during the Nazi era. If it turns out that injustice was done here and works were taken from Jewish fellow citizens at the time, for example in connection with their flight, persecution, expulsion or murder, we return them to their descendants, who now live all over the world, often in Israel. The fact that this sheet has now taken the opposite route and was given to us as a gift by an Israeli family whose grandfather from Berlin had to flee from the Nazis is both a sign of reconciliation and a reminder to fight anti-Semitism. We will keep Hermann Münz in honorable memory in our collection.”
Menzel’s „Gruppe im Sturm“, owned by Heinrich Munz, will always be associated with the memory of this Jewish collector and his family in our collection! Many thanks to the descendants of Heinrich Munz, Tamar Munz Kaplan, her brother Yaron Munz and her nephew Noam Munz.
Heinrich Munz and his son, ca. 1970, Fotografie Familie Munz
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