Art dealer, publisher, Jew: Vera Grodzinski welcomes an account of the career of Paul Cassirer, the art dealer and publisher who did so much to introduce French modernism to Germany

Apollo, Oct, 2006 by Vera Grodzinski

This informative exhibition on Paul Cassirer is now at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, a post-1945 municipally-funded institution in a former Rothschild townhouse on the River Main. It originated in Berlin, at the Max Liebermann Hans, a former home of Liebermann, confiscated by the National Socialists in the early 1930s, that has recently been restored as an exhibition venue. Despite the Jewish connections of both venues, the exhibition makes very few references either to the wider German Jewish historical context or to the Jewish identity of Paul Cassirer. Indeed, it avoids any mention of the manifold anti-Semitic responses to his modernist ventures or of the personal and professional attacks on him as an art dealer, publisher and avant-garde leader of French impressionism during a period of nationalistic fervour.

The only relevant reference in the exhibition is the biographical note that Cassirer came from a well-to-do Jewish family and that the 'Jewish' (the inverted commas are in the German text) Paul Cassirer publishing house and art gallery was forced to close in 1933 and its directors chose to go into exile in the UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands. By then, Cassirer was no longer alive, as he had committed suicide in 1926. How easy it is to rewrite history and recreate a core episode of German modernism without mentioning that many German Jews, and particularly Cassirer, were at the forefront of the avant-garde and were openly attacked for it, particularly when French modernism was involved. In some ways the excellent catalogue-compendium tries to compensate for this omission. But how many buy such a hefty volume (published only in German), let alone read it?

The exhibition centres on Cassirer's significance as a headstrong and avant-garde art publisher from 1908 onwards. Visitors willing to take the lift to the second floor will be well rewarded: there is a wonderful semi-documentary film reconstructing Cassirer's life in Berlin around 1900, in which he is played by a handsome young beau in a broad-rimmed hat, cigarette hanging nonchalantly from his lips. The film lasts only some 45 minutes, but it successfully recreates the ambience of a lost Berlin: the interviews with contemporary historians and art historians fade in comparison with seeing Berlin and its world come alive in silent but moving archival footage.

The film hugely enhances the static exhibits shown in the grand Rothschild rooms on the ground floor; here hangs a small selection of oil paintings by the leading secession artists whom Cassirer exhibited regularly in his gallery, including Max Liebermann, Max Pechstein, Lovis Corinth (Fig. 2), Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Georg Kolbe, Max Slevogt, August Gaul and many more. One woman inspired many of them: Cassirer's second wife, Tilla Durieux, a leading actress in Max Reinhardt's company. Corinth depicted her as a Spanish dancer (1908), Max Oppenheimer painted her in everyday dress (1912) and Auguste Renoir chose to insert coquettishly a pink flower in her hair, in a portrait for which Durieux sat in Paris during the summer of 1914. It was barely finished when, unexpectedly, the Cassirers had to hurry back to Germany as war was declared, but since the canvas was still too wet to be transported, it was left behind in Paris. It was only after the war that the portrait was reunited with its sitter and hung in its rightful place in the Cassirers' Tiergarten apartment, a focus of the Berlin intelligentsia.

Numerous photographs provide glimpses of Cassirer's early life, his various homes and his art gallery, Kunstsalon Paul Cassirer, which had an innovative reading room designed by Henry van de Velde. However, the focus of the exhibition is Cassirer's publications, beautifully presented in small display cabinets, in calm contrast to the colourful and exuberant oil paintings of many celebrities--including Richard Strauss by Max Liebermann and Heinrich Mann, Ludwig Meidner and Rene Schickele by Max Oppenheimer--city-scapes and the leisure activities of the increasingly prosperous Burgertum.

Paul Cassirer Verlag, Cassirer's publishing house, and his PAN Presse, which published the cultural journal PAN, offered unprecedented opportunities for avant-garde German and French writers and artists to comment on controversial issues, illustrate contemporary, biblical and mythological themes, or see their words in print, sometimes for the first time. They included the German-Jewish lyrical poet Else Lasker-Schuler, whose unique and quirky talent was recognised only many decades later. From its inception in 1908, PAN was aimed at a public that could not afford original oil paintings and were happy to make do with original graphic works on pages that were detachable from the journal and therefore were collectable, even frameable. For example, the first issue offered some 30 original lithographs by Max Slevogt for the popular Lederstrumpf tales. Other examples were illustrations by Corinth for the biblical story of Judith and Heinrich Heine's poems and Liebermann's illustrations for Goethe's poems. The publication of original prints as affordable art was a modernist, democratic venture that proved to be a milestone in the German publishing world.