Otto Feldmann

The Austro-Hungarian art dealer Otto Feldmann played a pioneering role in the promotion of contemporary art in Germany before World War I, although he is mostly known as a German Expressionist artist of the Rhine region. Feldmann’s relative obscurity is probably attributable to the fact that his galleries—the Rheinische Kunstsalon in Cologne and the Neue Galerie in Berlin—only operated for two short but prolific years, and that extant copies of his exhibition catalogues are extremely rare.

After studying in Munich, by 1908 Feldmann began a career as a watercolorist and caricaturist in Cologne. He exhibited with the Vereinigung Kölner Künstler at the Museum of Applied Art in Cologne in 1908; in January 1913 he participated in the exhibition of the Kölner Secession at the Walraff Richartz Museum; and in the summer of that same year his work was included in the Rheinische Expressionisten exhibition at the Kunstsalon Friedrich Cohen in Bonn.

During a stay in Paris in 1910–11, he joined the group of Northern-European art aficionados who regularly met at the Café du Dôme—known as the Dômiers—and formed long-lasting friendships with artists such as Rudolf Levy, Jules Pascin, and Hans Purrmann; dealers Joseph Brummer and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler; and collectors Alfred Flechtheim and Wilhelm Uhde. These encounters had a tremendous impact on his career in the following years.

In January 1912, Feldmann opened his first gallery, the Rheinische Kunstsalon at 20 Hansaring in Cologne, where he exhibited a wide range of European avant-garde artists, from the German Expressionists and the Parisian Cubists to the Italian Futurists. From 1912 to 1914, the gallery presented works by Umberto Boccioni, Georges Braque, Carlo Carra, André Derain, Erich Heckel, August Macke, Manolo, Jules Pascin, Pablo Picasso, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Kees van Dongen, and Maurice de Vlaminck, as well as the Rheinische Expressionisten and the Deutsche Werkbund. Perhaps its most distinctive feature was acting as one of Paris dealer Kahnweiler’s “antennas” in Germany—a role later played in the interwar years by Flechtheim. This meant enviable access to Kahnweiler’s stock of Fauvist and Cubist paintings for German collectors. As a result of Feldmann’s connection to Kahnweiler, in March–April of 1913 his Cologne gallery hosted a major Picasso exhibition that had been previously shown at the Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich.

Such exhibitions were not only a daring endorsement of groundbreaking art trends, but also a firm stand against the pervasive nationalism epitomized by Carl Vinnen’s pamphlet “Ein Protest deutscher Künstler” (April 1911), which denounced the increasing presence of Parisian artists on the German market. Vinnen’s pamphlet led, in turn, to the riposte Im Kampf um die Kunst (Munich: Piper, June 1911) signed by Max Beckmann, Ernst Cassirer, August Macke, Franz Marc, Uhde, and others. Judging from his choice of exhibitions, Feldmann clearly endorsed the latter position, oblivious of the poor critical reception they elicited.

In October 1913 Feldmann opened the Neue Galerie in Berlin, located at Lennéstrasse 6a. The Berlin gallery’s first show comprised a group of German and Paris-based artists, and the critic Carl Einstein wrote a preface for the catalogue. Two months later Feldmann held the landmark exhibition Picasso —Negerplastik, which juxtaposed Cubist paintings and African sculptures. The following year, the Neue Galerie showed works by André Derain, James Ensor, Moïse Kisling, Manolo, and Pascin, among others, as well as group shows of the Neue Secession and the Rheinische Expressionisten.

Feldmann’s projects were cut short by World War I and the galleries did not survive. In 1923 he married Ida Levy (sister-in-law of the artist Rudolph Levy), with whom he lived mostly in Paris during the interwar period, and continued to deal privately. He was arrested by the Gestapo as he attempted to retrieve possessions from his apartment in Prague, and died at Auschwitz on May 12, 1942.