Max Leon Flemming (or Fleming)

Max Leon Flemming was a Hamburg-based art patron and businessman whose collection of European modern art, assembled in the 1910s and 1920s, was one of the finest in northern Germany, even exceeding local institutions like the Kunsthalle in its breadth and quality. Following World War II, Flemming co-founded Galerie Gerd Rosen in Berlin, the first gallery to open in postwar Germany.

Born near Düsseldorf, Flemming studied chemistry first in Stuttgart, then in Munich and Berlin to prepare for work at the family’s factory, which produced soap and stearin (an ingredient in candles) and had been founded in 1833 by his great-grandfather. His disinterest in the trade may have led Flemming to attend art history and literature lectures while pursuing his science degree. In 1905 the premature death of his father forced him to abandon his studies and to assume joint directorship with his older brother over the family company. In the early 1910s, Flemming moved to Hamburg, where he began to collect art while running an import-export business with offices along the Jungfernstieg.

Flemming’s first acquisitions included a rare Cubist still life by Marc Chagall, entitled Around the Table (1912; private collection, London, Einstein 1928, no. 483), which he probably acquired at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1914. He bought in bulk from collectors such as Franz Kluxen, from whom he acquired a number of works, including three paintings by Picasso¬: Vase of Flowers (1908; Museum of Modern Art, New York); Spanish Landscape (1908; private collection, Daix and Rosselet 1979, no. 182); and Girl Playing the Violin (1911; private collection, Germany, Daix and Rosselet 1979, no. 393). Flemming also collected Persian miniatures, East Asian artifacts, African and Oceanic sculpture, antiquities, antique furniture, and Oriental rugs but the circumstances under which he did are little known. He also amassed an extensive library of rare first editions and prints. Alfred Flechtheim, together with graphic artist Georg Alexander Mathéy, served as his art advisors.

In the fall of 1919, the Hamburger Kunstverein presented Flemming’s collection in an exhibition entitled Gemälde und Graphiken aus seiner Hamburgischen Privatsammlung (Paintings and graphic arts from a Hamburg-based private collection). According to Rosa Schapire’s review of the show, within two years the number of paintings Flemming owned had grown from one in 1917—a dancing female figure by Ferdinand Hodler¬—to over a dozen canvases each by Chagall, Kees van Dongen, Auguste Herbin, Marie Laurencin, August Macke, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Picasso, and Christian Rohlfs. Works by Picasso presented in 1919 included Fille au Café (Girl at the Café, 1901; Hermitage, Saint Petersburg) and The Blue Room (1901; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), as well as the artist’s Vase of Flowers and Spanish Landscape. The collector’s holdings of works on paper also expanded during this period. In 1922 Flemming was the subject of an article by critic Paul Erich Küppers in the German art periodical Der Cicerone.

Unconventional in his taste, Flemming stood apart from the more tradition-minded scene of local collectors. According to his guest book, among those who visited his soirees were artists Vassily Kandinsky, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Kurt Schwitters; dancers Gret Palucca and Mary Wigman; poets and writers Theodor Däubler and Paul Eluard; critics Carl Einstein, Küppers, and Wilhelm Uhde; art dealers Flechtheim and Curt Valentin; as well as like-minded collector Valerie Alport (née Mankiewicz).

In 1928 Flemming relocated to Berlin. The ensuing world economic crisis and stock market crash in 1929 brought the collapse of his business and necessitated the sale of the majority of his collection to other German collectors and galleries; his library was sold by Hamburg’s Friedrichsen & Co. Soon after, Flemming moved to the Netherlands, where he served as consul for some years; he returned from Holland in 1935 and continued to live in Berlin throughout World War II.

On August 9, 1945, Flemming co-founded the Galerie Gerd Rosen together with the antiquarian Gerd Rosen, who also served as the gallery’s director. The gallery’s opening exhibition, Ausstellung junger Kunst (Exhibition of contemporary art), featured the work of Heinz Trökes, a Flemming protégée, as well as artworks that had been defamed as entartete Kunst (degenerate art) during the Third Reich. Other artists showcased at the gallery were Alexander Camaro, Wolfgang Frankenstein, Karl Hartung, Bernhard Heiliger, Werner Heldt, Hannah Höch, Otto Hofmann, Juro Kubicek, Curt Lahs, Jeanne Mammen, Paul Strecker, Hans Thiemann, Hans Uhlmann, and Mac Zimmermann. During the early years, Rosen also organized lectures and roundtable discussions as well as art and book auctions at the gallery. Following a number of difficult years in the late 1940s, Rosen returned to running the gallery as an antiquarian book and art dealership. Galerie Gerd Rosen closed the year after Rosen’s death in 1962.

Flemming is also remembered as a donor to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The two paintings he gifted to the institution—Pechstein’s Morgen am Haff (Morning at the Lagoon, 1911; location unknown, Soika 2011, no. 1911/53) and Schmidt-Rottluff’s Oldenburgische Landschaft (Oldenburgian Landscape, 1909; private collection, Wietek 1995, fig. 41)—however, were deemed entartet in 1937 and removed from the galleries.