Franz Kluxen

Franz Kluxen was a German businessman who became one of the most important supporters of Marc Chagall and one of the earliest buyers of work by Pablo Picasso before the First World War. Active in Münster, Munich, and Boldixum (present-day Wyk), Germany during the first half of the twentieth century, Kluxen amassed an art collection that encompassed examples of nearly all of European modernism. However, despite the breadth and size of his collection, Kluxen is still a relatively unknown collector.

An inheritance and the bequest of his father’s department store in Münster afforded Kluxen a life of independent means that allowed him to invest in modern art early on. In a 1912 letter sent to Vassily Kandinsky, the twenty-five-year-old Kluxen formalized his intentions as a collector. He stated, “I wish to own a few, well selected modern paintings, and modern: 1) because old paintings may be bought by the state, 2) because I have no money, 3) because the modern paintings have greater force over me.” Kluxen was likely alluding to the fact that prices for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings were already beyond his means in the 1910s, restricting him in acquiring only the newest, and thus still affordable, art. The young collector purchased numerous works from the watershed Sonderbund exhibition organized in Cologne in the summer of 1912. Among those works were Cuno Amiet’s Fruit Harvest (1912; private collection; Cologne 2012, no. 289), Alexej von Jawlensky’s Red Head (1910; private collection; Jawlensky et al. 1991, no. 307), and August Macke’s Promenade along the Lake I (1912; private collection; Heiderich 2008, no. 417). Toward the end of the Sonderbund exhibition, Walter Klug, the show’s managing director, who had facilitated some of these acquisitions, concluded that Kluxen’s was at the time “the most interesting, best modern collection.” Within the next few years, Kluxen went on to assemble an impressive collection that, at times, was said to have included as many as five hundred objects. Broad in geographic and stylistic orientation, Kluxen’s tastes ranged from German Expressionism to French and Czech Cubism to Italian Futurism. Among the artists featured were Vincenc Beneš, Georges Braque, Carlo Carrà, Chagall, André Derain, Emil Filla, Albert Gleizes, Wilhelm Gimmi, Erich Heckel, Hermann Huber, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, Macke, Franz Marc, Jean Metzinger, Max Pechstein, and Picasso. Before World War I, Kluxen entertained the idea of eventually donating his collection to a museum in Berlin. In late 1913, he and the Swedish artist and collector Nell Walden (then artist Herwarth Walden’s wife) agreed to join forces in this endeavor. While Walden acquired some Cubist works, Kluxen amassed an astounding trove of Cubist masterpieces, and although none of them entered a public collection as a gift or bequest directly from Kluxen, numerous works eventually found their way into museums. These include Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910–11; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Chagall’s Birth (1911–12; Art Institute of Chicago), Kandinsky’s Improvisation 10 (1910; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen), and Picasso’s The Death of Harlequin (1905; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

In 1917, Kluxen selected sixty paintings, watercolors, and drawings from his collection for the fifty-fourth exhibition of Herwarth Walden’s Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, which opened that August. Since at least the fall of 1913, the collector and the dealer had developed a close relationship as a result of Kluxen’s frequent visits to the gallery. Indeed, the catalogue Sammlung Kluxen. Gemälde und Aquarelle, Zeichnungen that accompanied the 1917 exhibition acknowledges Kluxen’s numerous acquisitions from Galerie Der Sturm.

Among the works on view were Léger’s Nude Model in the Studio (1912–13; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), as well as Picasso’s Vase of Flowers (1908; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Spanish Landscape (1908; Daix and Rosselet 1979, no. 182), and Woman Playing the Violin (1911; private collection; Germany; Daix and Rosselet 1979, no. 393). Kluxen’s exhibition at Der Sturm might have also included Picasso’s The Poet (1912; Kunstmuseum Basel), a painting whose debut in Germany dated back to the artist’s retrospective at Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in February 1913; Kluxen likely acquired the artist’s Cubist portrait from Thannhauser. The aforementioned still life Vase of Flowers entered Kluxen’s collection via the Paris-based German amateur dealer Wilhelm Uhde, who was an acquaintance of the collector.

For a brief moment in 1919, Kluxen revived the idea of combining his collection with the Waldens’ and that of Hermann Lange (another pioneering German collector of modern art) with the intention of gifting the artworks to a museum. The plan, however, never materialized. Little is known about the fate of Kluxen’s collection following the First World War. Through the years, the collector had sold paintings to secure funds when the art market was in his favor, however by the early 1920s he was forced to sell many artworks, likely due to the punishing devaluation of German currency. A close network of artists, art dealers, and collectors—among them Georg Muche, Bernhard Köhler, and Herwarth Walden—assisted him in this endeavor. One such painting, Chagall’s Death (The Dead) (1911; location unknown), was confiscated as entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”) from the Staatliche Gemäldegalerie in Dresden during the Nazi era. Although Kluxen stayed in touch with artists such as Muche, he more or less withdrew from the art scene by the late 1920s.