Adolf Kohner

Businessman Adolf Kohner was among the most noted collectors of modern art in Hungary in the early twentieth century. Displayed at the elegant Kohner Palace in the heart of Budapest, Kohner’s collection was especially well known for its holdings of major works of French and Hungarian modernism, as well as a significant number of Gothic wooden sculptures, Renaissance bronze statuettes, and antique carpets. Kohner was most active on the European art markets from 1903 to 1914, during which time he built connections with galleries in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.

Kohner came from one of the most prestigious Jewish families in Hungary at the turn of the century. Despite his early interest in music and fine arts, Kohner enrolled in chemistry and agriculture classes at Humbold University and received a PhD in chemistry in 1886. Following his father’s death in 1894, he took over his family business empire that manufactured agricultural and chemical products, in addition to railway construction and banking. He acquired the honorific of baron in 1912 from the Austro-Hungarian emperor Joseph Franz to mark his prolific role among Hungary’s business elite.

Kohner inherited not only his father’s business but also his art collection, which primarily included seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and antique carpets. Unlike his father, however, Adolf Kohner was most intrigued by the art of his own time. He first made a name for his independent and progressive artistic tastes in 1896, when he acquired an 1882 work by the Hungarian modernist painter Pál Szinyei Merse, Skylark (which he donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, in 1917). This purchase signaled a radical change to the makeup of his father’s collection. introduced a radical transformation of his father’s inheritance. In 1908 he sold many paintings from his father’s collection and invested his wealth in French and Hungarian Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, although his acquisitions also included Austrian contemporary art and Norwegian Impressionism, including paintings by Tina Blau, Adolf Fényes, Károly Ferenczy, Gustav Klimt, and Frits Thaulow.

Kohner’s primary partner on the art market was the Vienna-based Galerie H. O. Miethke, which was under the artistic direction of the painter Carl Moll at the time. Kohner was a close acquaintance and patron of Moll’s— his 1905 canvas, Winter Courtyard (today in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), was a centerpiece among the artworks displayed in the main hall of the Kohner Palace. Kohner made some of his most prestigious purchases through the Galerie Miethke, including Olive Trees by Vincent van Gogh (1889; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City), Still Life with Black Clock—also known as The Black Marble Clock—by Paul Cézanne (1867–69; private collection), and likely The Call by Paul Gauguin (1902; Cleveland Museum of Art). Additionally, Kohner had connections with the Galerie Max Hevesi and Galerie Arnot in Vienna; the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris; and the art businesses of Alfred Flechtheim and Paul Cassirer in Berlin, from which he purchased paintings and works on paper by Eugène Boudin, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Gustave Courbet, André Derain, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jean François Millet, and Paul Signac, among others.

Located on the corner of Damjanich and Bajza utca, the Kohner Palace served as Kohner’s private home and was well-known among international visitors to Budapest, as well as artists, art enthusiasts, and local elites. The palace hosted public tours during which visitors could study the impressive collection displayed in the palace’s spacious hall, reception room, and dining room, as well as in three smaller salons. In 1919, during the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik Republic, Kohner’s collection was confiscated and communized along with all Hungarian private collections. In the summer of 1919 many major works from his collection were put on display in the monumental exhibition Art Treasures Taken into Public Ownership in Budapest’s Kunsthalle, where workers and Bolshevik party members could see the works for free.

Given the turmoil of the 1929 global economic crisis, Kohner started selling some of his most beloved art objects in 1930. To avoid bankruptcy and save his business, he sold his entire collection in 1934 at an auction held at the Ernst Museum, Budapest. Kohner died three years after the dissolution of his collection.