Sophie Küppers (born Schneider)

Sophie Küppers, an art historian and collector, was a major patron of interwar avant-garde art in Europe and an important advocate for the work of Soviet artist El Lissitzky, her second husband.

Küppers studied art history at the University of Munich, where she met her first husband, Paul Erich Küppers. Soon after their marriage in 1916, Paul became the founding director of the Kestner-Gesellschaft (Kestner Society) in Hanover, which supported young avant-garde artists through an ambitious exhibition program and emerged as a key gathering site for artists associated with Hanover Dada. Together, the couple assembled an art collection through purchases and gifts from artists, including such significant works as Alexej von Jawlensky’s Heilandsgesicht: Kopf “Lichte Ruhe” (ca. 1921; private collection), Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation 10 (1910; Fondation Beyeler), and Paul Klee’s Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms (1920; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). After Paul’s death from the Spanish flu in 1922, Eckert von Sydow took over as director of the Kestner Society, while Küppers ran a separate gallery in the society’s building, located at Königstraße 8, having been denied directorship of the society on account of her gender.There, she exhibited and consigned works by such artists as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Christian Rohlfs, and Kurt Schwitters and occasionally sold art from her collection.

It was through Schwitters that Küppers met the artist El Lissitzky in Hanover in 1922; they would eventually marry in Moscow five years later. Küppers initiated an exhibition of Lissitzky’s work at the Kestner Society in 1923 and was instrumental in completing his seminal book Kunstism (The Isms of Art;1924), co-authored with Hans Arp, by maintaining correspondence with contributing artists and obtaining image permissions while Lissitzky was undergoing medical care in Switzerland. They also collaborated on several other projects both in Germany and the Soviet Union, such as the 1928 Pressa exhibition in Cologne, for which Lissitzky designed the Soviet pavilion, and graphic design work on the periodical USSR in Construction in the 1930s. Küppers later recounted in detail her life with Lissitzky in a monograph, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, published in 1967 and in English translation in 1968.

When Küppers moved to the Soviet Union in 1927, she left her art collection behind, loaning to the Provinzial Museum in Hanover sixteen works, which research suggests was the extent of her personal collection at the time. Lissitzky retrieved three from the museum while on a visit to Germany in 1930: Klee’s Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms and watercolors by Klee (lost) and Fernand Léger (location unknown). The remaining thirteen objects in the Provinzial Museum were seized by the Nazis in 1937 and deemed entartete Kunst (degenerate art). While some objects still cannot be traced, others were sold through the dealers Karl Buchholz, Hildebrand Gurlitt, and Ferdinand Möller and later reached private collectors and museums, some of whom have since compensated or restituted artworks to Küppers’s heirs. For instance, Küppers’s heirs received financial compensation in 2017 for Klee’s Swamp Legend (1919), now in the collection of the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich. Additionally, the Kiyomizu Sannenzaka Museum in Kyoto returned a watercolor by Klee, Deserted Square of an Exotic Town (1921), to Küppers’s son Jen Lissitzky, in 2001. The Fondation Beyeler also settled a claim with Jen Lissitzky to retain Kandinsky’s Improvisation 10, formerly in Küppers’s collection.

Küppers was ultimately sent to a concentration camp in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1944, three years after Lissitzky’s death, where she remained even after her enforced exile was lifted in 1956. In 1958, on her sole subsequent trip outside of Russia, Küppers sold Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms in Austria to the collector Carlos Kos. It then came to The Met through a series of sales set off by a Sotheby’s auction in 1974.