Fritz Nathan

One of the foremost art dealers in the interwar period, Fritz Nathan played a major role in the development and expansion of modern art collections in Germany and Switzerland. His business, the Galerie Nathan (1936–2001), based in Zurich at 7 Arosastrasse, has been criticized for allegedly selling art sold under duress by exiled Jewish collectors during World War II.

Nathan studied medicine and volunteered for the German medical service during World War I. In 1922 he earned his doctorate at the University of Munich, but, the following year, he decided to change the course of his career and become a business partner of his half-brother Otto H. Nathan, who owned an art dealership.

In 1924 the firm moved to 6 Ludwigstrasse in Munich and adopted the name Ludwigs Galerie. While at the company, Nathan specialized in paintings from the German Romantic period and negotiated the sale of work by Caspar David Friedrich to private collectors and museums. One notable transaction that he brokered was the sale of Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818; Kunstmuseum Winterthur) from the collection of Julius Freund—father of photographer Gisèle Freund and a prominent art collector from Berlin—to the Swiss collector and patron Oskar Reinhart, with whom Nathan had a close business relationship and friendship.Nathan also organized solo exhibitions of nineteenth-century German painters, such as Karl Philipp Fohr (1927), Hans Thoma (1928), Friedrich Wasmann (1931), and Ludwig Richter (1934). Partnering with the firm of Paul Cassirer in Berlin, Nathan also organized a thematic exhibition of Romantic painting at the Ludwigs Galerie in 1931. After Otto’s death, Nathan continued to run the gallery on his own and moved it to 46 Briennerstrasse, where it remained until 1933. After the Nazis seized power that year, the German Labor Front confiscated the gallery stock and took possession of the gallery building, forcing the business to move to 5 Ottostrasse.

In 1935 Nathan was consulted on the reorganization of the Sturzenegger collection at the St. Gallen Art Museum in Switzerland. Because Germany was becoming increasingly dangerous, he decided to migrate to St. Gallen on the invitation of the mayor, Konrad Nägeli, and arrived in Switzerland the following year. He transferred control of the Ludwigs Galerie to his long-term employee, Käthe Thäter. (The gallery was destroyed during the Second World War.)

Thanks to help from Reinhart and Nägeli, Nathan received a work permit in St. Gallen and opened the Galerie Nathan in 1936. He also founded the Society of Friends of the Fine Arts in the same year. Nathan’s apartment in St. Gallen became a meeting point for family, friends, and acquaintances who were forced to immigrate, for example the musicians Karl Flesch, Clara Haskil, Herrmann Scherchen, and Felix von Weingartner as well as professional colleagues, especially the dealers Walter and Marianne Feilchenfeldt from Berlin, who were frequent guests from 1939 onward.

Through his gallery, Nathan sold works to many museums in Switzerland, Germany, England, and the United States, as well as to Swiss and foreign private collectors. In addition to the work of German Romantic painters, the Galerie Nathan actively exhibited and sold works of modern art. Works shown at the gallery included Juan Gris’s Fruit Dish and Carafe (1919; private collection) and Pot and Bottle (1911; private collection); Paul Cézanne’s Skull and Jug (1864–65; private collection); Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Gustave Coquiot (1901; Stiftung Sammlung E. G. Bührle) and double-sided painting Crouching Woman (1902; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart) and Mother and Child (1905; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), formerly from Gertrude Stein’s collection; Fernand Léger’s Smoke over Rooftops (1912; private collection), Composition with Two Dancers (1928; private collection), and Still Life (1924; private collection). One key work by Georges Braque, the oil painting Bottle, Glasses, and Newspapers (1913), is now a promised gift to The Met from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection. In 1951 Nathan moved his gallery to Zurich.

Nathan is known to have distributed flight assets, which were artworks or other valuable objects sold by German refugees while in exile. In Zurich, he helped to build the private collection of the German Swiss industrialist Emil Georg Bührle, which included artworks with various provenance issues. As a result, Nathan’s name appeared on the U.S. government-run Art Looting Investigation Unit’s list of “red flag” names. Nathan remained active as an art dealer until shortly before the end of his life in 1972; his son, Peter, joined the firm in 1953 and continued the business after his father’s death.