Der Neue Kunstsalon

Located initially on Königinstrasse 44 in Munich, the Neue Kunstsalon was a short-lived gallery space committed to promoting German and international art in a broad range of media including decorative arts. The gallery opened in early November 1912 with a solo exhibition of Emil Nolde; other presentations featured the work of Alexander Archipenko, Ernst Barlach, Otto Freundlich, Paul Gauguin, Marsden Hartley, Ernst Heckel, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, Max Lehmbruck, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Henri Matisse, Gabriele Münter, Jules Pascin, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, and Morgan Russell.

The gallery’s founders and financial backers were Nuremberg-born hops merchant Max Dietzel and Munich- and Paris-trained art historian and critic Dr. Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, who had met through the famous art patron and museum founder Karl Ernst Osthaus. They ran a robust program that quickly established the Neue Kunstsalon as a venue for contemporary art. There Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as well as other Brücke painters first showed their work, and in June 1913 Synchromist painters Macdonald-Wright and Russell made their German debut. Schmidt also represented clients at auctions in Munich and abroad.

According to Schmidt, it was Dietzel’s idea to open the gallery in Munich—a decision that soon led, at least in part, to the dismantling of the Neue Kunstsalon as initially conceived by the two of them. The market for modern art in Munich during the 1910s was limited and the competition was fierce. Art dealers such as Heinrich Thannhauser and Hans Goltz courted the same group of artists and collectors. Despite this, the Neue Kunstsalon had some successes, including the sale of such Blue Period works by Picasso as Seated Harlequin (1901; The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Woman Ironing (1904; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). The lack of both marketable paintings and clients, however, soon caused their joint enterprise to collapse. One of Neue Kunstsalon’s last events organized together by Dietzel and Schmidt was a charity auction on February 17, 1913 to benefit the Expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler. Experiencing personal financial losses, both had to sell artworks from their respective private collections: among them Picasso’s The Death of Harlequin (1905; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), which Schmidt sold to collector Franz Kluxen at the high premium of 8,000 German Reichsmark. Among other works, it was this gouache with which Dietzel and Schmidt chose to advertise their gallery in print in early 1913. Around March 1913, Dietzel and Schmidt liquidated Neue Kunstsalon and split its inventory. Whereas Schmidt moved on to first teach about art in Mannheim and then to direct the Stadtmuseum Dresden, Dietzel continued dealing art, keeping the name Neue Kunstsalon.

In late March 1913, Dietzel inaugurated a new exhibition space (which had opened in mid-February) at Prannerstrasse 13 with a retrospective of Münter’s work. Another move followed only a few months later to Maximilianplatz 12a. Although the gallery’s exact closing date remains unclear, it seems likely that it closed around the fall of 1914, when Dietzel was drafted to serve in World War I. Dietzel died on January 1, 1916, in the Vosges region of eastern France following an accident.