Edwin Suermondt (also Carl Friedrich Edwin Suermondt)

Edwin Suermondt, a trained attorney and art historian based in Aachen, Germany, was among the first to collect Cubist art in Central Europe and, by about 1905, had assembled one of the finest private collections of French and German modernism in Germany. In the 1920s and 1930s Suermondt, a cosmopolitan whose heart was at home in Paris, served as a central figure in promoting the work of avant-garde artists, poets, and intellectuals such as Stefan George, Walter Hasenclever, Karl Otten, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Ludwig Strauss.

Of Dutch heritage but born and raised in Germany, Suermondt descended from a family of wealthy bankers and industrialists with a longstanding tradition in art patronage. Since the 1850s, for instance, his uncle, Barthold, made his collection of primarily Netherlandish and Dutch paintings available for public viewing by establishing the Galerie Suermondt in Aachen; in 1882, he bequeathed more than a hundred works from his collection to the city, where the municipal museum is still named after him (Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum). Following his uncle’s example, Suermondt became an avid supporter of the arts in the region, but shifted his focus to modern art: he promoted Parisian as well as local artists by acquiring their most recent works and lending them to international exhibitions in the 1910s. He also admired Henri Rousseau and Hieronymus Bosch on whom he wrote his dissertation under the supervision of Heinrich Wölfflin at Munich University.

Like his compatriots Alfred Flechtheim, Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, and Wilhelm Uhde, the last of whom he met in Heidelberg around 1902, Suermondt was a defender of the avant-garde and had close ties to its key participants in Paris. During Suermondt’s visits to Uhde in Paris, where Uhde had moved in 1904, Suermondt became acquainted with such artists as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, as well as the collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein. He also became friendly with Robert Delaunay as well as the circle of artists and intellectuals who frequented the Café du Dôme.

Around 1905, primarily under Uhde’s influence, Suermondt began to assemble a collection of French modernist art that he later augmented with work by German artists. Although the circumstances of his acquisitions are not yet fully documented, some individual and groups of works can be identified through ownership and exhibition history. Among his earliest acquisitions were Picasso’s Seated Harlequin (1901; The Metropolitan Museum of Art); four works by Braque including Violin and Palette and Piano and Mandola (both 1909–10; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), once in Uhde’s collection; and other works by Nils Dardel, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck. He acquired a sizable group of paintings by Rousseau, among them A Centennial of Independence (1892; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), Portrait of Madame M. (ca. 1895–97; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), The Football Players (1908; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), and Banks of the Oise (1905; Smith College of Museum Art, Northampton, Mass.), which he purchased from various dealers including Flechtheim, Heinrich Thannhauser, and Uhde. Artists whose work Suermondt also acquired in depth included Josef Eberz, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Johannes Molzahn, and Hermann Tiebert (a Neue Sachlichkeit painter who, in 1916, executed a portrait of a female member of the Suermondt family, possibly the collector’s mother, Anna). These and other works hung at Burg Drove, where Suermondt lived together with his wife, Martha (whom he had married in 1919), and his mother. To expand his collection, Suermondt also commissioned the German painter Heinrich Nauen to execute a series of six large-scale canvases representing different subjects (now in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum in Krefeld, Germany) for a salon at Burg Drove. Completed by late 1913, four of the paintings were exhibited in Düsseldorf at Galerie Flechtheim in January−February 1914.

Throughout his years of collecting, Suermondt generously loaned his paintings to exhibitions. Most important among them were the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, the 1913 Picasso retrospective at Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich, as well as the 1914 Internationale Ausstellung at the Kunsthalle Bremen, which featured two of Suermondt’s works by Picasso: Le Pont-Neuf (spring 1911; Phillippe Nordmann Collection, Geneva) and The Writing Desk (1910; Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London). In 1919 Suermondt, together with Flechtheim, Karl Ernst Osthaus, and Reber, became members of the advisory committee of the newly founded, Düsseldorf-based artists’ association Das Junge Rheinland, which aimed to make more visible emerging artists from the region by organizing events that would market their works nationally and internationally.

In 1923, Suermondt died suddenly of injuries dating back to his military service during World War I. His heirs, his wife Martha (née Compes) and their two children, retained his collection, which included more than eighty paintings, over 110 works on paper, and a single sculpture. Through Martha’s 1927 marriage to the German art dealer and Flechtheim associate Alex Vömel, her portion of the collection, later known as the Suermondt-Vömel collection, eventually entered the art market as early as the 1950s.