Theodor and Woty (also Anneliese Werner; born Anneliese Rütgers) Werner

The artist couple Theodor and Woty Werner, who met in Paris in 1930 and married in 1931, assembled a trove of nineteenth and twentieth century art as well as a small collection of Luristan bronzes from western Iran dating to the early Iron Age. Their collecting activities coincided with the development of their own respective artistic practices between the 1930s and 1960s.

While living in Paris in the 1930s, Theodor and Woty maintained close friendships with other artists such as Hans (Jean) Arp, Georges Braque, and Joan Miró. They were also part of the social circle of Christian Zervos, the art critic and publisher of the French art bulletin Cahiers d’arts. Through their contacts, the Werners kept abreast about developments in modern art. Debates advanced by the group Abstraction-Création as well as the Surrealists around André Breton provided Theodor with continuous artistic inspiration. Woty’s painterly pursuits eventually gave way to a focus on weaving, a technique that she approached as a form of painting. Her woven pictures reflect her engagement with both the abstract and figurative art that the couple began to collect in Paris. Their taste ranged from Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Vincent van Gogh to Paul Cézanne as well as Braque, Alexander Calder, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso. The couple purchased over forty bronzes from the Luristan province and Kermanshah in western Iran that became popular among Parisian artists and dealers in the 1930s because of their aesthetic appeal.

The Werners moved back to Germany in 1936, relocating to Potsdam near Berlin. As an abstract painter in Nazi Germany, Theodor found few outlets for his work because of National Socialist policies denouncing modern art. Scholars suggest that he continued to paint nonetheless, and found employment as a consultant to the Berlin-based collector Dr. Bitter. Woty, on the other hand, enrolled in the technical school for weaving in Potsdam. The couple continued to collect during the Nazi regime. Although little information exists about the dealers that the Werners frequented first in Paris and then in Germany, documentation confirms that they acquired Gris’s 1915 Bottle of Bordeaux (Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Munich) after 1937 from Karl Buchholz in Berlin. They purchased other paintings such as those by Klee and Van Gogh from Marlborough Gallery in London and Justin Thannhauser in Berlin. From Ferdinand Möller, another Berlin-based dealer, they bought Klee’s Structural I (1924; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which Woty lent along with three other Klees to the 1937 exhibition Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The exhibition included Theodor’s own work as well. The Werners also bought works directly from artists such as Picasso. In 1939, the couple inherited the collection of Woty’s brother, Rudolf Rütgers, after his premature death. Rütgers’s collection included Gris’s 1916 Pitcher and Glass on a Table (Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Munich).

During the Second World War, when Theodor was conscripted to work as a technical draftsman, the couple moved their collection several times for safekeeping. They first transferred it from Potsdam to Tübingen, Germany, but a bombing raid destroyed most of Theodor’s artistic production. In 1946, they brought their collection to Charlottenburg, a neighborhood within the postwar British Allied sector of Berlin. While they hoped to emigrate in 1949 and move the collection again, their plans fell through. They finally moved to Munich in 1959.

In 1971, Theodor and Woty bequeathed part of their painting, sculpture, and textile collection to the Pinakothek der Moderne of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich. Their collection of graphic arts, including works on paper, and Luristan bronzes went to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung and the Prähistorische Staatssammlung respectively. In addition to the art that they had collected, the Werners also gave nearly 3,300 examples of their own artwork to Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen as financial assets, enabling the institution through the sale of these items to acquire new work by contemporary artists on a regular basis.