Paul Westheim

The art historian and critic Paul Westheim was an influential promoter of modern art in Germany. As the editor of the leading German art journal Das Kunstblatt, Westheim commissioned articles by an international group of writers, thereby disseminating geographically broad news of artistic developments between the 1910s and early 1930s. Westheim was also a patron and collector of art. A Jewish intellectual, he was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and eventually immigrated to Mexico.

Westheim grew up in a conservative orthodox Jewish household in central Germany. At the age of fifteen, he relocated to Darmstadt to pursue an apprenticeship in business but soon began to write criticism for the Frankfurter Zeitung and attend lectures in art history at the technical university there. In 1906 he moved to Berlin, where he studied under the art historians Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer. By 1911, Westheim had established himself as a professional writer and editor noted for his specializations in architecture, the decorative arts, and painting. Deemed unfit for military service during the First World War, Westheim became the editor of the illustrated art periodical Das Kunstblatt; its first official issue was published by Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in January 1917. A year later Westheim founded Die Schaffenden: Eine Zeitschrift in Mappenform, a series of quarterly print portfolios, and, together with writer Carl Einstein, co-edited the Europa-Almanach beginning in 1925. The author of numerous monographs on Expressionist artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Wilhelm Lehmbruck and woodcut printing, Westheim also wrote on Indian architecture as well as pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican and modern Mexican sculpture. In addition, he edited the book series Orbis Pictus Weltkunstbücherei and worked as an art critic on the radio.

Over the course of his career, Westheim assembled an art collection of some fifty paintings and sculptures and more than three thousand works on paper, including hundreds of prints and also acted as a patron to many artists. Brimming with artworks, Westheim’s Berlin apartment, located at Apostelkirche 8, gave the impression of a gallery or house museum. Westheim acquired artworks mainly at exhibitions mounted by Das Kunstblatt but also purchased directly from artists or, more frequently, from art dealers such as Berlin-based Karl Nierendorf. Westheim had a particular taste for German Expressionists (Ernst Barlach, Rudolf Belling, Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gerhard Marcks, Otto Müller, and Max Pechstein) but he also collected the work of French artists Fernand Léger, Jean Lurçat, and Suzanne Valadon among them.

With the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Westheim, who was Jewish, sought to relocate his art collection outside Germany. When his initial attempt failed, he entrusted the collection to his longtime confidante and partner, the art historian Charlotte Weidler, in Berlin. In 1933, Das Kunstblatt shut down in the face of Nazi cultural policy and Westheim fled to Paris. He lived and worked there, writing for the German exile daily Pariser Tageblatt and its successor the Pariser Tageszeitung as well as Das Neue Tage-Buch and Die Neue Weltbühne, until 1940, when he was interned at two concentration camps in France, Les Milles and Gurs. In 1941, he escaped to Mexico via Lisbon.

Despite his efforts to safeguard the collection, parts of it were destroyed or sold by Weidler. Attempts to recuperate his lost property after 1945 and receive indemnification came in vain. In 1954, Westheim obtained Mexican citizenship. In 1963, during his first travels back to Germany since the Second World War, Westheim died in Berlin. After his death, numerous artworks that had survived from his collection re-surfaced on the art market.