Curt Valentin
Curt Valentin (born 5 October 1902 in Hamburg, † August 19 1954 in Forte dei Marmi, Italy ) was a German - American art dealer and publisher. He acted with modern art, especially sculptures. As an emigrant from Nazi Germany in 1937, he opened the Buchholz Gallery Curt Valentin in New York City, in which he acted with the permission of the German authorities with works of " degenerate art ". From 1951 the gallery operated under Curt Valentin Gallery.
Life and work
After finishing school, Valentine was at the Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris working, then in Hamburg gallery Commeter. From 1927 he worked for the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin, where he co-designed exhibitions and art magazine omnibus. As Flechtheim galleries in November 1933 because of the inflammatory slogans of the Nazis went bankrupt and were closed, Valentin 1934 found employment at the newly opened bookshop in Berlin by Karl Buchholz ( 1901-1992 ), Leipziger Strasse 119/120, where in the connected he gallery could act with art again. Buchholz was one of the four gallery alongside Ferdinand Möller and Bernhard Böhmer Hildebrand Gurlitt in Berlin and in Hamburg, who were commissioned to devise -making sale of the confiscated works abroad in Nazi Germany.
As Valentin could provide no proof of Aryan descent - to his amazement, he had four Jewish grandparents, including Julius Stettenheim - he emigrated with support from Buchholz to New York, where he worked in the 3 West 46th Street The Buchholz Gallery on March 18, 1937 - with Curt Valentin sculptures and drawings by Ernst Barlach, Georg Kolbe, Gerhard Marcks, Richard Scheibe and Renée Sintenis opened. 1939 moved the gallery into the 32 East 57th Street in Manhattan to.
The Buchholz Gallery or Curt Valentin was used as a middle man from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ). For example, it acquired in April 1939 five works of art from a Nazi art auction in Lucerne, including three pictures of André Derain, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee and Henri Matisse. In order to facilitate the export of the ostracized in Germany art, he had in 1936 received the written permission of the National Socialist Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to sell these works in America.
1944, the art gallery were seized by the American authorities, as they were in possession of a "hostile alien ".
In 1951 the gallery received its own name, Curt Valentin Gallery. She acted with works by major artists such as Alexander Calder, Marino Marini, Henry Moore and Auguste Rodin. The choice of works and exhibitions showed preference for Valentine's sculptures. He was also in some limited edition books with texts by poets and writers, illustrated by contemporary artists out.
Curt Valentin died in 1954 in Italy, when he visited Marino Marini, of a heart attack.
The gallery was founded in 1955, a year after his death, closed and sold some works on the Parke- Bernet auction in November of that year. Some of the represented artists of Valentin and his assistant Jane Wade joined the Otto Gerson Gallery. According to Gerson's death in 1962 the gallery operated under the name Marlborough - Gerson Gallery.