Photography Collection

In May, 1997 Sotheby's London auctioned off a stunning private collection of modern photography under the name "Helene Anderson Collection". The world’s best funded private collectors and most prestigious museums competed for the masterpieces offered and paid 100,000 Euro or more for a single photo. Today, more than ten years later, these buyers still do not know whether they are legal owners of their acquisitions or whether they will have to return the precious photos at some point.As early as half a year after the auction the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, was able to prove that the provenance of the collection was fake. 234 photographs of the major photo avant-garde of the 1920s, among them Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Edward Weston, László Moholy-Nagy, Umbo and Albert Renger-Patzsch, are a part of the international photo collection, which the industrialist Kurt Kirchbach had accumulated from 1929 to 1932.

The widow of Kurt Kirchbach, Hildegard Kirchbach who died in 1995, had spent the last one and a half years of her life in a nursing home in Basel, Switzerland, headed by Angelika Burdack. Shortly after the death of Mrs. Kirchbach in July of 1995, Angelika Burdach and her husband Hans-Joachim Burdack delivered the photographs in question to Sotheby's in London for an auction and declared them to be the collection of her mother-in-law, whose maiden name had been Helene Anderson. Thus, the “Kirchbach Photo Collection,” the first private collection of international modern photography, changed its name and became the "Helene Anderson Collection," a fictitious collection which to this day appears in newspaper reports, term papers and as provenance data in auction catalogues.The question whether the Burdack’s were legitimate owners of the photographs and if, therefore, a legal transfer of ownership could take place at the London auction, is still pending in court. Pressured by the publication of the true provenance of the collection (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 29, 1998) the Burdack’s declared through a lawyer that Mrs. Kirchbach, shortly before her death, presented 234 photographs to Angelika Burdack, “as an expression of friendship and gratitude” for good care. However, as head of a nursing home and according to her employment contract Angelika Burdack was not allowed to accept gifts of substantial value. And this was not a present of small value: the sales of the photographs in London generated around DM 5.5 Million at the time. Since the Burdack’s were unable to document the giving of the photos or produce witnesses for the acceptance of the gift, Mrs. Kirchbach’s heirs pressed criminal charges against the Burdack’s for wrongful possession and, in addition, initiated civil action for restitution of the auction outcome. So far, it is unclear as to who is lawfully entitled to bring a civil action against the Burdack’s. This is due to the fact that the inheritance question has not been resolved after twelve years of litigation. Moreover, this dispute does not only involve financial assets and real estate, but a significant art collection whose principal items are paintings by Franz Marc and Ferdinand Hodler, watercolour paintings by Emil Nolde, and an omnibus collection of graphic art by Lovis Corinth.

Three different parties have laid claim to this inheritance. Werner Stauffacher, a commercial lawyer from Zurich, who consulted Mrs. Kirchbach during the last three years of her life, had claimed the inheritance immediately after her death. As proof he referred to a handwritten “last will and testament” of Hildegard Kirchbach dated December 1993, the month in which she had been brought to the Basel nursing home after she was severely injured in her flat. Since 1995, the validity of this will has been contested by the Munich industrialist Eckbert von Bohlen and Halbach who relies on a notarized will from 1987, which contains the request to donate the entire art collection, including the photo collection, to the Basel Art Museum. Stauffacher was declared "unworthy of the inheritance" on February 2, 2006 by the Swiss Federal Court in Lausanne because he left, “the deceased, who was his client under the false impression that his efforts were based on genuine friendship and affection, without making clear to her that he was simply interested in payment of the lawyer's fee charged by him” (Judgments 5C.121 / in 2005 and 5P.161/in 2005). After the ruling of the court of ultimate resort, the hopes of the buyers of the “Helene Anderson Collection” and the international press were shattered that the question whether the Burdack’s were legal owners or whether the auction had to be annulled would be resolved.

Stauffacher found a way to appeal the federal court ruling; however, the final verdict is still pending. The parties expect it to be announced at the end of autumn this year. Yet, the legal dispute will not be over by that time. Even if the federal court ruling from February 2006, which sided with the action brought by Bohlen and Halbach, should be confirmed, Stauffacher will be unable to take possession of the inheritance: a niece of Mrs. Kirchbach who is living in Germany and Spain has since appeared. She also claimed the inheritance and filed an action against von Bohlen and Halbach. This litigation will not be completed until a few years.Whether the " Kirchbach Photo Collection“ will arrive in the Basel Art Museum as the collector and his widow according to several wills intended, is still written in the stars. As long as the question of who is the lawful heir is not going to be resolved, the lawsuits pending against the Burdack’s in Basel are suspended. According to newspaper reports, they left Germany and disappeared abroad. While the litigation involving the Kirchbach inheritance is dragging on, our knowledge of the parts constituting the international “Kirchbach Photo Collection,“ the most significant photo collection of modernity, has considerably improved. In 2005, ten photographs that were part of an auction at the Villa Grisebach in Berlin clearly came from the Kirchbach collection.Among them were photographs of Hugo Erfurth, Andreas Feininger, Albrecht Renger-Patzsch, Fritz Henle, Hein Gorny, Charlotte Rudolph and other photographers, who are no longer famous. As with the London omnibus collection, the photographs were large-size prints from 1929 to 1932, excellently preserved. Though different from the London omnibus collection, in which most of the photographs had been detached from the card mount, the photos from the Villa Grisebach were still in the original frames of the Kirchbach collection complete with stamped inventory numbers as well as typed labels with the title, the photographer, and the artist’s hometown. According to the previous owner, he had acquired the photos during the 1970s after seeing an advertisement in the Saxon newspaper, "Wochenblatt," which had been placed by an elderly lady living in the vicinity of Dresden. Even more spectacular is an omnibus collection of fourteen photographs, which was auctioned off in May with Christie's in London under the title "Springefeld Collection.” The handwritten inventory numbers at the backs of the photos and traces of other evidence point to the fact that these photographs too were once part of the "Kurt Kirchbach Collection,” The inventory numbers match precisely the gaps in the inventory reconstructed from the better known omnibus collection. In this respect, the name chosen by Christie’s, "Springefeld Collection", is misleading because these photos were not collected by Springefeld, but acquired by him as part of an already complete collection. The auctioned photos represent a selection of a larger group of 54 photographs that were submitted by the heirs of the graphic artist Fritz Springefeld who died in Dresden in 2005.The remaining 40 photos of this omnibus collection, among them a complete series of photographs by Hugo Erfurth, Ewald Hoinkis, and Willy Zielke along with single prints by Umbo, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Andreas Feininger and Hans Finsler are earmarked for sale at the November auction at Christie's. According to a handwritten statement Springefeld, born in Leipzig in 1914 and one of the well-known industrial designers in the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s, had acquired the portfolio at an auction at the Social Security Administration Dresden for 15 Deutsch Mark in 1949.

Evidently, in 1948 and 1949 the Social Security Administration Dresden organised auctions of objects distrained upon from dilatory contribution payers as well as of furnishings and collection objects found in the houses and villas of expropriated owners who had fled to West Germany. Kirchbach’s villa in Dresden-Loschwitz, together with his factories had already been expropriated by the Soviets in 1945. He had fled to West Germany as well. After the villa had been the lodging of high Soviet officers till 1947, it became state property in 1948, at the same time as the GDR was founded. The Saxon Prime Minister Max Seydewitz had already lived in this building since 1947.From 1953 to 1957 it was used as a guest house by the GDR government. It is entirely possible that parts of the photo collection were still in the villa in 1948 and, after it had been appropriated by GDR officials, was liquidated at auctions via the Social Security Administration Dresden. Among the photos now auctioned off at Christie's are some of those icons of the modern age of photography which reportedly were, according to reviews from 1932, part of the Kirchbach collection, yet had been absent from the London omnibus volume of 1997: thus, for example three photographs by Florence Henri, a still life by Walter Peterhans who lectured at the state college Bauhaus in Dessau , László Moholy-Nagy’s portrait of fellow Bauhaus professor Oskar Schlemmer depicted on a balcony in Ascona along with two famous artist portraits by Hugo Erfurth: Oskar Kokoschka’s portrait from 1920 and Marc and Bella Chagall’s double portrait from 1923. The reappearance of these icons makes once more clear how much the purchasing criteria of collectors were manipulated by the then influential publications concerning modern photography. The Peterhans’ "Still Life" as well as the photo "Corrugated Roofs" by Brett Weston shown in London appeared in the most influential photo book of the avant-garde at that time, the volume Photo Eye" by Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, which was published on occasion of the international exhibit „Film and Photo“ in Stuttgart in 1929. Florence Henri’s „Composition with Spools of Thread“ and László Moholy-Nagy’s portrait of Oskar Schlemmer were among the few select photographs depicted in the exhibit catalogue. However, Kirchbach and his adviser Hildebrand Gurlitt, former head of the King-Albert-Museum in Zwickau and later head of the Hamburg Art Association, bought by no means only photos which had already been ennobled by depictions in important publications. Typical for the Kirchbach collection is the side by side of masterpieces by pioneers and unusual photographs by little-known or at the present time completely nameless photographers, representing the new photographic aesthetics.

Three photos of this kind were offered at Christie's: a remarkably high resolution rendering of drops of water on a windowpane by Willy Zielke, a photo of shoes enclosed by wave foam by Rudolf Kessler, made stunning because of its perspective as well as the close up of soap suds by an absolutely unknown photographer called Johann Graf. Such photographs make clear that the original spectrum of photographic masterstrokes by far surpassed the canon established today. It is the unorthodox pleasure of a collector prompted not by famous names but by exciting pictures, which makes Kirchbach’s collection an irreplaceable historical document. Christie's mentioned the “Kurt Kirchbach Photo Collection“ as a likely provenance of the photographs in the catalogue, which electrified the community of international collectors, and prices were accordingly high, in most cases double the estimate. Florence Henri's reflecting compositions, Peterhans' "Still Life", Weston’s "Corrugated Roofs" and Erfurth’s portraits cost between 20,000 and 30,000 Euro; Moholy-Nagy’s portrait of Oskar Schlemmer yielded a record high of 45,625 Euro (gross). As a result, the collectors are now ready to pay considerable mark ups, solely for the provenance Kirchbach. Photos, such as by Graf or Kessler that would probably not have yielded more than 1,000 Euro without the Kirchbach provenance, reached 10,000 and 18,600 Euro in London.Of the roughly 600 photographs which were part of the Kirchbach collection in the beginning of 1933 only 300 are known; half of them are still missing. Judging from Kirchbach’s and Gurlitt’s collector strategy one may rightfully assume that there is in this part of the collection also a huge number of photographs which made history. The gaps in the numbering groups which are assigned to individual photographers point to the fact that important photos by Man Ray, Robert Petschow, László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky are still missing. On occasion of the opening of an exhibit of his photos in the Cologne gallery Wilde, the great Hungarian photographer André Kertész revealed in a newspaper interview given in 1982 that the first museums which had acquired his photos were the Berlin Art Library and the Zwickau Museum.However, the King Albert Museum in Zwickau was not collecting any photographs at that time. Rather, its director, Hildebrand Gurlitt, had used the museum letter head to acquire photographs for his friend Kurt Kirchbach. Of the certainly extensive Kertész omnibus volume in the Kirchbach collection to this day no photograph has appeared. The unexpected reemergence of parts of the Kirchbach collection originating in the former GDR from private sales and auctions at Villa Grisebach and Christie's gives rise to the hope that the missing half of the Kurt Kirchbach photo collection might also reappear one of these days. The restoration of the complete collection with its 600 photographs would mean a sensation in the history of photography.