At Milan “The Tannahauser collection. From Van Gogh to Picasso“

The exhibition entitled “Guggenheim. The Tannahauser collection. From Van Gogh to Picasso“ to be held at Palazzo Reale from October 17th 2019 to March 1st 2020, will feature around 50 works by the great Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and exponents of the early 20th-century avant-gardes, including Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh and an important number of works by Pablo Picasso.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Al Museo Guggenheim questa meravigliosa collezione viene ammirata ogni giorno da centinaia di americani e di turisti in visita nell’edificio-culto realizzato da Frank Lloyd Wright; a Milano per alcuni mesi queste opere straordinarie rendono nuovamente omaggio al ruolo di questa famiglia nella difesa e nella promozione degli artisti di avanguardia europei durante oltre mezzo secolo.

 

In 1905 Heinrich Thannhauser, a Jewish art dealer and the father of Justin, opened his first gallery in Munich where, in 1908, he presented the first major Van Gogh retrospective in Germany. In 1909, his young son Justin began working with him, gradually taking over the organization of the exhibitions in the various galleries they had since opened in Europe, and the buying of artworks. In 1911-12 the first show of works by Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group was staged, and in 1913 one of the first major exhibitions devoted to Picasso, which marked the start of a long friendship between Justin and the Spanish master, which would last until the artist's death in 1973. During World War I Justin served in the army and, after being wounded in action, was decorated with the Iron Cross; he married Käthe, with whom he had two sons, Heinz and Michel. In 1920 Justin opened a gallery in Lucerne with his cousin Siegfried Rosengart and in 1926 he mounted an important exhibition on Degas at the Munich gallery. In 1927 he opened a new gallery in Berlin. During this period he organized major exhibitions devoted to Gauguin, Matisse and Monet. In 1935 his father Heinrich died, and in 1937 he moved to Paris opening a new gallery. When German troops took Paris in 1940 Justin was in Switzerland and could not return to France. At the end of that year he boarded on a ship in Lisbon and sailed to New York. In 1944 his son Heinz was killed in combat during World War II and his other son, Michel, committed suicide in 1952. His wife Käthe died in 1960. Two years later Justin married Hilde Breitwisch. In the space of two decades the Thannhausers' New York home became a meeting place for luminaries in the world of culture, art, music, theatre, cinema and photography, including Leonard Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Renoir and Arturo Toscanini. Like Solomon R. Guggenheim, he championed innovation in art and, now that he had no heirs, he decided to donate 75 works from his collection, including 30 Picassos, to the American museum. In 1965 the pieces were presented in a designated gallery at the Guggenheim Museum. Justin Thannhauser died in Switzerland in 1976, at the age of eighty-four. In 1984 his wife Hilde donated another ten works to the museum, which entered the Guggenheim collection upon her death in 1991.

Edited by Nicolò Villa