Collection Leo Lewin
Leo Lewin, who was born in 1881, was the oldest of six children of Carl Lewin, a well-known Breslau producer and wholesaler of textile products. The family firm “C. Lewin” initially manufactured men’s clothing. The success of the venture was determined by the expansion of the product range to include work and protective clothing, as well as horse blankets and throws. Residents of Breslau and the surrounding areas could purchase products produced by the Lewins at the company’s store at Gartenstrasse 7 (today’s Piłsudskiego Street).
During the First World War, numerous orders for military uniforms allowed the Lewin’s to become very wealthy, and it is likely that Leo Lewin began amassing artworks on a large scale during this period. It is known that by 1917, his collection of works by Max Liebermann and Max Slevogt was substantial. In the same year, the collector acquired a spacious villa in the elegant district of Breslau – on Akazienallee (now Akacjowa Avenue). For the new owner, the interiors were redesigned by the renowned architect Oskar Kaufmann, brought in from Berlin. Some walls were decorated sparingly, organizing the space designated for the exhibition of the painting collection.
The villa on Akacjowa Avenue became a popular meeting place for artists who were friends with Lewin. Both painters whose works formed the nucleus of his collection, Max Slevogt and Max Liebermann, were guests at his home. The results of these visits included, among other things, portraits of the collector’s family painted by both artists. Starting from 1917, the interiors quickly filled with works of art. Some of them Lewin acquired or commissioned directly from the artists, while other purchases were made through the Paul Cassirer gallery in Berlin.
The core of Lewin’s collection consisted of works by German painters, including numerous compositions by the aforementioned Slevogt and Liebermann. The third of Lewin’s favorite artists was the sculptor August Gaul. The Breslau collector was the sole owner of the complete “Little Zoo,” a set composed of fifteen small bronze and silver figurines. Among the works commissioned by the collector from Gaul was a fountain with sculptures of geese, which adorned the villa’s garden on Akacjowa Avenue. The interiors were adorned with canvases by Hans von Marées, Wilhelm Trübner, Lovis Corinth, Hans Thoma, and Carl Spitzweg, as well as sculptures by Georg Kolbe and Ernst Barlach, whom the collector knew personally.
Lewin also collected drawings by the Breslau-born painter Adolph von Menzel, amassing several dozen of them. A gem of his collection was a canvas by Menzel titled “Procession in Hofgastein” (now in the Neue Pinakothek collection in Munich). However, the fame of Lewin’s collection was not brought by works of native artists but rather by paintings from leading European artists, mainly impressionists.
It is not precisely known when Lewin decided to expand the profile of his collection to include works by artists from outside Germany. Numerous paintings, including canvases by Daumier, Manet, and Monet, were likely acquired from the Rothermundt collection in Dresden, probably in 1920. A year later, at an exhibition of Edvard Munch in the Berlin Cassirer gallery, he acquired two landscapes by this artist. Among the early acquisitions of the collector was also a still life by Pablo Picasso (now in the Tate Gallery in London). In Lewin’s collection, one could admire the works of three outstanding representatives of the realistic style: Camille Corot (e.g., “Poetry” in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne), Honoré Daumier, and Gustave Courbet (“Grand Pont” in the University Art Gallery at Yale). The collection also included works by an artist whose creativity bridged realism and impressionism – Édouard Manet. One such example is a depiction of a young bull in a meadow created in the summer of 1881 in Versailles. The collection was enriched by two portraits by Renoir and a landscape by Camille Pissarro, as well as an early composition by Paul Cézanne.
A highlight of the collection was a beautiful painting by Claude Monet depicting snow-covered vineyards at Moulin d’Orgemont. Lewin’s collections also featured two paintings by Edvard Munch, reflecting the collector’s interest in the latest developments in art. Both canvases depicted coastal landscapes. One of them was sold at auction in 1927 and soon found its place in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, where it can be admired to this day. The second, currently in the hands of a private collector, depicts the coast in Hvitsten.
Lewin also owned three paintings by van Gogh, one of which was later deemed a forgery. When Lewin acquired them, however, it came with an authenticity certificate issued by the expert on the artist’s work, Julius Meier-Graefe. Attribution doubts regarding the second canvas, “Garden at Auvers,” were resolved a few years ago, ultimately confirming it as an authentic work by van Gogh. The only van Gogh canvases from Lewin’s collection that never raised doubts depicted a plaster cast sculpture created in 1887 during the artist’s stay in Paris, where, due to his numerous visits to the Louvre, he created a series inspired by ancient art. The collection of the Breslau entrepreneur also included a large collection of drawings by European masters (including Cézanne, Delacroix, Daumier), complemented by two drawings by Rembrandt. Both were purchased from the collection of Wilhelm von Bode, the longtime director of Berlin museums.
The economic crisis of the second half of the 1920s must have also affected the Lewin family business because, already in 1927, the collector decided to sell a large part of the collection. The auction was organized by two well-known art dealers, Paul Cassirer and Hugo Helbing. The auction on April 12, 1927, was preceded by a three-day exhibition in Cassirer’s Berlin salon at Viktoriastrasse 35. Three years later, the collector decided to auction off additional works.
After the Nazis came to power, and Lewin, as a Jew, was burdened with additional taxes, the collector decided to sell his graphics at an auction in Max Perl’s Berlin salon. Before the outbreak of World War II, the Lewin family, along with part of the surviving wealth, emigrated to the United Kingdom, gradually selling the remaining artworks over the following years. Books from the rich library once housed in the villa on Akacjowa Avenue, adorned with a characteristic ex-libris designed by Max Slevogt (depicting a youth holding two restless horses), reached the London antiquarian market in the 1950s. They can still be purchased in many European antiquarian bookstores.
This article is based on the book: Magdalena Palica, From Delacroix to van Gogh. Jewish art collections in former Wroclaw, Wroclaw 2010.
