Littmann was a admirer of the work of artists belonging to the well-known group “Die Brücke.” One of its representatives was Otto Mueller. This painter and graphic artist, born in Liebenau (now Lubawka), assumed the position of professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breslau in 1919. During his long acquaintance with the artist, Littmann acquired a total of 130 of Mueller’s works, including two paintings. One of them was probably painted in 1919 and depicts the image of two busts of women (currently owned by the Ludwig Museum in Cologne). The second canvas, created around 1918 and now part of the Kunsthalle collection in Emden, portrays a nude young man standing in front of two standing and one sitting girl. One of Mueller’s drawings from Littmann’s collection, a sketch with green pencil depicting naked girls among trees, is now part of the Cabinet of Prints in Berlin museums. All three compositions mentioned above have been returned to the collector’s descendants in recent years and then repurchased from them for the collections of the institutions where they were located.
An interesting story is associated with both of the mentioned Mueller paintings. After Littmann’s death, they were supposed to be put up for sale at Max Perl’s auction house in Berlin in February 1935. However, two days before the planned auction, they were confiscated by the Gestapo, along with 62 works by other contemporary artists, due to their “pornographic” and “Bolshevik” character. They were handed over to the Berlin National Gallery to determine whether they had any artistic value in line with the Nazi aesthetic canon. The then director of this institution selected 18 works from this group, including two Mueller paintings from Littmann’s collection, thus saving them. The remaining works were deemed “degenerate art” and were burned in March 1936.
Over a year later, in July 1937, an exhibition titled significantly “Entartete Kunst,” or degenerate art, opened in Munich. Among the more than six hundred exhibited works, viewers could see four paintings from Littmann’s collection.
Painting Information:
glue paint on canvas, dimensions: 120 x 88.2 cm, current owner: Kunsthalle, Emden.
Literature: Achim Sommer, Otto Muellers „Knabe vor zwei stehenden und einem sitzendem Mädchen (Landschaft mit Figuren)“ von 1918/19 – Ein expressionistisches Gemälde aus der ehemaligen Sammlung Dr. Ismar Littmann, Breslau [w:] Beiträge öffentlicher Einrichtungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zum Umgang mit Kulturgütern aus ehemaligen jüdischen Besitz, red. Ulf Häder, Magdeburg 2001, s. 92-103.
