Image: Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg
The exhibition ‘Von Monet bis Picasso. Jüdische Kunstsammler:innen in Deutschland’ has opened and will be on view from 11 September 2026 through 29 March 2027.
It reconstructs 15 significant art collections formed by German Jewish collectors before 1945 and brings many of their modernist masterpieces, now scattered around the world, together in one place.
Around 100 works are presented, spanning Realism and Impressionism through Expressionism and New Objectivity, with artists including Paul Cézanne, Lovis Corinth, Ferdinand Hodler, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Milly Steeger.
The exhibition highlights Jewish collectors’ pioneering role in establishing, supporting and defending modern art since the turn of the 20th century, focusing on 15 families, couples and individuals and their collecting activities.
Among those featured are the Hirschland family, Clothilde and Paul Schüler, Max Meirowsky, Rosa Schapire and Margarete Mauthner.
Their life stories are presented through historical documents and photographs in the context of the exclusion, disenfranchisement, persecution, expulsion and murder that marked the Nazi period.
The exhibition also traces both the destruction of the collections and the paths taken by individual artworks up to the present day.
