The Art Dealer Victor Wallerstein

Dr. Nadine Bauer
Provenance researcher at the Brücke-Museum

Early Years until 1919

Victor Wallerstein was born in Prague on 21 April 1878 into a musically inclined observant Jewish family as the third of six children. His father was the head of a music school and chief cantor at the Maisel Synagogue in Prague. While initially working in his uncle’s glove export business, Wallerstein studied photography, later training with a professional photographer in Munich from 1902 to 1905.1 In 1903, he married Vera von Goldberg (1876–1956). The couple had two children, a son, Franz (1904–1987) and a daughter, Brigitta (1910–2008), known as Gitta, later Gitta Perl. From an early age, Wallerstein had been passionately interested in the visual arts and in 1908 began studying art history and philosophy in Basel. A year later, he published his doctoral thesis on the Northern Renaissance, titled Die Raumbehandlung in der Oberdeutschen und Niederländischen Tafelmalerei der ersten Hälfte des XV. Jahrhunderts (The Treatment of Space in Southern German and Dutch Panel Painting in the first half of the 15th century).

In 1911, Victor Wallerstein became a trainee at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (now the Bode-Museum) in Berlin and by 1917 he was employed at art dealer Paul Cassirer’s renowned Kunstsalon gallery in Berlin. As an art historian, Wallerstein wrote a series of articles on contemporary art that were published in several journals, including the Sozialistische Monatshefte (starting in 1915) and Das Kunstblatt (beginning in 1917).

The Galerie Goldschmidt-Wallerstein and Its Artists

At the end of 1919, Wallerstein founded a gallery together with art historian Dr Fritz Goldschmidt (1886–1935), initially located in rooms at Schöneberger Ufer 36a and then, as of 1928, at Viktoriastraße 21. The Galerie Goldschmidt-Wallerstein was in the same neighbourhood as other art dealers, including Leo Blumenreich, a close friend. Although the sales focus of the Galerie Goldschmidt-Wallerstein was originally on 16th and 17th-century works, it began dealing also in contemporary art in 1921. A “Modern Department”, founded specifically for this purpose, presented artworks by the Brücke artists and others, with Erich Heckel and Otto Mueller featured in the opening exhibition. In addition, works by Wassily Kandinsky (1922), Paul Klee (1923), Oskar Kokoschka (1924) and Lyonel Feininger (1925) were also shown in solo exhibitions.2

Wallerstein’s Ties to the Brücke Artists and His Private Collection

Long before he became an art dealer, Wallerstein cultivated personal contacts with artists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel. His relationship with Heckel is reflected in various ways: The artist portrayed Wallerstein at least twice: in 1912 in a pencil study, which belongs to the Brücke-Museum collection, and a year later in a painting now thought to have been destroyed. Victor Wallerstein notably portrayed Heckel in a photograph he took years later. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner also knew Wallerstein by the start of the 1910s. In 1913, the artist sent him holiday greetings from Fehmarn. Victor Wallerstein began assembling a private collection of contemporary art quite early. It included works by Oskar Kokoschka, Bela Czobel, Otto Mueller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel.

The National Socialist Era and Persecution (1933–1936)

The severe antisemitic persecutory measures immediately inflicted by the National Socialists forced Wallerstein and Goldschmidt to close their gallery in 1934. The business was liquidated in 1936. In addition, Wallerstein was barred from the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Fine Arts) in 1935, a professional association that since 1933 had also included art dealers.

Flight and Life in Italy (1936–1944)

In September 1936, Victor Wallerstein and his wife Vera fled to Italy, able to take only a few of their artworks with them. At first, they lived in Ronchi near Marina di Massa and, after November 1937, in Florence. There, the couple’s living conditions were increasingly precarious. Apart from the continual threat of National Socialist persecution, the Wallersteins were additionally at risk because of the antisemitic race laws enacted by the fascist government of Italy. As in Germany from 1933 onwards, in 1938 Italy introduced new regulations to legitimise discrimination and persecution of the Jewish population. The situation deteriorated further after Italy’s surrender to the Allies on 8 September 1943 and the subsequent German occupation of the country. Victor Wallerstein was denounced in the summer of 1943 for his alleged “anti-Nazi stance”. With no other means of survival, he was forced to sell some of the artworks he had managed to bring with him from Berlin, including the painting Erich Heckel und Otto Mueller beim Schach (Erich Heckel and Otto Mueller Playing Chess), which is now at the Brücke-Museum.

During the last years of Victor’s life, the Wallersteins surrounded themselves in Florence with friends from Berlin, including the sculptress Emy Roeder (1890–1971) and the painter Rudolf Levy (1875–1944). Emy Roeder and Wallerstein had known each other since at least 1922 when Roeder had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Goldschmidt-Wallerstein. She described Wallerstein posthumously as “the best friend that life ever gave me”.3 In 1943, Rudolf Levy painted what was to be a last portrait of Victor. Later that year, in December 1943, Levy was arrested in Florence by the Gestapo; in January 1944 he was deported and murdered. On 23 July 1944, after arrest and questioning by the SS, Victor Wallerstein died whilst in hospital in Florence. He was 66 years old.

• 1
  See the memoirs published by his brother Konrad Wallerstein (in German): Konrad Wallerstein, Meine Lebenserinnerungen: Ein Familienbild (1942), pp. 29–31, https://rosdok.uni-rostock.de/file/rosdok_document_0000010630/rosdok_derivate_0000037742/Wallerstein_Erinnerungen1942_2017.pdf (21.8.2024).
• 2
  Berlinische Galerie, Werner J. Schweiger Art Archive, WJS KK 35 (1/2). Among the Goldschmidt-Wallerstein card catalogue information listed is a compilation of the gallery’s references in art magazines and advertising. Exhibition catalogues are known for the following exhibitions organised by the Galerie Goldschmidt-Wallerstein’s “Moderne Abteilung” (Modern Department): Oskar Kokoschka (1924), Lyonel Feininger (1925), Curt Echtermeyer (1927), and a sales exhibition of works from a private collection in Berlin (1927).
• 3
  Emy Roeder to Hans Purrmann, 19 October 1944, Hans Purrmann Archive, Munich, no. 1345.