The Art Historian Rosa Schapire

Valentina Bay
Assistant Curator at Brücke-Museum

The Art historian Rosa Schapire (b. 1874 in Brody, Galicia, now Ukraine) was the fourth of five girls born into a Jewish merchant family. She grew up in a multiethnic society that had a lasting influence on her. In addition to her native German, Schapire spoke Polish, French and Russian.

Hamburg

Likely due to financial difficulties, the family moved to Hamburg in 1893, where Schapire’s first job was as a clerk for the electric company. Along with her sister Anna, she was actively involved in the women’s movement. Schapire wrote feminist texts on the emancipation of women, predicting that financial independence from men was crucial and attainable.1

Schapire also discovered her passion for art during this period. She was one of the first women to study art history in Bern and Heidelberg, and completed her studies in 1904 with a dissertation on the Frankfurt painter Johann Morgenstern.2 Afterwards, she returned to Hamburg. Knowing she would not find a position at a university or a museum in the German Empire because of her gender, she embarked on a career as a freelance art historian. Schapire worked as an author and translator, held art historical lectures and gave tours through Hamburg’s museums. Schapire’s communicative personality helped her build an extensive network of artists and art lovers.

Supporting the Brücke

Schapire first came into contact with the works of the Brücke artists in 1906 through a lecture by the Hamburg Woman’s Club. Enthusiastic about their modern, colourful visual imagery, she became an avid supporter of the artist’s group and an inofficial member. She championed and accompanied the artists with nearly unmatched commitment, introducing them to new collectors and possibilities for exhibitions. They gave her works in gratitude, which led to an extraordinary and personal collection assembled over many years.3

Schapire shared a particularly close friendship with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The energetic art historian and the somewhat reserved artist met for the first time in 1908 and hit it off immediately. She published the first catalogue raisonné of his graphic oeuvre in 1924. The Brücke artist expressed his appreciation in several portraits, personalised signets, letterhead stationery he designed, and handmade jewellery. He even designed the artwork and furniture to decorate and furnish Schapire’s apartment, creating what she called “the most beautiful secular space in Europe”.4

The Flight from the Nazi Regime

The year 1933 and the National Socialist rise to power represented a massive break for Schapire. The sphere in which she had been able to manoeuvre continued to shrink. As a Jew and a supporter of the modern art defamed by the Nazi Regime, requests and commissions for her work continued to decline. Schapire was even banned from the library at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1935 after she had lodged a complaint about modern works being taken down from the museum‘s exhibition galleries. Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcut portrait of her hung in the Nazi’s Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) propaganda exhibition in 1937.

Despite increasing persecution, Schapire struggled for a long time with the decision to leave Germany. She was very attached to Hamburg and committed to supporting modern artists in Germany. It was not until 1938 that she finally decided to emigrate. However, when the visa to travel to the United States was further delayed, she changed her plans and flew to England in August 1939 with no more than 10 Reichsmarks in her pocket. And it was just in time, because two weeks later Germany invaded Poland, and the Second World War began.

Schapire managed to get a large portion of her collection ‒ among which were many works by Schmidt-Rottluff ‒ past the German authorities and safely to London, presumably with the help of friends there. The rest of her possessions stored in a warehouse along Hamburg’s harbour, including books, several portfolios of graphics and Schmidt-Rottluff’s furniture, were confiscated from the storage facility, then auctioned and disappeared.5

New Beginnings in London

Things were not easy for the art historian in London. It was the second time she had to establish her professional standing in a foreign country, but she was over 50 this time. Through diligence and tenacity, however, Schapire managed to regain her footing. She conducted scholarly research, translated texts and wrote reviews of exhibitions and books for the art magazine Weltkunst, among other publications.6

Schapire also untiringly continued her efforts on behalf of her friend Schmidt-Rottluff up until her death in 1954. In Great Britain, where German Expressionism was met with scepticism as the art of the former enemy, she never stopped trying to convince museums and other aficionados about his art. It was thanks to Schapire’s perseverance that the artist had his first exhibition in England at the Leicester Museum in 1953. A year later, the art historian suffered a heart attack while visiting the Tate Gallery in London – not far from the portrait that Karl Schmidt-Rottluff had painted of her in 1915. She had just given the work to the museum a short time before.

  • 1
    Rosa Schapire, “Ein Wort zur Frauenemanzipation” in Sozialistische Monatshefte, vol. 1, 1897, pp. 510-517.
  • 2
    Rosa Schapire, “Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern. Ein Beitrag zu Frankfurts Kunstgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert”, dissertation, University of Heidelberg, Strasbourg, 1904.
  • 3
    For an overview of known works from Schapire’s collection, see the exhibition catalogue Rosa. Eigenartig grün: Rosa Schapire und die Expressionisten, Leonie Beiersdorf (ed.), Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, 2009, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, 2010, Ostfildern, 2009, pp. 316-329.
  • 4
    Gerhard Wietek, “Dr. phil Rosa Schapire”, in Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, vol. 9, Hamburg, 1964, p. 131.
  • 5
    See Leonie Beiersdorf, “Wieder Boden unter den Füssen. Rosa Schapire in England (1939‒1954)”, in the exh. cat.: Rosa. Eigenartig grün: Rosa Schapire und die Expressionisten (see note 3), pp. 257-264.
  • 6
    For an overview list of Rosa Schapire’s publications, see Bucru Dogramaci and Günther Sandner (eds.), Rosa und Anna Schapire: Sozialwissenschaft, Kunstgeschichte und Feminismus um 1900, Berlin, 2017, pp. 257-270.