Alfred Flechtheim (1878–1937) was the premier gallerist of the Weimar Republic, standard-bearer of French modernism in Germany and one of the leading cultural figures and tastemakers of interwar Europe. He also ventured into experimental publishing, producing the wildly successful variety magazine Der Querschnitt. Flechtheim – as a Jew, a gay man and promoter of French modernism – was the emblematic “outsider as insider” of the Weimar Republic. Yet, until very recently, he had all but disappeared from the pages of history. Both the loss and revival of interest in his biography are undoubtedly connected to the contested realm of restitution in regard to stolen art during the Nazi era. Flechtheim’s life mirrors a vanished world that remains profoundly relevant to contemporary discussions about the meaning of Europeanness and the legacies of the Holocaust.
I first read about Alfred Flechtheim on the colorful website, Strange Flowers–highly unusual lives, which brings to life the verve of fin de siècle and interwar Europe through eclectic biographical, urban, and other cultural vignettes. I was immediately drawn to Alfred Flechtheim; his immense contributions and role in shaping 20th century European art and culture leaped right off the page.
A leading cultural figure and tastemaker of the times, Flechtheim was among a group of bourgeoisie underdogs, many of them Jewish, who played a pivotal role in transforming the aesthetics and the business practices of the European art world. Their endeavors came at the tail end of the entrepreneurial environment generated by the Impressionists but shortly before the onset of the litigious machinery and hyper-professionalization that came to define the art world in the mid 20th century.
In his lifetime,Flechtheim established a successful, eponymous enterprise, the Flechtheim Galleries and mounted over 150 art exhibits on a wide range of artists and movements. Above all, though, he was known as the leading promoter of French and Spanish modernism in the Weimar Republic. Yet he also established close personal and professional relationships with a number of important German artists, such as Karl Hofer and Hanz Bolz, and more notably, was the exclusive representative of George Grosz throughout much of the 1920s. Renown for his arduous work ethic as much as for his bonhomie, Flechtheim’s sharp aesthetic sensibilities and willingness to take risks also led to the creation of the tremendously successful Der Querschnitt, a mainstream cosmopolitan variety magazine with occasional homoerotic content.
Flechtheim mirrored the cultural effervescence and intellectual output of the Weimar Republic. As a Jew, a gay man, and promoter of French modernism, he was, to paraphrase Peter Gay, the consummate “outsider as insider”. Yet Flechtheim’s glittering accomplishments, like those of the Weimar Republic, were “out of proportion to the mere fourteen years of its life.”1 In fact, Flechtheim, like Weimar itself, was not simply the product or output of a discrete and bounded era, but rather the inheritor of broader, older European cultural and intellectual ethos. As Peter Gay succinctly observed, just as “the Weimar style was older than the Weimar Republic, so was it larger than Germany.”2
Flechtheim was exemplary among the already circumscribed numbers of Weimar citizens who continued be dedicated to the “free international commerce of ideas,” an intellectual dynamism that characterized prewar Europe but which the Great War destroyed in Germany “for all but the most determined cosmopolitans.”3 The scope and breadth of this cosmopolitanism narrowed down further as the 1920s moved forward and the continental pendulum moved from creative effervescence toward chauvinist, exclusionary nationalism and totalitarianism.
Flechtheim, along with prominent (and lesser prominent) figures in the art world, such as Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, Paul Cassirer and Gertrude Stein, were Jews in the ethno-social sense of the word. Whether as dealers, patrons and artists, Jewish participation in the creation and the promotion of the modern European art world was wide-spread and disproportionate to their numbers. 4 By contrast, Jewish promotion of Jewish-specific art and Jewish art institutions paled in comparison. Insofar as German Jewish museums and their holdings were concerned, Nahum T. Gidal has noted that they “they remained at the level of small provincial collections, scarcely noticed by the Jewish patrons and collectors.”5
Yet, precisely because seminal Jewish figures in the 20th century art world tended to be thoroughly acculturated, irreligious and/or unaffiliated from communal Jewish institutions, most literature on 20th century art wrongly overlooks or casts aside the impact of Jewishness in shaping the trajectories, predilections and contributions of these individuals. This dismissal ignores or fails to understand Jewishness as an ethno-social experience that carried profound implications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries insofar as sensibilities and self-awareness vis a vis gentile majorities. Equally important, Jewishness as an ethnicity determined access and barriers, formal and otherwise, to socio-cultural, political and economic resources and networks. Flechtheim, I believe, emphasized his markedly Ashkenazi features in photographic portraiture as both aesthetic proposal and as counter-aesthetic riposte to anti-Semitic degradation of Jewish facial features.
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El rinconcito levantino 