The Behrens family of collectors
Image Archive Hamburg, www.hamburg-bildarchiv.de
George Behrens was born in Hamburg in 1881 and grew up surrounded by art. His grandfather, Eduard Ludwig Behrens, a successful Hamburg banker, had started collecting art. He was passionate about French art, especially the then still unknown group of artists from the Barbizon School. They turned their backs on the academic painting tradition and painted in the open air, paving the way for Impressionism. Paintings by Delacroix, Corot and Daubigny are in the Hamburg collection, contemporary French artists that Eduard Ludwig Behrens acquires with taste and foresight.
His sudden death in 1895 came as a shock to the Hamburg art world, as Behrens was not only a collector but also promoted the art life of his home city. The Kunstverein proclaimed: „We were all filled with the painful feeling that Hamburg's art life had suffered a great loss, perhaps one that would be irreplaceable for a long time to come.“
From: Emil Heilbut, Die Sammlung Eduard L. Behrens zu Hamburg: Catalog (Nachtrag) - Munich, 1898, p. 47 (https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.22373#0047)
The portrait of the banker, painted by the Munich „society painter“ Franz von Lenbach, was not created until after his death. The artist Paul Meyerheim, who was supported by Behrens, recounts the anecdote: „When the aged benefactor died, his family wrote to Franz von Lenbach asking him to paint a portrait of Eduard Behrens from photographs, which Lenbach briefly rejected. However, the family sent another art-loving acquaintance directly to the master, who again refused despite the offer of a high price. The next day, however, he visited the advocate at the hotel and asked him how long he intended to stay in Munich; the answer was: „Until tomorrow afternoon“, to which Lenbach said: „Well, you can take the picture with you“ and so it happened.“
Image Archive Hamburg, www.hamburg-bildarchiv.de
His private collection of paintings, one of the most important of its time, is inherited by his elder son, Eduard Ludwig junior, the father of George Behrens. His second-born son Theodor inherits the porcelain collection and drawings by the contemporary artist Adolph Menzel. Eduard Behrens expands the company and builds a new bank building at Hermannstrasse 31, in the heart of the city behind Hamburg City Hall. On the second floor, there are spacious gallery rooms in which the collection of paintings is exhibited. The bank's meetings also take place in these glamorous surroundings.
175 years of L. Behrens & Söhne, Hamburg, p. 31.
One visitor, the lawyer and patron Gustav Schiefler, enthused about the collection: „It adorned the conference rooms of the bank in Hermannstrasse. In the reception room, the visitor was confronted with a number of cabinet pieces by Menzel. On the walls of the conference room, the centre of which was taken up by a long table, hung the pearls of the Barbizon masters...
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen
...It means something when, during the breaks in the consultation, the business friends and financiers were able to relax in front of Daubigny's delicious Oise landscape, (...) a hunting painting by Decamp and a nymph by Diaz bathing in a forest thicket...“
Federal Archives, Image 136-B0393, Photographer: Oscar Tellgmann
George Behrens volunteers for a year in the military in Ludwigslust - in the dragoon regiment, a mounted unit. He trained in banking and then went abroad for a few years to deepen his knowledge of the world's major stock exchanges. But in 1905 he had to return in a hurry because his father had fallen seriously ill.
Preservation of the art collection
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
George Behrens became a partner in the company in his mid-twenties. In addition to the banking business, Behrens trades in sugar and supplies large quantities of this foodstuff to France as reparations after the First World War.
After his father's death in 1925, George inherits the large collection of paintings. However, it is burdened by the high inheritance tax. In addition, business was not going well and the global economic situation was tense. The sale of the collection is imminent. The banker agreed a permanent loan agreement with the Hamburger Kunsthalle: the city would be allowed to exhibit all the paintings in the famous private collection for ten years. During this time, Behrens could not dispose of them freely and was not allowed to sell any of the artworks. But he avoids the high tax payment and is thus able to save the collection.
Federal Archives, picture 102-16635
First escape plans
Ten years later, when the permanent loan obligations ended, a lot had changed: The National Socialists were now in power. Although George Behrens is baptised, after the The Nuremberg Lawsn but as a Jew. Due to the growing hate propaganda and economic reprisals, he considers moving the headquarters of his bank abroad.
However, the business transfer failed and the Behres bank was liquidated by the National Socialists. And he was also denied the sale of artworks. This is particularly perfidious: the employees of the Kunsthalle, with whom the Behrens family had worked together in a spirit of trust for decades, take advantage of the emergency situation. When Behrens announced that he was now free to sell his paintings at home and abroad after the ten-year period had expired, the museum reacted immediately. It had numerous paintings from Behrens„ art collection placed under protection and they were included in the “List of Nationally Valuable Works of Art„. In this way, the Kunsthalle prevented Behrens from taking his artworks abroad. George's mother Franziska Behrens, who is considered a “first-degree half-breed" and therefore has provisional Reich citizen status, can remain in Hamburg. In October 1939, she arranges for the collection to be moved to the bank's security vaults.
Caption XY
In December 1919, the still young Weimar Republic passed the Ordinance on the Export of Works of Art. Privately owned works of art classified as particularly worthy of protection were subject to an export licence, meaning they could no longer be taken abroad. They were entered on a list, the List of nationally valuable works of art. During the National Socialist era, this regulation was often instrumentalised. For example, works of art were categorised as ‚nationally valuable‘ in order to prevent Jewish private collections from emigrating abroad.
Imprisonment, escape and deportation
Federal Archive, Image 183-78612-0002 / CC BY-SA 3.0 de
During the November pogrom of 1938, George Behrens was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was not released until March 1939. He flees to Brussels, where he believes he is safe.
But he can only breathe a sigh of relief for a short time. In May 1940, German troops occupied Belgium. As a result, many of the Jewish refugees who had sought refuge there were deported to France. George Behrens was among them. He is taken to the Saint-Cyprien internment camp.
The Saint-Cyprien camp
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
At the foot of the Pyrenees, on the shores of the Mediterranean, this camp was hastily built in 1939 - originally to intern people fleeing the civil war in Spain. The living conditions were inhumane: there was no clean water, no sanitary facilities, vermin and infectious diseases plagued the approximately 90,000 internees. Despite this, around 1,000 Jewish refugees from Belgium are accommodated here from May 1940.
One of them was the painter Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944). Like George Behrens, he fled from Germany to Brussels and was deported from there to Saint-Cyprien. It is not known whether Nussbaum and Behrens met in the camp. But what the artist experiences and captures on canvas is also the reality of George Behrens' life: emaciated figures behind barbed wire, a desert of sand, barracks and tin buckets that serve as latrines.
Felix Nussbaum House in the Museumsquartier Osnabrück, on loan from the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung © Museumsquartier Osnabrück, photographer Christian Grovermann
George Behrens helps his fellow prisoners. He is a member of the Protestant Committee in the camp and writes several letters to the American Quakers, a Protestant aid organisation that supports refugees and the persecuted. The Quakers promise to send food parcels.
With the help of friends, George Behrens manages to escape to Cuba. Havana will be his home for the next few years.
The path of the painting: From Hamburg to Carinhall...
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen
The painting of the bathing nymph, also known as „The Wounded Eurydice“, which once enchanted visitors in the rooms of the Behrens Bank, is now being sold - most likely to secure the fugitive's livelihood.
Henschel Museum and Collection e.V. Kassel
A gift to the Commander-in-Chief of the German Air Force
It changed hands several times: it was first acquired by the Hamburg art dealer Brigitte Frauendorfer, who sold it to Göring's chief buyer Walter Andreas Hofer in December 1940, who in turn sold it on to the aircraft manufacturer Oskar Henschel, who gave it to Hermann Göring as a birthday present on 12 January 1941. The painting thus travelled from Hamburg to Göring's private collection in Carinhall.
...from Berchtesgaden to Munich
Central Institute for Art History Munich, Photothek, ZI-0984-04-00-390878
As the Red Army approached during the Second World War, Göring moved his art collection to Bavaria. The US Army found the works there and transferred them to the Central Collecting Point. Among them: the painting by Narcisso Virgilio Diaz de la Peña.
George Behrens returned to Hamburg in 1948. He dies in 1956.
When the works of art owned by Hermann Göring were divided up, the painting became the property of the Bavarian State Painting Collections in 1961. During the investigation into the provenance of the former Göring collection, suspicions of a persecution-related loss became stronger. In 2013, the painting is restituted to its rightful owners.
