Co-founder of the Secession

It once belonged to the painter Josef Block.

Block moved to Munich as a young man in 1881. He was originally from Silesia, began to study art in Breslau (Wrocław) and continued his studies at the Kunstakademie (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich.

One of his tutors was Bruno Piglhein, a painter of historical scenes. Piglhein arranged a prestigious job for his student: Block was allowed to contribute to Piglhein’s monumental panorama Jerusalem am Tag der Kreuzigung Christi (Jerusalem on the Day of the Day of Christ’s Crucifixion). The panorama, which went on display for the first time in 1886 in Munich, was destroyed in a fire in Vienna in 1892.

Josef Block set up a studio at 75 Theresienstraße. This part of Munich – around the neighborhoods of Maxvorstadt and Schwabing – had a population largely made up of artists, students, and academics. Josef Block lived in the same building as two other painters, Fritz von Uhde and Ludwig Dill.

It was in this studio that on April 4, 1892 Block and 95 fellow artists founded the „Verein bildender Künstler Münchens e.V.” (Munich Association of Visual Artists), which later became famous as the „Secession”. This group considered itself the antithesis of the established art scene in Munich, which was dominated by the portraitist Franz von Lenbach. The co-founders of the Secession were Block’s professor Bruno Piglhein and the “prince of painting” Franz von Stuck. Author Margarete Mauthner recalled the foundation of the movement: „Secession? – The word meant nothing to me; it was an alien concept. But when I heard the names of those behind the movement, it all became clear: light, freedom, purity in art, even when it did not follow an entirely new direction, death to the studio tone, kitsch, and falsity…”

He married Else Oppenheim, the daughter of the banker Hugo Otto Oppenheim and his wife Margarete, née Mendelssohn. The couple soon added to their family with the birth of Anna Luise, Hugo, and Otto. However, for a long time, they were unable to enjoy family life as Else suffered severe depression and had to be admitted to a psychiatric institution in 1903.

Josef Block became firmly established in the art world of Berlin, as he had been in Munich. He was friends with Max Slevogt, Emil Orlik, and Max Liebermann and became a sought-after portrait artist in high society. Prominent art dealers such as Fritz Gurlitt and Paul Cassirer sold his works and he often took part in the Biennale in Venice and Secession exhibitions.

In 1904 the women’s illustrated magazine Berliner Leben – Zeitschrift für Schönheit und Kunst (Berlin Life – Magazine for Beauty and Art) wrote: “The artist is at the center of his works; he has a calm and self-assured gaze. A renowned painter who has a very good name in the art world. Here you can see Die Versuchung des heiligen Antonius (The Temptation of Saint Antony), underneath it Spanierin (Spanish Woman), above this to the right another picture of a Spanish woman, and below that Dame im Grünen (Woman in the Greenery); in addition, the Grablegung Christi (Burial of Christ) and Chansonette (Little Song).”

Block had a longstanding friendship with the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, whom he had known since his time in Breslau. Block often visited Hauptmann on the Baltic Sea island of Hiddensee and in the Giant Mountains. He produced a series of portraits of Hauptmann during this period.

Block was a keen and frequent traveler. Around the turn of the 19th / 20th century, he embarked on a grand tour of the Mediterranean, which took him as far as Egypt. In the 1920s he often visited Italy, Switzerland, and France. He always had his camera with him – he was a fan of the new artistic medium of photography.

Around 1906 Block inherited a collection of Old Masters paintings from his uncle, the Berlin lawyer Berthold Richter. The paintings were so famous and so valuable that in 1919 leading representatives of the museums in Berlin such as Wilhelm von Bode wanted to include them in an inventory of national treasures.

From the late 1920s Josef Block lived in a large apartment at Derfflingerstraße in Berlin-Tiergarten.

„Mr Block’s apartment was like a museum”, recalled his housekeeper, Gertrud Lessow. „There were pieces of genuine period furniture, the precious rugs were literally laid one on top of the other. The series of high-ceilinged rooms which had no connecting doors were full of valuable porcelain, sculptures, pictures, bronzes…”