From Weimar to Westwood

In 1956, Fred Grunwald established the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA. His gift to the university hinged on a promise to donate over a period of years his excellent collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, German, and American prints.^# Born Friedrich Grunewald near Düsseldorf in 1898, Grunwald, a German Jew, immigrated to America with his family in 1939.^#He had survived serious injuries in World War I as well as various forms of Nazi persecution, which included the reported seizure and possible destruction of the print collection he assembled prior to 1933. Only after World War II had ended and he was settled in Los Angeles as a successful clothing manufacturer did he return to collecting works on paper, forming the nucleus of the Grunwald Center Collection (figs. 1–2). Now one of the country's most important university print cabinets, the Grunwald Center collection has grown to include more than forty thousand prints, drawings, and photographs that span the Renaissance to the present.

While the basic outlines of Grunwald's story have been part of the Center's narrative from its inception some sixty years ago, recent research has expanded our knowledge of Grunwald's life and collecting activities, particularly with respect to the nature of his first collection and its relationship to his postwar activities.^# Thanks to a careful analysis of works in the collection as well as recently uncovered restitution documents and other archival materials presented on this website, we can reconstruct the full scope of Grunwald's collection throughout the course of his lifetime, from its early formation in Weimar Germany to its eventual dispersal after his death. The historical record explored here is at times internally inconsistent. Other discoveries have given new dimension to a historical moment fraught with trauma and questions of accountability. Furthermore, the difficulty of conducting provenance research has been exacerbated by the status of prints as multiples, as the whereabouts of individual impressions are often particularly difficult to track.^# Despite these obstacles to our research, a romance of reparations has emerged in which the collection's complex and disputed past prefigures its present state.

Although Grunwald was not a prominent international figure, his struggle ultimately shaped the history of a major American museum collection. This may prove one of the most interesting and distinctive features of Grunwald's collecting history—one that adds an additional layer of complexity to our research, as it appears that neither Grunwald, nor the Nazi authorities who seized the original collection, ever made an inventory of its contents. The reconstruction of the original collection is thus based entirely on postwar accounts, which are likely compromised by memory and personal bias. Grunwald's collecting history also offers a relatively unique case within the extensive literature on World War II–era reparations. Unlike other studies that have emphasized the impact of Nazi racial ideology and profiteering on public art collections, German artists, and high-profile individuals, this study examines the practical impact of Nazi looting on a comparatively modest provincial collector.^# It encapsulates the fundamental paradox of much reparations research: often the most flagrant thefts are undocumented.

The biography provided by Grunwald's son, Ernest, offers a fascinating, though imperfect, account of the origins of the Grunwald Collection. Brimming with seedy antagonists and dramatic reversals, Ernest's biography of his father is the most cinematic of the existing sources. While in some respects it is the most detailed, Ernest was misinformed about some aspects of his father's collecting history, which are clarified in greater detail below. According to Ernest, Fred Grunwald was drafted into the German army and served on the western front until 1918, when the bones of his left leg were shattered. Despite two years in the hospital undergoing extensive surgeries, the leg was eventually amputated at the knee. His interest in German graphic arts of the period developed while he was in the hospital, and he responded sympathetically to the frustration they expressed (fig. 3). It was also during this period of convalescence that he met his future wife, Gertrud Löwenstein (Trude to her friends), a young single woman from a wealthy family who volunteered by consoling Jewish veterans. During the early part of his marriage, Grunwald worked for his sister's husband, Hermann Wistinetzki, in Wuppertal, a town about thirty kilometers east of Düsseldorf, and their two children, Ernest and Lotte, were born. In 1930 he established his own business, which prospered into the early years of the Third Reich. It wasn't until 1937 when Grunwald decided that they needed to emigrate after their house was raided and he was questioned by the Gestapo.

While many of the 153 prints and illustrated books by the aforementioned artists that remain in the Grunwald Center's collection can be traced to postwar purchases, it is apparent that as Grunwald matured as a collector he came to recognize and appreciate rarity. His selection of works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, to take just one example, contains some remarkable objects, including an unrecorded state of the artist's color drypoint Two People Seated near a Lamp (fig. 7). On the reverse, there are very faint drypoint impressions of studies of a seated figure and a portrait head (fig. 8). Among the most exceptional rarities are a pair of books that relate to Kirchner's illustrations for Georg Heym's Umbra Vitae, a book of poetry republished in Munich in 1924. This remarkable two-volume work, set in gorgeous green and black Secession-style bindings, presents designs, drawings, and proofs from the 1924 publication inset into its own pages (figs. 9–11).^#

The other two accounts of Grunwald's early collection derive from reparations claims that he filed in the late 1950s, and they differ significantly, both from one another and from the list of works discussed thus far. Grunwald's restitution documentation is particularly compelling, and German restitution policy provides an important context for understanding the difficulties he faced in seeking to recuperate his losses. The first restitution legislation passed by the American military government on November 11, 1947, known as Military Law No. 59, became the restitution standard in the occupied zones. It strove to make restitution possible for all ascertainable property that had been taken away on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, or political opposition to the regime. Yet German authorities, frequently the same persons who had implemented the discriminatory measures in the first place, often opposed or attempted to reduce the scale of restitution, which they viewed as a form of arbitrary punishment rather than as fair recompense. Treaty provisions reinstating West German sovereignty placed limits on West Germany's liability for stolen goods that paled in comparison to realistic estimates.

Exacerbating this situation, the Federal Republic of Germany did not pass legislation that included a mechanism for actual payment until 1957. Only then, with the July 15, 1957, amendment to the BRüG, did the government acknowledge liability for Nazi seizures that took place elsewhere in Europe or make restitution possible for lost property.^# Even then, claimants had to prove that the loot was taken within or moved to the territory of modern West Germany; East Germany categorically rejected the restitution of private property as anathema to the socialist state. Eastern bloc residents were excluded from West Germany's settlement mechanism until after German reunification decades later.^# Furthermore, compensation for persecuted Jews was subject to a strict "material reductionism" by German restitution authorities that required precise listings of individual losses. Like many claimants, Grunwald's restitution claims provided an autobiographical narrative of personal, physical, and financial struggle condensed into a discrete parcel of bank slips and itemized lists.^# The process itself was challenging: it took Grunwald and his attorney more than a decade to finalize his settlement while different inquiries and complaints were routed through the labyrinthine German bureaucracy, and some claims were still being litigated after his death.^#

According to the initial application filed on Grunwald's behalf, the head of the Gestapo as well as several plainclothes officers arrived at his residence one early morning in May of 1934 or 1935.^# They used his membership in the B'nai B'rith lodge as a pretext to search the apartment, arrest him, and secretly remove eight to ten portfolios kept in an antique cabinet in the master bedroom. When Grunwald was released, he realized that roughly four to five hundred sheets from his collection were missing, though the application states that he is unable to provide an itemized list. However, it does note names of artists whose works were seized, including some mentioned above, like Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Franz Marc, as well as listing individual titles, including several by Edvard Munch. The list offers a much more focused account of what was in the collection, hinging almost exclusively on artists associated with either Die Brücke in Dresden or Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. However, even this list is of limited value because details are scant and not all of the named works are securely identifiable.

More, and sometimes contradictory, details emerge in the final paperwork filed in 1960 that marked the resolution of Grunwald's art restitution claim, for which he was awarded 125,000 deutsche marks, at the time equivalent to roughly US $31,000.^# This paperwork includes a statement of testimony by Grunwald's former landlord Alice Beitzen which explains that she lived in the same building as the claimant and was familiar with his art collection. The seizure Beitzen witnessed happened in 1934 or 1935. The homes of influential Jews were being searched, and Grunwald was being targeted. Beitzen testified that Grunwald knew this was coming, and warned her in advance, even going so far as to ask if she would open the door for the Gestapo when they arrived. She says, "I can still remember clearly that they came one morning just shortly before seven o'clock. . . . Outside there were three or four people in civilian clothes, who pushed me aside and said, 'Where is the Jew?'"^# She followed them upstairs and watched from the next room as they tore the bedroom apart and rummaged in the cabinet where the art was kept. She couldn't see what was removed, but noted that there were three or four thick portfolios under their arms when they left. Later, Grunwald told her that they had only left behind the work by Jewish artists. She couldn't remember who the artists were, admitting, "Even at that time the names of Modern artists were not so familiar to us. Munch and Feininger are names that I still remember."^# In Beitzen's account certain details match the initial application—the intimidating physical stature of the Gestapo chief, for example, or the location of the materials in a cabinet in the master bedroom—while others diverge—three or four portfolios are mentioned, for example, not eight or ten.

The second witness testimony is provided by Alex Vömel, a former employee of Alfred Flechtheim who took over Flechtheim's Düsseldorf gallery in 1933.^# Vömel recalls that Grunwald was a frequent visitor and patron of Flechtheim, and that he himself had visited Grunwald's house once in 1928. Vömel corroborates what was in the application—that for the most part, Grunwald owned works by Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter artists. However, he also adds, "Of course I cannot now recount all of the particulars that I observed, still I know that the claimant had drawings, woodcuts, etchings and lithographs by Kirchner, Gauguin, Klee, Kollwitz, Kandinsky, Macke, Marc, Otto Mueller, Ensor, Toulouse-Lautrec, Barlach, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Beckmann, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso and others" (figs. 12–17).^# In addition to the German artists that we might expect to see in Vömel's list, he has added some important French and Belgian Modernists.

Concurrent to his dealings with Prouté, Grunwald was reconstituting his late nineteenth- and twentieth-century German collection, working primarily through select German and Swiss dealers such as Ackermann and Sauerwein in Munich, Wolfgang Ketterer in Stuttgart, and Kornfeld and Klipstein in Bern.^# Purchases from Ketterer included notable works by German artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Dix as well as the occasional French works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Marc Chagall, Paul Gauguin, and Maurice de Vlaminck. His purchases from Ackermann and Sauerwein of more than 140 works by German and Scandinavian artists were of particular quality and interest. They included rare early states, hand-colored impressions, and trial proofs that are among the Grunwald Center's most significant examples of German Modernist graphic art (figs. 20–21).^# Despite the importance of the German dealers for the growth of certain areas of his collection, Grunwald appears to have preferred doing business with the Parisians, confessing to Feinblatt that he felt much more comfortable with the reserved cordiality of Prouté than with the false warmth of Ketterer and his Teutonic colleagues.^#

Grunwald's postwar collecting was also recuperative, and there are demonstrated instances where works in the Grunwald Center collection correspond conspicuously to items he claimed to have lost. This is true of the Degas print of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre (fig. 22), as well a host of other works: bathing scenes by Kirchner; color woodcuts by Gauguin; works by Kollwitz, including Weavers on the March and Bar in Hamburg; Wassily Kandinsky's Little Worlds series; and at least two dozen other examples (figs. 23–24). The most poignant moment of Grunwald's reconstructive postwar collecting was Otto Mueller's gypsy series. Frederick Wight, as well as the Grunwald Center's founding curator, E. Maurice Bloch, both stated that this series of works celebrated Grunwald's return to collecting after the hiatus induced by exile and war.^# They are also among the works enumerated in the 1960 affidavit of what was seized, and the Gypsy Madonna is mentioned by name (fig. 25).^# Such images must have had incredible resonance with Grunwald. Mueller was an artist who had been associated with both Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, so would have been very familiar to him. 

Like Grunwald, Mueller also suffered a debilitating injury during World War I. Several of Mueller's paintings and one of the lithographs from this group were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937, labeled as avatars of racial and moral depravity and the "Jewish longing for the wilderness."^# Looking back from a more stable position, the image of an itinerant family next to a covered wagon must have recalled Grunwald's own experience of exile, even if his emigration involved sailing on a Cunard ocean liner and not bouncing along dirt roads (fig. 26). This work would have carried another layer of meaning for Grunwald, something like what has been ascribed to Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia. According to Bloch, this set of works was a gift from Grunwald's first wife, Trude, who was killed just two years later in an automobile accident.^# Her death occurred in 1949, the same year that Grunwald returned to collecting seriously, according to Ernest.^# The Mueller print embodies the contiguity between the two phases of the collection. Grunwald was making up for material and nonmaterial losses alike, and his collecting activities in the last two decades of his life must have inflected his recollections of the past.

While attempting to recover his losses, Grunwald's collection also expanded in new directions. Feinblatt acquired a slew of contemporary Italian prints on his behalf in 1955 (fig. 27). Their correspondence demonstrates Grunwald's pragmatism, as his collecting was increasingly entrusted to third parties due to poor health. He wrote to her, "I am very interested in the prints by Morandi. . . . If you feel that they are very high buy just one or two, if you feel they are high you can buy more and if you feel they are not too high you can buy even more."^# The 1955 Contemporary Italian Prints exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum (now LACMA) was drawn almost exclusively from Grunwald's collection.^# He regularly lent work to exhibitions in and around Southern California, and his collection was featured in two landmark print exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum. Grunwald was a driving force in the 1954 exhibition of Modern German printmaking, and his entire collection was included in the 1955 Renoir retrospective.^# Grunwald's desire to make his private collection available to larger, public institutions would shortly become a defining aspect of his legacy.

The growth of Grunwald's postwar print collection and the founding of the Grunwald Center proper coincided with a renaissance in American printmaking, which witnessed the foundation of several important print publishers and printmaking workshops, including the Contemporaries Graphic Art Centre (now Pratt Graphics Center), New York, in 1955; Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York, in 1959; and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles, in 1960.^# Grunwald collected American prints extensively. He became a good friend and close supporter of June Wayne and her fledgling Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which helped redefine the medium of lithography for contemporary artists. The first exhibition of Tamarind prints opened at the UCLA Art Galleries in 1962 under the auspices of the Grunwald Center and its founding director, E. Maurice Bloch, and subsequently traveled to ten American cities throughout the Midwest and the West Coast.^# Grunwald was also closely associated with the UCLA printmaker John Paul Jones, whose marvelous intaglio prints spurred the Los Angeles print renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.^# He corresponded with Lessing Rosenwald, whose collection forms the basis of the print cabinet at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and maintained close contacts with West Coast dealers such as Jake Zeitlin, O. P. Reed, and R. E. Lewis.^# Grunwald became an integral part of the flourishing print culture of Southern California, a phenomenon that in turn laid the foundation for the development of Los Angeles as an independent and cosmopolitan artistic center.

When Grunwald's relationship with the Los Angeles County Museum soured, for reasons that remain subject to speculation, UCLA became the recipient of his generosity.^# He established the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation in 1956 with a twofold promise to donate works from his collection on an annual basis, and to leave the remainder to UCLA in his will.^# A letter to the university's chancellor heralded Grunwald's gift as "one of the most significant proposals for implementing and enriching the teaching program for the arts and humanities that could come to any University."^# E. Maurice Bloch, a newly appointed UCLA professor and former curator at New York's Cooper Union, was appointed to oversee the new center, which was temporarily located in a small closet in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning building and relocated to the Dickson Art Center after Grunwald died.^#

At Grunwald's death in 1964 he had donated more than two thousand works. But past is prologue, as they say, and this romance of reparation would not wrap up quite as neatly as Grunwald had intended. He did not actually make a provision for UCLA in his will, so fewer than one hundred works from his estate were given to the foundation; the remainder was divided up between his children and second wife.^# While his heirs donated many of the works bequeathed to them and remained major supporters of the fledgling institution, an important group of approximately sixty works was sold by his widow, Saidee, after 1977 through the San Francisco dealer R. E. Lewis.^# Of the fifty-three Renoirs that he had purchased through Prouté, a complete representation of the artist's printed works, the Grunwald Center retained only one (fig. 28).

Nevertheless, this tale of loss and restitution has a happy ending. The 3,236 works gifted to the Center from Grunwald's collection balance incredible range with areas of significant depth and offer a rich testimony of a remarkable lifetime of collecting. Prints from Grunwald's collection have been featured in countless scholarly publications and are continually loaned to major museums across the country. The Grunwald Center provided a model for other institutions, like LACMA's Robert Gore Rifkind Center, and it remains a vital resource for students, scholars, and the general public. Today, more than fifty years since the Grunwald Center's founding, Fred Grunwald's legacy continues to flourish.