Heinrich Fischer-Galaţi

A philanthropist and collector of works on paper, Heinrich Fischer-Galați was instrumental in promoting modern graphic arts in Bucharest and, through exhibitions and his influential art bookshop, offered Romanian audiences the opportunity to engage with works by artists from across the world.

While his father, Max Fischer, had founded a shoe-polish and metal-packaging factory in Romania in the late nineteenth century, Fischer-Galați, though involved in the family business, was more interested in fostering cultural initiatives. In 1916 he created the Graphica society to encourage and popularize etching, engraving, and lithography in Romania through exhibitions and limited-edition portfolios in the hope that public tastes could be molded to appreciate the graphic arts. As part of the society’s activities, Fischer-Galați organized Bucharest’s first international exhibition of works on paper in 1916, gaining the support of numerous local collectors, including Romanian politicians and members of the royal family, to mount the presentation. Titled Prima expoziție retrospectivă de arta gravurei din secolul XV până în secolul XX (The First Retrospective Exhibition of the Art of Engraving from the Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century), it contained more than six hundred engravings, woodcuts, and lithographs by artists from Albrecht Dürer to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Hokusai to Käthe Kollwitz.

Fischer-Galați’s own collection of works on paper was more comprehensive than most, containing around fifteen thousand volumes and four thousand prints and drawings by 1927. Although its exact contents are unknown due to a lack of documentation, extant publications indicate that Fischer-Galați lent works by Paul Cézanne, Maurice Denis, Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Auguste Rodin to the 1916 exhibition. He may have acquired these at auctions abroad, as he was well informed about European auctions and even provided information about upcoming sales in London and Paris in a short-lived publication that he edited, titled Tiparnița (The Printing Press).

Frustrated with the poor quality of book production in his country, Fischer-Galați created the Romanian Bibliophile Society, also known as Bibliofila, in 1923. He expanded his activities into publishing and opened a bookshop (located in Bucharest, at Str. Wilson 1) where visitors could admire well-crafted books from Romania and abroad. In an interview in 1927, Fischer-Galați emphasized the democratic intentions of the space, which stocked not just luxurious editions for bibliophiles but also new and inexpensive books catering to all interests and incomes. To attract and educate as wide an audience as possible, Bibliofila sold color reproductions of famous artworks alongside more expensive signed prints and works on paper and also offered to procure works from abroad on behalf of clients. Fischer-Galați exhibited reproductions and graphic works as well, including those by Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Dürer, Vincent van Gogh, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, and Titian. Bibliofila helped to bring works of modern art to public attention in Romania at a time when artists and art students would have had to travel abroad to encounter many of them. While some had been available through black-and-white reproductions in magazines, Fischer-Galați collaborated with photography studios in Florence and Munich to obtain accurate color reproductions.

Fischer-Galați also served as the main financial backer of the Academy of Decorative Arts in Bucharest, which operated from 1924 to 1929. Its varied curriculum included classes in applied and visual arts disciplines such as metalwork, textile design, bookbinding, typography, poster design, etching, engraving, drawing, and sculpture. Eventually, it hosted the first commercial space for modern design in the city, established following an agreement in 1926 between Fischer-Galați, the school’s director Andrei Vespremie, and Mela Brun-Maxy, the space manager. While it is not known whether Fischer-Galați commissioned works for his own collection from academy artists, numerous local collectors did, helping to popularize new artistic trends.

Fischer-Galați’s interest in vanguard ideas was also apparent in his support of Esperanto, a transnational and experimental language with links to the avant-garde. He established Federația Societăților Esperantiste din România (Federation of Romanian Esperanto Societies) and participated in many international Esperanto conventions. To this activity he also owed his life: when in peril during the Second World War due to his Jewish origins, he managed to escape Romania and relocate to Switzerland with help from the Esperanto community. He died there in poverty in 1960; it is not known what happened to his collection, which may have been expropriated in the early 1940s before he left Romania.