Irene and Karl Gröppel

The industrialist Karl Gröppel and his first wife, Irene Gröppel (née Freiin von Alemann), can be counted among a distinguished cadre of progressive art collectors and patrons active in 1920s North Rhine-Westphalia. Based in the city of Bochum, the couple made their first art purchases in 1921, and they continued to assemble a collection of primarily German Expressionist art until the early 1930s when the world economic crisis brought their collecting activities to a halt.

The Gröppels built the core of their collection around the German Expressionists from Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter—amassing works by Max Beckmann, Karl Hofer, Alexej von Jawlensky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Franz Marc, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Müller, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as by lesser known regional artists Heinrich Campendonk, Ignatius Geitel, Hellmuth Macke (August’s cousin), Walter Ophey, Johan Thorn Prikker, and Eberhard Viegener. However, the Gröppels also had a taste for the French Fauves (namely Georges Braque and Maurice de Vlaminck) whose work resonated with the bold palette and expressiveness that they favored.

Irene was instrumental in shaping the couple’s collection but Karl, who admitted having built the courage to invest in avant-garde art only over time, provided the financial backing. He supported their acquisitions as well as the artists who frequently attended gatherings at their homes and whom the Gröppels invited from time to time to stay as part of a residency. His income came from directing what had been his family’s coal mining machinery business, “C. Lührig’s Nachf. Franz Gröppel,” which, in 1930, became the “Westfalia Dinnendahl Gröppel AG (WEDAG).”

At the beginning, the Gröppels purchased works from the Städtische Gemäldegalerie Bochum, the local municipal gallery, but they soon frequented other regional and national art firms such as the Galerie Alfred Flechtheim in Düsseldorf and the Galerie Neue Kunst - Hans Goltz in Munich as well as artists’ studios, from whom they acquired works directly. They also depended on the advice of August Hoff and Richart Reiche, art historians involved in the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne.

Following the world economic crisis of the late 1920s, which halted the Gröppels’ collecting efforts, the collection remained unchanged until the early 1950s. During the Nazi era, with the majority of their objects deemed entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”), the Gröppels nonetheless remained steadfast in their commitment to the avant-garde and Irene, who had joined the National Socialist party early on, tried to help young artists who suffered from ideologically motivated restrictions despite her political affiliation. The Gröppels’ collection was kept safe throughout World War II in part because Karl transferred groups of works to at least two locations: their country houses in Gollenshausen at the Chiemsee and in the Sauerland near Brilon, in southern and western Germany respectively. Through the organization of large exhibitions of modernist art in Bochum after the war (including the extensive, albeit anonymous presentations of works from his collection in 1948 set up by the Bochumer Künstlerbund at the Richard Baltz-Haus), Karl contributed to the rebuilding and reeducation efforts in Bochum and the nearby region. Moreover, in the early 1950s, Karl either exchanged or sold several paintings including Georges Braque’s The Terrace at the Hôtel Mistral (1907; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection) and Vlaminck’s Sailboats in Poissy (1909; Sotheby’s London, June 24, 2014, lot 117) for works that fit more closely within the collection’s overall character and style.

Karl considered his collection to be his life’s achievement and intended to sell it to the city of Bochum, but a series of bureaucratic missteps and political wranglings resulted in the municipality’s failure to purchase it. Instead, in 1957, the nearby city of Dortmund acquired the group of nearly two hundred paintings, works on paper, and sculpture for the Museum Ostwall. Gröppel’s collection, which became a cornerstone of this new cultural institution founded in 1949, made its public debut in a 1958 exhibition celebrating the acquisition. Works from the collection remain on view at the museum today.