Gottlieb Friedrich Reber

A businessman active within the textile trade and, from 1924, a Freemason, Gottlieb Friedrich Reber was also an early twentieth-century collector and patron of the arts. His collection, which included non-Western, ancient, and medieval art, as well as European paintings dating from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, was most renowned for its holdings of works by Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. In the 1920s, Reber turned to collecting almost exclusively works by living artists, in particular the aforementioned Picasso and Juan Gris. Further acquisitions of works by Georges Braque and Fernand Léger cemented Reber’s reputation as a key supporter of major Cubist painters in the years after the end of World War I.

Reber was well known in international artistic circles during his collecting career, which began in the first decade of the twentieth century. Professional success and his marriage in 1907 to Erna Sander, the daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, provided him with adequate financial resources to become a committed patron of the arts. While rarely credited, she partook in her husband’s collecting endeavors. Reber’s initial focus as a collector was on French Realist, Impressionist, and post-Impressionist painting. To date, he is known to have acquired more than a dozen works on paper and thirty paintings by Cézanne, among them Young Man and Skull (1896–98; Barnes Collection) and The House in Aix (Jas de Bouffa) (1885–87; Prague, NárodníGalerie). His holdings also featured examples by Camille Corot, Gustav Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh. Reber acquired his knowledge of art through his own efforts, befriending many dealers and promoters of modern and contemporary art along the way. Occasionally, he also acted as a marchand-amateur (private art dealer-collector), selling and exchanging works from his collection. In Germany, he established a rapport with the dealers Alfred Flechtheim and Paul Cassirer. In 1913, Cassirer presented a selection of Reber’s paintings at his Berlin gallery as part of an exhibition tour of the collection. He was also a long-term client of the Munich- and Lucerne-based Moderne Galerie run by Heinrich Thannhauser, Justin Thannhauser, and Siegfried Rosengart. In addition, Reber developed lasting relationships with the Paris-based galleries of Ambroise Vollard and Bernheim Jeune. Reber subscribed to the short-lived literary and artistic review Les Soirées de Paris (1912–14), founded by Guillaume Apollinaire; participated in the German artist society Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler, or The Sonderbund, before World War I; and in 1919 was among the founding members of Das junge Rheinland, an association of avant-garde fine and commercial artists, architects, typographers, and writers. Among the numerous critics and art historians with whom the collector and his wife corresponded were Carl Einstein and Julius Meier-Graefe, each of whom published on Reber and his collection.

Until 1919, Reber, together with his family, lived and worked in his native Germany, chiefly in Barmen (now Wuppertal). However, alarmed by the social and political unrest that engulfed Germany after World War I and worried about the possibility of his assets, including his collection, being confiscated, Reber, his wife, and their daughter, Gisela (later Gisela Pudelko), relocated to Switzerland but retained their German citizenship. In addition, Reber maintained a permanent address in Germany until 1923, the year when his donations of funds to the universities of Innsbruck and Tübingen, where his father and two of his brothers had studied, earned him an honorary doctorate and the title of honorary senator, respectively. From 1921 to 1928 the family lived in Lugano, and between late 1928 and the early 1940s at the Château de Béthusy in Lausanne, both of which became showcases for Reber’s extensive and continuously evolving art collection. Before the outbreak of World War II, the Rebers also kept an apartment in Paris.

Beginning around 1922, Reber became an ardent patron of Picasso, sourcing works primarily from Paris-based dealers Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Léonce and Paul Rosenberg, and Vollard. Notably, to date, Reber is not known to have been among the buyers at the four Galerie Kahnweiler and Wilhelm Uhde sequestration sales that took place in Paris between 1921 and 1923, even though they included some of the paintings he would eventually own. Over the course of a decade, Reber amassed more than one hundred and sixty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Picasso dating from 1905 to 1927. Around 1925 his interest pivoted more decidedly toward Cubism and particularly Juan Gris; he eventually owned nearly ninety pictures by the artist. Braque and Léger were also represented in his collection, with thirty-one and twenty-three works respectively. The collection included Braque’s Trees at L’Estaque (1908; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection) and Picasso’s Portrait of Clovis Sagot (1909; Hamburger Kunsthalle), Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair (1913–14; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection), Three Musicians (1921; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Mother and Child (1921; Art Institute of Chicago). Among Gris’s paintings formerly in Reber’s collection are Harlequin with a Guitar (1917; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Still Life with Checked Tablecloth (1915; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection). In 1930, Léger executed decorative paintings in oil on canvas for the dining room at the Château de Béthusy.

Reber also kept up with the contemporary art scene in Germany. By the mid-1920s, Reber was corresponding regularly with Carl Einstein. The original edition of Einstein’s publication Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1926) contained twenty-five photographic reproductions of works from Reber’s collection, and the chapter on Cubism in the second (revised) edition, published in 1928, included a dedication to him. Einstein’s promotion of Reber’s collection continued in the pages of the short-lived Surrealist art magazine Documents (1929–31), edited by Georges Bataille, for which Reber served on the editorial board and possibly as a co-financier. He also remained active as a benefactor of museums, donating the 1911 painting Der Kaiserdamm by Max Beckmann to the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1920 (the artist later painted the dealer’s portrait [Museum Ludwig, Cologne]).

The 1929 stock market crash damaged Reber’s finances, forcing him to gradually sell off his collection. Still, Reber continued to play a role as a major lender to, for example, the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1929; Picasso’s first museum retrospective, which took place in 1932 at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris and Kunsthaus Zürich; Braque’s retrospective at Kunsthalle Basel in 1933; and the international independent art exhibition organized at the Jeu de Paume in Paris four years later. The latter coincided with the defamatory Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) show in Munich that denounced the art simultaneously on display in the French capital as “art of decay.”

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Reber faced persecution. He left Germany for good that year, having divided his time during the previous decade principally between France, Germany, and Switzerland. By that time, he had become an internationally reputed Freemason; the fraternal organization was banned in Germany by the Nazi regime in August 1935. Unlike other high-ranking Freemasons close to him, Reber escaped detainment in a concentration camp. The German occupation of France and the rise of Gestapo activity in Switzerland in 1940 heightened the threat posed to the collector. In 1941, the Vichy government published names from the archives of the French Masonic chaptersthat revealed Reber among past honorary members. Because of his affiliation and, as he later suspected, possibly because of his continuous public support for art classified as “degenerate,” along with his general disapproval of Nazi policies, Reber and his family were stripped of their German citizenship in March 1943, which restricted their ability to move freely. Erna Reber remained in Lausanne while Reber stayed in Italy, where he had traveled two years previously on assignment from Walter Andreas Hofer (his personal assistant from 1930 to 1934), who by 1941 had become chief art advisor to Nazi party official Hermann Wilhelm Göring. Following the armistice between Mussolini’s Italy and the Allies in September 1943, Reber was put under house arrest in Avellino, near Naples. In April 1945 he was interrogated by the Field Security Section and admitted to having worked on the Italian and Swiss art markets as one of the facilitators aiding Hofer. (He has been linked to four transactions relating to Göring’s collection). He was barred from returning to Switzerland until 1947. Reber’s own collection continued to disintegrate during and after World War II.

The wartime association with Hofer had a lasting and negative impact on Reber’s reputation. His name appeared on the list of “Red Flag” individuals issued by the U.S. government’s Art Looting Investigation Unit. Reber returned to Switzerland in the late 1940s and lived in relative obscurity in Lausanne until his death in 1959. His wife also died there a decade later.