Archives

The archive Stuttgart Kunstkabinett Roman Norbert Ketterer comprises all preserved documents on the activities of the Kunstkabinett in Stuttgart from 1946 to 1962 and the Galerie Roman Norbert Ketterer in Campione d'Italia from 1962 to 1988.

During this period, Roman Norbert Ketterer brokered more than 40,000 works of art from the field of classical Modern art and in particular Expressionism, which were thus returned to museums or to new private collections from 1946 onwards as "degenerate art" from before 1945, either from hiding or from abroad. This archive is therefore one of the key sources for provenance research in this particularly critical area of art.

Eduard Bargheer (1901–1979) emerged from the Hamburg Secession of the 1920s and belonged to a group of German artists and intellectuals who, surprisingly, beginning in 1933—persecuted in various ways by the Nazis—retreated to Italy as a “refuge subject to revocation.” Bargheer lived on Ischia, where he consistently continued to develop his painting style, which straddled “abstraction and empathy.”

During the final years of his life, Dr. Wolfgang Henze compiled a documentation of Bargheer’s life and work, which resulted in a monograph published in 1979 that included a catalog of his paintings. The Eduard Bargheer Archive works closely with the estate administrator, Dirk Justus, at the Bargheer Museum in Hamburg.

Francis Bott (1904–1998) was a late bloomer in the world of painting. He came from the politically active left-wing bohemian scene of the 1920s; he sang and occasionally painted to earn a living. After 1933, he was forced to move first to Vienna and then to Prague, then to Paris, where he began painting in a style that straddled realism and surrealism, became active in the anti-fascist movement, and organized the “Freier Künstlerbund” exhibition in Paris in 1938. In 1940, he went into hiding in the Pyrenees and was able to return to Paris in 1944, where he joined the “Abstraction-Création” group. From then on, until 1968, he consistently created an ode to the inexpressible: abstraction.

Dr. Wolfgang Henze met him in 1977 and work documentation on his life and work , which resulted in a 1979 monograph including a catalog of his complete works—the foundation for the current archive.

Berthold Müller-Oerlinghausen, known as BMO (1893–1979), was a sculptor, draftsman, and mosaic artist. Under the influence of Hans Perathoner in Bielefeld, expressive artistry and religious themes became his guiding principles early on and remained so throughout his life. His experiences as a soldier in World War I led him to convert to Catholicism, fueled by a deep passion for Italy. He dedicated himself to renewing Christian art through expressive forms. However, priests with nationalist leanings destroyed his church furnishings. Although his stylistic approach—which bridged the gap between Barlach and Etruscan sculpture—might have appealed to the Nazis, he found this repugnant. Like so many German artists, he retreated to Lake Constance in 1940, where he led his mosaic workshop—which he had founded in Berlin—to great prosperity both during and after World War II.

Dr. Wolfgang Henze first met BMO in 1968 but did work compile a documentation of his life and work after his death. This resulted in a monograph published in 1990, which included a catalog of his sculptures. Dr. Wolfgang Henze is the executor of BMO’s estate and works closely with his family in Kressbronn on Lake Constance and in Berlin.

Fritz Winter (1905-1976) began as a mine electrician in his hometown of Ahlen, was active in the socialist youth, began to paint and wandered through Holland and Belgium, worked underground at night, attended the Realgymnasium during the day to study medicine, his former drawing teacher advised him to apply to the Bauhaus, which was possible even without a school degree. There he studied with Klee and Kandinsky and exhibited at the Ferdinand Möller Gallery in Berlin as early as 1930. He worked with Naum Gabo in Berlin and several times with Kirchner in Davos in 1929-32.

In 1928-29 he decided on his form of "abstraction-création" from the small formats of these three artists to the abstracting two-meter paintings he saw with Kirchner in Davos, and in their very worlds of form, initially in the very dark tones of his underground world, from which bright colors burst out before and during World War II. He consistently tests the abstraction of the 20th century in long series of experiments. In 2009, the Galerie Henze & Ketterer took over the estate part of his son Florian Winter and his archive.