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) came from the Hamburg Secession of the 1920s and belonged to the group of German artists and intellectuals who, astonishingly, withdrew to Italy from 1933 onwards - harassed in various ways by National Socialism - to a "refuge on revocation". Bargheer lived on Ischia and there consistently continued to create his painting between "abstraction and empathy".

In the last years of his life, Dr. Wolfgang Henze compiled a documentation on his life and work, which resulted in a monograph with an index of his paintings in 1979. The Eduard Bargheer Archive works closely with the estate administrator, Dirk Justus, at the Bargheer Museum in Hamburg.

Francis Bott (1904 1998) is one of the latecomers to painting. He came from the politically committed left-wing vagabond scene of the 1920s, sang and painted sometimes to earn money, moved by necessity after 1933, first to Vienna and Prague, then to Paris, where he began to paint between Realism and Surrealism, was anti-fascist and organized the exhibition of the "Free Artists' League" 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 group "Abstraction-Création". Then, until 1968, he created with high consistency a hymn to the unsayable, abstraction.

Dr. Wolfgang Henze got to know him in 1977 and created a documentation on his life and work, which in 1979 resulted in a monograph with an index of his complete works, the basis for the current archive.

Berthold Müller-Oerlinghausen, gen. BMO (1893-1979) was a sculptor, draftsman and mosaicist. Expressive expression and religious themes became lifelong guidelines for him early on through Hans Perathoner in Bielefeld. Experiences as a soldier in World War I pushed him to convert to Catholicism with a great passion for Italy. He devoted himself to a renewal of Christian art in expressive forms. However, ethnic-minded priests destroyed his church decorations. Although he could have pleased the Nazis with his stylistic possibilities between Barlach and Etruscan sculpture, this was abhorrent to him. Like so many German artists, he retired to Lake Constance in 1940, where he led his mosaic workshop, still founded in Berlin, to great prosperity during and after the Second World War.

Dr. Wolfgang Henze met BMO as early as 1968, but did not compile documentation on his life and work until after his death. This resulted in a monograph with a list of his sculptures in 1990. Dr. Wolfgang Henze is the administrator of BMO's estate and works closely with his family in Kressbronn on Lake Constance and 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.