Sonderbund

Sonderbund. An organization founded in Düsseldorf in 1909 to mount exhibitions of contemporary art; the full name was Sonderbund Westdeutscher Kunstfreunder und Künstler (Special League—or Federation—of Art-lovers and Artists in Western Germany). The ‘art-lovers’ included collectors, dealers, museum officials, and writers, the first president of the Sonderbund being Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874–1921), a banker, collector, and critic. He was one of the first Germans to support the Post-Impressionists (he had personally travelled to Aix-en-Provence to buy directly from Cézanne) and he founded the Folkwang Museum in Hagen (opened 1902 in a building remodelled by Henry van de Velde), one of the earliest public museums of contemporary art in Germany. (After Osthaus's death, the contents of the museum were transferred to Essen, and the building in Hagen, much altered, is now the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum.) Four Sonderbund exhibitions were held—the first three in Düsseldorf (1909, 1910, 1911) and the final one in Cologne (1912). The Cologne exhibition—held at the Kunsthalle from May to December—was by far the most important. Its aim was to provide ‘a conspectus of the movement that has been termed Expressionism'. Van Gogh was the central figure of the exhibition, and Cézanne, Gauguin, and Munch were also very well represented. In an anteroom were paintings by El Greco, a great forerunner of Expressionism. German painters (especially those of Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke) were naturally to the fore, but the exhibition was international in scope, with artists from eight other countries on show. It was influential on the planning of the Armory Show, which took place the following year. Originally an all-American exhibition had been envisaged, but when Arthur B. Davies saw the catalogue he wrote to Walt Kuhn: ‘I wish we could have a show like this.’ Kuhn immediately set out for Europe, just managed to catch the exhibition as it was being dismantled, and picked up valuable advice from artists and dealers. However, Kuhn was much more interested in French than in German painting, and German art was poorly represented in the Armory Show.