engleski

Works of Max Slevogt in the Tilla Durieux Collection in Zagreb

Tilla Durieux was one of the most famous 20th century German actresses. Owing to her fame and her marriage to prominent collector and art dealer Paul Cassierer, she sat for a great number of artists and owned a large art collection, mostly comprising of modernists works from the first decades of the 20th century. Among 117 portraits of Durieux so far documented, there are works by Ernst Barlach, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz von Stuck, Max Oppenheimer, Max Liebermann, Hugo Lederer, and August Renoir. One of the most famous portraits showing her as Salome in one of the most popular roles in Oscar Wilde’s play was painted by Max Slevogt (1907) and has been housed in the Zagreb City Museum together with other objects from Tilla Durieux’s estate. In 1938, in order to escape Nazi persecutions of Jews, Tilla Durieux arrived in Zagreb with her third husband Ludwig Katzenellenbogen where she lived until 1952. They rented an apartment in the villa of the Lubienski family at 27 Jurjevska Street in which she stored her art collection. After returning to Germany, her art works remained in Zagreb for decades, until the early 1980s. Records of legal proceedings related to Tilla Durieux's estate and preserved photo- documentation show that the collection, in addition to the aforementioned 1907 portrait, comprised at least three other paintings by Slevogt. These were the watercolour titled Interieur (undated, probably a stage-set draft), watercolour drawing Scene from the Spiel der Kaiserin Play Featuring Tilla Durieux (1911) and an oil on canvas titled Tilla Durieux as Potifar's Wife in Richard Strauss' Joseph’s Legend, from 1921, which is today part of the holdings of the Landesmuseum in Mainz. This paper aims to show which of Max Slevogt's works were part of Tilla Durieux’s Zagreb collection and to describe a legal battle fought after the death of the actress between her heirs and the Croatian authorities, which led to the division and unfortunate disappearance of one part of this valuable collection.

Max Slevogt, Tilla Durieux, Zagreb, Berlin, Villa Jurjevska 27, Modern Art, Provenance Research

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