Milestone Cooperation on Self-Taught and Outsider Artists’ Work in Cologne. The Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek and ZADIK Receive Major Gifts from the Zander Collection

In 1997, Charlotte Zander was the first woman to be honored with the ART COLOGNE Award for her formidable dedication to “naïve art.” Twenty-eight years later, the documentation and scholarly study of the works of self-taught and outsider artists are firmly established in Cologne, with permanent representation at three venues: last fall, the nonprofit Zander Collection inaugurated an exhibition space in Cologne where exhibitions of works from the collection are held on a regular basis. Susanne Zander now gifts the internationally unrivaled specialized library with literature on the collection’s themes to the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek Köln (KMB), where scholars can access it effective immediately. Meanwhile, the collector, gallery owner, and museum founder Charlotte Zander’s archive has been entrusted to ZADIK, where it is being made accessible to researchers. ZADIK is preparing a thematically focused exhibition, which will open in 2025.

Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, director of ZADIK, is delighted: “In the extensive archival material documenting Charlotte Zander’s work, ZADIK now possesses a stock of high-quality sources providing insight into her collection-building activities going back to the 1950s. Because she turned her personal passion into a profession, founding a gallery and, later, a museum, the archive also enables us to learn more about the international networks of dealers and museums handling and showcasing ‘naïve art.’”

Susanne Zander, CEO of Sammlung Zander, is confident that the gifts have opened up new avenues of access to the work of self-taught and outsider artists for specialists and the broader public alike: “One objective of our work with the Zander Collection is to facilitate and promote scholarly engagement with this art. We want to establish Cologne as a central setting of such research. The gifts, which also encompass my personal extensive library on so-called outsider art, are a vital step toward this goal. We are moreover developing new projects involving the collection that embed our exhibitions in diverse discursive and scholarly contexts.”

Elke Purpus, director of the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek, is inviting the interested public to come and start reading: “We have already entered 2,449 publications into our online catalogue—the work is almost complete. We look forward to welcoming many visitors wishing to consult the Zander Library.”

Bringing both an archive and the related specialized library to Cologne is a model that ZADIK and the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek have successfully implemented in a series of instances. They underscore its advantages: “It is only a short walk from one institution to the other, enabling scholars to take full advantage of the two related sets of holdings—a collaboration we intend to consolidate and expand on.”

03 EXHIBITION

Emma Stern

31.08.24 – 25.01.25

You are cordially invited to the opening on Friday, August 30 from 6 – 9 pm

The opening of the exhibition will take place on the occasion of this year’s DC Open.
Opening hours: Saturday, August 31, from 1 – 7 pm and Sunday, September 1, from 1 – 5 pm

Emma Stern paints from memory: the market square in Lebach, the apple harvest, or a village fair, scenes from her childhood and youth—her “happy days,” as she herself puts it. In many works, flowers in luminous colors crowd the frame. The pictures bear witness to her deeply felt love of nature and show the community among which she lived and whose member she was. One exception is the painting Exodus, which stands as a symbol of the apparent idyll’s collapse: it depicts the hasty departure of the Jews of Paris ahead of the arrival of the invading German troops in 1940.

Emma Stern is born Emma Daniel in Sankt Wendel in the Saar, where her parents have a draper’s shop, in 1878. She marries at the age of eighteen, and two years later, she and her husband Julius Stern open a branch of her parents’ business in nearby Lebach. They have four children: Betty, Kurt, Paul, and Ruth. Betty, the eldest daughter, dies when she is only two. Julius and the sixteen-year-old Kurt are drafted to serve on the frontlines of World War I in 1916. Both return from the war in 1918. Two years later, her husband dies of complications from a war injury. From then on, she runs the business together with her children.

In 1935, the Saar is returned to Germany after to a plebiscite; faced with the increasing disfranchisement of Jewish citizens and the boycott against her shop, Stern sells her business. The family is torn apart and forced to leave Germany.

Stern finds refuge in Paris. Kurt and his wife initially emigrate to Palestine, where they survive the Holocaust. Paul also escapes to France but is arrested along the way and, in 1944, deported on Convoi 77, the final train from Drancy to Auschwitz, where he is murdered by the Nazis before year’s end. Ruth, who has moved to France in 1930, is arrested in 1940 and detained in the French internment camp at Gurs. She manages to escape from the camp within months and, probably thanks to contacts in the Résistance, survives the German Wehrmacht’s occupation in the underground. After the war, Stern and her daughter Ruth settle in Paris—they cannot imagine returning to Germany.

Ruth is an artist, and while they vacation together in the south of France in 1948, Emma picks up her daughter’s painting utensils: the instant when, at the age of seventy, she embarks on a life as an artist. She quickly develops her own style. Her early pictures are compositions in delicate colors that she applies to the canvas in gingerly and diligent brushstrokes. Soon, though, Stern grows bolder: she mixes stronger hues and lays them on thickly and in several layers, a technique that lends her works a special depth.

As an assistant to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and associate in Fernand Léger’s studio, her daughter Ruth Stern-Salzmann runs in Paris’s artist circles and builds a network. Emma Stern, too, becomes a presence on the scene; her art is talked about. Jean Dubuffet is the first to exhibit her works, in a group show at Galerie René Drouet, Paris, in 1954. In the 1960s and 1970s, her work is shown in galleries on a regular basis, by Bassano, Charpentier, Delpire, and others in Paris and by Aenne Abels in Cologne. Institutional group exhibitions in Mannheim, Munich, and Zurich follow.

Several filmmakers portray the remarkable artist. The documentary short Le temps d’Emma, directed by Liliane de Kermadec and produced by Robert Delpire in 1964, is screened at the Venice Film Festival and wins a Golden Lion.

Until her death in 1969, Stern creates an outstanding oeuvre encompassing around five hundred works. The picture Emma’s Door (1956), which takes the beholder to the rural idyll of the apple harvest, hung on the door of Stern’s room. It renders a look back at a distant memory while exemplifying the distinctive style of an artist whose life was far from arcadian and left no room for ostensibly naïve yearnings.

The exhibition presents Emma’s Door and six other works by the artist from the Zander Collection as well as Liliane de Kermadec’s film.

Emma Stern is one of only a handful of women artists in the Zander Collection. Charlotte Zander exhibited her works at her Galerie Charlotte in Munich in 1976, 1987, and 1990 and at fairs like Art Cologne and Art Basel on a regular basis. Between 1996 and 2020, her works were on view as part of the permanent exhibition at Museum Charlotte Zander at Schloss Bönnigheim.

We sincerely thank Anne de Kermadec and Sarah Moon for the opportunity to screen the film.

Sammlung Zander gGmbH

Jülicher Str. 24a

50674 Cologne