AYou come across the name Fritz P. Mayer again and again in German museums. For example, in the Frankfurt Städel, next to the painting “Koloss II” by Wolfgang Mattheuer, a plaque explicitly explains that he and his wife not only bequeathed this painting to the contemporary art collection, but also works by artists such as Werner Tübke and Arno Rink. “This made it possible,” it continues, “to close a significant gap in the museum collection.” The gap had a name: GDR.
An exhibition in Aschaffenburg shows how passionately Fritz P. Mayer has devoted himself to this field, to East German painting and especially to the Leipzig School, over the past thirty years. Christiane Ladleif, who until a few weeks ago was the director of the Jesuitenkirche art gallery, has selected a good sixty works from Mayer's collection. “I would have left some things out,” comments Mayer, whose collection includes another hundred and seventy pictures from the Leipzig School alone, “I would have included others.” And thinks that the presentation might have benefited from a little less historical processing and a little more romanticism.
A man shows what is possible
The selection is magnificent – museum-like, from the smallest drawings to huge, awe-inspiring triptychs: every single work is proof that the museums were hesitant in their purchases of East German art for too long and, to be precise, are still hesitant to this day. And so a passionate private collector is now showing what the state institutions have missed. At the same time, however, as a generous patron, Mayer is always there to provide permanent loans or donations to, for example, the Chemnitz Art Collection, the House of History in Bonn, the Kunsthalle Mannheim, the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig and the National Gallery in Berlin to support his fund.
Mayer's passion for art began with a gift from his father, a small landscape by the Dutchman Jan van Goyen. That was forty years ago, when he was in his mid-thirties. However, he regrets that he never had much time to devote much time to art, having always remained a committed dilettante in the best sense of the word. Nevertheless, as if on the side, a veritable collection of open-air paintings emerged, especially from the nineteenth century, with works by Courbet, Slevogt and Liebermann, among others – and gave him on the walls at home a counter-world to the family business, which ran textile machines for the world market in a Frankfurt suburb produced. He ran it until recently.
On fire for the Leipzig school
His interest in the Leipzig School is due to chance, which led him to a gallery in downtown Frankfurt on a Saturday morning just to pass the waiting time. Almost immediately, an enthusiasm for Wolfgang Mattheuer's work, which, with more than fifty works, forms the focus of his collection and continues to this day, arose. Mayer sees this as a continuation of German Romanticism.
At the same time, he was impressed by Mattheuer's political statements in the paintings and his visual metaphors for sometimes painful experiences. He had Mattheuer's picture of the crashed Icarus under his broken wings, at which the passengers of an excursion bus look down with malice, hanging in his office for years. Despite the myth's tragic end, it didn't warn him to be careful, he says, but reminded him that some ideas are worth trying – and that failure in front of an audience doesn't necessarily have to be seen as a defeat. Of course, there is a lot of dreaming in the paintings of the Leipzig School, and in the art of socialism in general, and one can be surprised that a German industrialist developed a passion for this painting, which is sometimes disdained as propaganda.
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