The Jewish Museum Frankfurt at Untermainkai© Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt

*** Please also visit the special exhibition about Ludwig Meidner ***

The Jewish Museum has been dealing with the theme of exile since its founding in 1988, both in numerous exhibitions and publications as well as in an especially intensive fashion in its collecting activities. The spectrum ranges here from artists, writers and musicians to the Frankfurt School. The complex of themes surrounding the art of those who were forced into exile is being worked on and researched in the Jewish Museum’s Ludwig Meidner Archive on a long-term basis.

Among the roughly 275,000 to 300,000 Jews who left Germany after 1933 were numerous intellectuals and artists. The fine artists who were driven from their homeland were not, as a rule, confronted with the phenomenon of “speechlessness” in the same way as the writers who fled, but for them exile often also meant a massive interference in their artistic output. Returning exiled artists – according to estimates, a mere three to four percent of exiled Jews, all of whose German citizenship was sweepingly revoked in 1941, returned to Germany – also often had difficulties finding their way again in the German art world after 1945. Moreover, there has been a broad lack of audience for these artists up to the present day.

While, for example, the academic and archival reappraisal of literary emigrants in exile had already started at an early stage, research into the art of people in exile initially proceeded exclusively in sporadic and monographic fashion. With its Ludwig Meidner Archive, the Jewish Museum wanted to establish an institute that would devote itself to the theme of the art of those on exile on a long-term basis. The starting point was the acquisition of the artistic estate of the German-Jewish artist Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) in February 1994. The Meidner Archive has since also taken into its care the estates of Else Meidner (1901–1987), Kurt Levy (1911–1987), Arie Goral (1909–1996) and H. Henry Gowa (1901-1990).

Facts and figures

The collection of the Ludwig Meidner Archive encompasses around 2,000 paintings, 4,100 drawings and watercolours as well as prints, sketch books, documents and photographs.

Exhibitions (selection)

Erinnerung – Bild – Wort. Arnold Daghani und Charlotte Salomon, 2012/2013
Else Lasker-Schüler. Die Bilder, 2010/11
Die Frankfurter Schule und Frankfurt. Eine Rückkehr nach Deutschland, 2009/10
Kein Weg als Jude und Deutscher? Der Maler, Publizist und Dichter Arie Goral, 2007
Ludwig und Else Meidner, 2002
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (1893–1965). Bauhäusler und Visionär, 2000/01
Heimat Exil Heimat. Emigration und Rückkehr des jüdischen Malers Kurt Levy (1911–1987), 1998
Sturm über Europa. Felix Nussbaum, 1998
Der Maler Hanns Ludwig Katz 1892-1942, 1992
Expressionismus und Exil. Die Sammlung Ludwig und Rosy Fischer, 1990
Samson Schames. Bilder und Mosaiken. Frankfurt, London, New York, 1989

Publications (selection)

Presler, Gerd / Riedel, Erik: Ludwig Meidner. Werkverzeichnis der Skizzenbücher / Catalogue Raisonné of His Sketchbooks. München: Prestel Verlag 2013
Boll, Monika / Gross, Raphael (Hg.): Die Frankfurter Schule und Frankfurt. Eine Rückkehr nach Deutschland. Göttingen: Wallstein 2009
Gross, Raphael / Riedel, Erik (Hg.): Kein Weg als Jude und Deutscher? Der Maler, Publizist und Dichter Arie Goral. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdisches Museum 2007
Heuberger, Georg (Hg.): Ludwig und Else Meidner. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdisches Museum 2002
Heuberger, Georg (Hg.), Expressionismus und Exil. Die Sammlung Ludwig und Rosy Fischer. Frankfurt am Main / München: Prestel 1990