Slevogt – a painting rediscovered

Philipp Freudenberg (1833 - 1919), portrayed by Max Slevogt in 1904, the year the painting was commissioned, can look back on an illustrious business career. He had worked his way up from humble beginnings and set up his own extremely successful fabric and fashion department stores' in Elberfeld in the 1860s. With the offer to become a partner in the Berlin fashion department stores' Herrmann Gerson, which had been the first German fashion retailer on Werderscher Markt to welcome customers from all over Europe since 1849 and was one of Berlin's top-selling ready-to-wear stores at the end of the 19th century, he moved to a leading position in the German fashion industry of the time in 1888.

Together with four of his five sons, he expanded the Gerson fashion house into a fashion and lifestyle empire in the following years with visionary presentations in collaboration with artists, architects and designers. The Freudenberg family created an equally art- and culture-loving environment in their private lives, so Philipp Freudenberg's portrait commission to the celebrated Berlin-based painter Slevogt came as little surprise. The portrait, which was painted in Berlin around the turn of the century and originated from Jewish ownership, became part of the art collection of the Landesbank Rheinland-Pfalz (LRP) in 1992. With the integration of the LRP and its art collection, it was added to the LBBW collection in 2008. This is all the more surprising as, according to a comprehensive monograph on Slevogt's work published in 1968, the portrait had officially been considered lost until then.

Image above, Max Slevogt: Kommerzienrat Philipp Freudenberg, 1904, detail, Courtesy Sammlung LBBW. Photo: Frank Kleinbach

The publication ‘Das Porträt Kommerzienrat Philipp Freudenberg, Nachforschungen zu einem wiederentdeckten Werk von Max Slevogt’, edited by Lutz Casper and the LBBW, presents the provenance of the work for the first time. In addition to essays by Gesa Kessemeier, Hans-Joachim Müller, René Philipp Sander and the conservators Magdalena Schlesinger and Tilman Daiber, the former head of the LBBW Collection, Lutz Casper, provides a detailed insight into the extensive search for traces of the ownership of the work up to its acquisition by the LRP. The publication, published by Hentrich & Hentrich, also contains an essay by Nurit Greenberg, the great-great-granddaughter of Philipp Freudenberg. It is thanks to her that the Freudenberg family archive has been systematically catalogued, published and handed over to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York for further research purposes.