Georg Kolbe in Frankfurt am Main—Ambivalence and Opportunism

The estate of Georg Kolbe is characterized by an unexpected, literally eventful history.In his last will and testament, the artist had stipulated that the studio house he had built in the late 1920s, the works of art contained in it, and his written estate should go either to a foundation yet to be established, or to the state and be made accessible to the public.By the time of his death on November 20, 1947, this self-confident gesture had created the necessary conditions for securing his estate-and his posthumous reputation.In 1949, old friends and companions established the Georg Kolbe Foundation, and in 1950 the studio building was opened as a museum. 2 The first director was Margrit Schwartzkopff, Kolbe's former photographer and office assistant, as well as the executor of his will, who was allowed by the will to live in selected rooms at Sensburger Allee 25.The interpretation of the will led to long disputes over the artistic and material estate between Margrit Schwartzkopff, who represented the foundation, and the family.She served as director until her death in 1969, during which time she ran the institution as a kind of memorial to the late artist, leaving the furnishings of the rooms largely as Kolbe had left them.Schwartzkopff was succeeded as director of the museum by Maria von Tiesenhausen, Georg Kolbe's granddaughter, who was born in 1929.She emigrated to Canada in the 1950s but continued to travel regularly during her directorship between Berlin and her adopted country of Canada, where her husband, Hans Dietrich ("Dietz") von Tiesenhausen, a Second World War naval officer, lived.It is impossible to date exactly when she began taking estate documents from the museum's archives to Canada, but she did so on a large scale and without disclosing which or how many documents were involved.Since there was no inventory of the written estate, it was subsequently impossible to collate what was missing with what existed in the museum's holdings.In 1987, almost a decade after the end of her directorship, von Tiesenhausen published a selection of letters to and from Kolbe. 3 For the most part, the selected excerpts came from the estate, which she also supplemented through selected acquisitions.As a close relative, she also had access to other materials remaining in the family; she continued to maintain some of her grandfather's contacts for research purposes, and conducted research in the public archives accessible to her.She also successfully and extensively researched the works of Kolbe that remained in the GDR and the Soviet Union.By 2006, she had successively returned the originals of the letters she had published, along with other documents, to the museum and its director Ursel Berger, who had been working there since 1978,

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