FLECHTHEIM, ALFRED

FLECHTHEIM, ALFRED (1878–1937), German art collector, art dealer, and publisher. Flechtheim was born in Muenster/Westphalia into a prosperous family of grain dealers. After leaving school, he went to Geneva and Paris to complete his education. While working in the family business, he already engaged in collecting and participated in an art exhibition in Duesseldorf in 1906. Flechtheim was a co-founder of the Duesseldorf Sonderbund in 1909, which assisted young contemporary artists by offering them the possibility of exhibiting their works. Today, the fourth exhibition of the Sonderbund in Cologne in 1912, which had a direct impact on the New York Armory Show of 1913, is considered the most important presentation of European modern art prior to World War I. In the same year, Flechtheim opened his own gallery in Duesseldorf. Drafted into the army in 1914, Flechtheim had to dispose of his gallery and parts of his collection. However, he reopened it in 1919 and managed to open a second gallery in Berlin in 1921 and a third in Frankfurt-on-the-Main in 1922. Flechtheim sought out the works of contemporary French artists like Georges Braque, André Derain, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice de Vlaminck but matched them with the works of contemporary German artists like Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Paul Klee, George Grosz, and Karl Hofer. As a dealer   who introduced avant-garde art in Germany, he was in close contact with his colleague Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in Paris, who was specialized mainly in the trade in Cubism, especially Picasso. In 1921, they joined forces and together became the most important art dealers and art patrons of the Weimar Republic. Many of his portraits, among them the famous one by Otto Dix (1926, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin), offer vivid testimony of Flechtheim's leading position in the art world. Flechtheim was forced to close his galleries in 1933 and took refuge in London, where he continued to arrange exhibitions of modern art until his death in 1937. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kunstmuseum Duesseldorf, Alfred Flechtheim. Sammler, Kunsthaendler, Verleger (1987). (Philipp Zschommler (2nd ed.)