Karl Nierendorf

Born: 1889.

Died: 1947.

Karl Nierendorf was a Berlin art promoter and dealer. Before World War I he worked as a banker in Germany, but his fortunes were changed by the social upheaval of the Weimar Republic. A collector in his social circle introduced him to Swiss artist Paul Klee, who convinced Nierendorf to take up a career in dealing art. Nierendorf opened his first gallery in Cologne with his brother Josef in 1920 and quickly proved an astute art dealer and patron, organizing not only exhibitions but also lectures and concerts in the space. He specialized in watercolors and drawings, particularly works by Expressionists, such as members of the group Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider). He soon moved shop to Düsseldorf and, after a brief partnership, took over J. B. Neumann’s Berlin gallery, Graphisches Kabinett, when Neumann left for New York in 1923.

The Galerie Nierendorf was a prominent venue for contemporary German artists, including those associated with Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Nierendorf had a particularly strong relationship with Otto Dix, as well as with Vasily Kandinsky and Klee, who both spent considerable time working in Germany. However, in the late 1920s and through the 1930s, global financial markets suffered and Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power.

In 1931 Karl Nierendorf curated an 11 October - 5 November exhibition of Aleister Crowley's artwork at the Porza Gallery. The exhibition catalog.

 The atmosphere certainly took its toll on Nierendorf, who was struck by a serious heart attack in 1934. Two years later, he took a much-needed sojourn to the United States, while his brother remained in Germany to maintain the operations of the Berlin gallery (which still exists today). Encouraged by the art market he encountered in the United States, Karl Nierendorf opened his eponymous gallery in New York in January 1937, on 53rd Street and across from the spot where the Museum of Modern Art would inaugurate its new International Style building.

That same year, Nierendorf came to know Hilla Rebay, an artist and later a director of Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting, through their shared admiration for Kandinsky. She and Guggenheim had purchased works from Nierendorf’s Berlin gallery earlier.

Nierendorf worked within the growing émigré community in New York to promote artists whose work was suppressed in Europe, including Lyonel Feininger, Kandinsky, and Klee, and also helped to launch the careers of emerging American artists such as Perle Fine, Adolph Gottlieb, and Louise Nevelson.

At the end of World War II, Nierendorf returned to Europe for a year-and-a-half long stay, during which time he saw both postwar devastation and, as Guggenheim curator Megan Fontanella has written, “the invigorating revival of cultural life.” Nierendorf returned to New York in fall 1947. He died suddenly of another heart attack, at the age of 58. As he had not executed a will in the United States, his estate passed into the courts. In early 1948 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation purchased the entire Nierendorf estate from New York State, adding many important Expressionist, Surrealist, and early Abstract Expressionist works to its permanent collection.

circa 1938

Portrait by Otto Dix