Grete Ring | For the unusual and unexpected

She expected a lot from life. As the new century began, Grete Ring, born in Berlin in 1887, was a gifted young girl. She grew up in a highly educated Jewish civil servant family, surrounded by books and paintings, museums and theaters. She energetically embraced the privileged upper-class life and took full advantage of the limited social opportunities available to women of her generation. Thus, Grete Ring, who had to take her Abitur as an external student, became one of the first women to study art history at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1906, initially as a guest student and only later "fully enrolled," because women were not permitted to study in Prussia until 1908.

Her love of art was fueled not least by her relationship with the famous painter Max Liebermann, whose niece she was. As one of the first women to receive a doctorate in art history, she eventually earned her doctorate in Munich in 1912 with a thesis on Dutch portrait painting in the 15th and 16th centuries. The literary and art scholar Sonja Hilzinger, who has made a name for herself with her publications on Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf, and Inge Müller, among others, aims to rescue Grete Ring from oblivion with her book.

With almost detective-like instinct, the author has discovered a multitude of sources and testimonies about her protagonist's life – from the imperial era to the 1950s – in various archives, museums and libraries, and in correspondence with widely scattered correspondents, mostly colleagues and art enthusiasts like herself. With immense effort and a great deal of empathy, she places the art scholar Grete Ring in the spotlight of contemporary history, in her professional and private contexts. This creates a panorama of an exemplary woman's life in the 20th century, with all the catastrophes of the era, two world wars, and the horrors of National Socialism.

Grete Ring initially worked at the Berlin National Gallery, then from 1920 onwards at the renowned Galerie Paul Cassirer, curating exhibitions, gaining experience in the art trade, and joining the firm as a partner in 1928. With relatively limited financial resources, she assembled a collection of drawings by 19th-century German and French painters, including Caspar David Friedrich, Adolph Menzel, Max Liebermann, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas.

For years, she traveled to the most important European art cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, and Florence, attending major exhibitions, meeting famous contemporary painters, and publishing in leading academic journals. She followed the development of Picasso's work, for example, with great enthusiasm throughout her life. Thus, she became a recognized member of a widespread network of like-minded art enthusiasts. And Grete Ring is a good writer, something by no means a given among scholars. Her constant openness to the new, the unfamiliar, and the unexpected makes her a pioneer in the field of art history.

In 1932/33, she had just curated the highly acclaimed three-part exhibition series "Living German Art" with art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. Just months later, the Nazis' rise to power led to an unimaginable rupture of civilization. Grete Ring witnessed the Nazis exhibiting modernist painting under the denunciatory title "Degenerate Art," including many works by artists she personally knew and admired. The professional opportunities for Jewish citizens were increasingly restricted, and so her only option was emigration to London.

There, she used all her courage and practical sense to make a successful new start. In 1938, she founded the British branch of the Paul Cassirer firm. Despite her good connections, she too experienced the feeling of isolation and loss in exile, which robs those affected of their foundation. Like her, almost all of her close friends had to emigrate, and contact with them became increasingly difficult, so art history remained her refuge and last refuge.

During these years, she wrote her major book on French Primitives in London. A beautiful credo to which the art journalist remained committed for her entire life: she wanted to present the artists "not like dried plants in a herbarium, but in the garden in which they grew and in the climate in which they flourished."

One of the few surviving photographs, featured on the cover, shows Grete Ring in front of her beloved summer house in Sacrow near Potsdam. She would never see it again. She never returned to Germany. She died in Zurich in 1952. In 2023, the Liebermann Villa on Lake Wannsee dedicated a celebratory solo exhibition to her, "Grete Ring, Art Dealer of Modernism." A woman whose departure into a self-determined life succeeded despite much adversity.

Sonja Hilzinger: Grete Ring. Art scholar and art dealer. A biography. Reimer-Verlag, 256 pp., hardcover, €39.