About This Project

Joseph Oppenheimer was born in Würzburg in 1876 and is one of the artists whose paintings and drawings are part of the collection of the Municipal Gallery. Although his views of the Prince Bishops' Residents and the market Square keep the picture of the Würzburg of the baroque era alive, we only have an incomplete outline of his work and much still has to be discovered.

As is so often the case in Würzburg, it was the founder of the Gallery, Heiner Dikreiter, who picked up the trail of the artist, then living in London, and purchase works for the Gallery, one of them being the Mirror Cabinet in the Prince Bishops' Residence of 1905. Oppenheimer shared the fate of so many Jewish artists who had been forced to leave the country by the denunciation of the National Socialist dictatorship. He found a new home in London and later in Montreal in Canada, where his family still lives today.

When the small cabinet exhibition was staged in the Municipal Gallery in 1987 to commemorate the artists, Heinrich Ragaller pointed in the catalogue to the fact that the artist's family was the principal source of the works on loan. This contact with the family has existed since the 1950s but has again been intensified and provides the basis for the exhibition project which attempts to give an overview of the work of an artist whose beginnings are in impressionism and who finally adopted expressionist tendencies. This project can be no more than an attempt because today, 30 years after his death, many of the early works are no longer there are or very difficult to obtain. The National Socialist period meant not only loss of his home and the dispersal of his family but also the loss and the scattering of a part of his work.

It was thus all the more important in the preparation for his exhibition that the artist's grandson, Vincent Prager, offered his help. Five years ago, he set up the Joseph Oppenheimer Foundation in Canada in memory of his grandfather, with the aim of securing a representative core of Oppenheimer's work and preserving it for posterity, exhibiting it and making it accessible to the public. Together with his mother, Eva Prager, Vincent Prager has not only lent works but has provided funds from the Oppenheimer Foundation to support the catalogue. We extend our thanks to him for his great commitment and as well as to the artist's daughter, Eva Prager, also for the prospect of our having works by Joseph Oppenheimer permanently in the Municipal Gallery in its new location in the Kulturspeicher. Our thanks go also to Hélèn Sitcotte of Montreal, who put the estate of the artist in order on behalf of the Oppenheimer Foundation and as an expert on the works provided valuable assistance and compiled a comprehensive biography from the material from the archives, and to the Art Spectrum Gallery in Würzburg for acting as intermediaries. Thanks are also extended to the Koenig and Bauer Foundation for the promotion of Cultural Life in Würzburg and the District of Lower Franconia for their support of this project as well as to the friends of Maine-Franconian Art and History Society. Finally, we would also like to thank those who have lent us works for parting from them during the exhibition and the airline, Air Canada, for their generosity in transporting the pictures for Montreal to Würzburg and back again.

In the Municipal Gallery, the project is in the hands of Beate Reese who has furthered the research with creative enjoyment and great commitment, developed the concept for the exhibition and the catalogue and who took charge of the project in close co-operation with Vincent Prager and Hélèn Sitcotte from the beginning. Our thanks go to her as well as the entire museum team to ensured that all the necessary preparations and organization ran smoothly.

Marlene Lauter