‘Theodor Kern in retrospect’

The folder of Kern-related items belonging to the late Jean Watts (see the previous two posts) includes a copy of the catalogue for an exhibition entitled ‘Theodor Kern in Retrospect: Paintings, Sculpture and Glass’, which was held at what was then Luton Museum and Art Gallery and is now Wardown House Museum and Gallery. The exhibition opened on 17^th August and closed on 15^th September. Unfortunately, the year is not mentioned, but since the notes imply that the artist was still living, I assume this was the retrospective exhibition which took place in 1968, just a few months before Kern’s death in February 1969, and which I mentioned in this post.

The exhibition catalogue is an extremely useful resource, both in providing a detailed list of the 70 or so paintings, sculptures and pieces of stained glass which the artist selected to represent his long career, and in the additional information on the back page about the locations in England where Kern’s public works – his murals, stained glass windows and sculptures in wood and stone – can be found.

Theodor Kern was interviewed for the Tuesday Pictorial, a local newspaper, at the time of the exhibition, which the resulting report describes as presenting a combination of traditional and more modern styles, with a predominance of religious themes. The dates of the paintings range between 1928 and 1968, the stained glass pieces are from the period 1945 to 1948, and the sculptures were created between 1945 and 1968.

It would take a good deal of time and effort to identify all of the items in the exhibition and it would probably prove to be an impossible task, since the items on display were available to purchases, with prices ranging from 15 guineas for a 1964 plaster head of Christ to a 100 guineas for a 1929 painting of a Sicilian village square, so it’s likely that a number ended up in private collections. Even among those that belonged (or would eventually belong) to public collections, Kern’s tendency to use the same or similar generic titles (‘Annunciation’, ‘Madonna and Child’ ‘Composition’) might hamper any effort to confirm their precise identity.

Nevertheless, a few of the paintings are certainly identifiable with known works by the artist. ‘Polish Bride’ (No. 46) which Kern began in 1930 and was still adding to in 1968, is definitely this beautiful portrait, now in the Wardown House Collection in Luton:

‘Harbour at Mentone’ (No. 9) from 1929 is almost certainly this picture, also owned by Wardown House:

Theodor Kern painted more than one view of Positano, in different styles, but the picture from 1929 (No. 22) is certainly this one, also in the Luton collection:

I wonder if the Michael Braunfels, painted in 1967 playing the flute (No. 20) was the Austrian-born composer of that name (though he was better known as a pianist), and if so how Kern came to be painting his portrait in 1967?

Finally, I wonder whether any of the three stained glass panels in the exhibition with the title ‘Lovers’ (Nos. 2, 6 and 7) were based on the preparatory drawings that I came across recently in the Smith Collection, and which I wrote about here:

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find reproductions of the two paintings singled out for special attention by the local newspaper reviewer, either the ‘strikingly different’ ‘Wild Emotion’, ‘its colours more vivid than those Mr. Kern normally uses’ or  ‘Refugees’, ‘where the agonised mother is pushing forward out of the dark past into an unknown future’.

‘A distinguished Austrian artist’

I’m indebted to Gerard Watts (see these posts) for sharing with me a collection of documents relating to Theodor Kern that belonged to his late mother. As I’ve noted before, Jean Watts was a member, and for a time the chairwoman of Hitchin Art Club, for which Kern often acted as a mentor and competition judge, and she also compiled the official history of the club. In addition, Mrs Watts was a fellow parishioner with Theodor and Frieda Kern at the church of Our Lady Immaculate and St Andrew in Hitchin, and a close friend of the couple, as demonstrated by the fact that Frieda left a number of items to members of the Watts family in her will.

There is an abundance of fascinating material in the collection, and it will certainly provide me with material for a number of future posts. In this post I’ll begin with an article published in the first ever issue of Hertfordshire Countryside magazine in the summer of 1946. This anonymous piece would be referred to by Jean Watts in her own article about Theodor Kern, published in the same magazine two decades later, in July 1967, which I wrote about here.

The 1946 article is of interest for a number of reasons. Firstly, having made reference to the sculpture of the Madonna and Child for All Hallows School in Somerset, which I wrote about in this post, it also mentions the March 1946 exhibition at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at Burlington House which I wrote about here. However, by contrast with the records that I’ve managed to find online, which suggest that Kern’s only contribution to the latter exhibition was a wooden ‘head of a girl’ (which I believe is one of the carvings now owned by Gerard Watts: see this post), the magazine article states that the artist also exhibited a second statue of the Madonna and Child, together with ‘examples of…outstanding stained glass designs’. It would be good to find a reliable catalogue of the exhibition, so as to be able to confirm which items Kern actually contributed.

Secondly, the article throws further light on Theodor Kern’s wartime voluntary work with wounded and traumatised soldiers at various hospitals in Hertfordshire, which I believe explains how he came to live in the county in the first place. Listed here are the Lister Hospital (which is more accurately in Stevenage, not Hitchin), Fairfield Hospital in Letchworth, and the St Paul’s Walden Bury and Hertford Convalescent Home, where, as described here, ‘for five years he…helped ex-Service patients, who were often deeply depressed, by creating in them an interest in drawing and art’. The reference to mental illness reminds me that, according to Fr Andrew O’Dell, the former parish priest at Our Lady’s church, Frieda Kern told him that Theodor also worked for a time at the mental hospital – or ‘asylum’, as it was then known – at Arlesey, near Hitchin. I wonder if Kern ever managed to put on the exhibition of patients’ drawings that’s mentioned here?

Thirdly, the article is illustrated by four reproductions of works by Kern. Two of these – part of a mural from the parish church in ‘Schallerdorf’, Austria (a misspelling of Schalladorf, a town about 40 miles north of Vienna) and the stained glass ‘mosaic’ of the Madonna and Child – were new to me, though the mural, which was executed in 1928, is mentioned in passing in Ernst Ziegeleder’s brief biography of Kern. The other two pictures, a charcoal drawing of Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster, and a pastel portrait of Walburga Breitenfeld, daughter of Kern’s friends and fellow Austrian exiles Walter and Johanna Breitenfeld (see these posts), were already familiar, since Walburga (now Mrs. Walburga Shearer) sent me reproductions of them from an old exhibition catalogue some time ago. The caption in the article describes the portrait of Walburga as ‘recent’, confirming that it was created after both Kern and the Breitenfelds left Austria. The description of its subject as ‘a Yugoslav girl’ may confuse: Walburga’s father Walter, an academic, was Austrian and the family lived in Vienna; however, her mother, Johanna, was a member of an aristocratic Austro-Hungarian family, born in what is now Slovakia. The family certainly owned property in what became Yugoslavia, and is now Serbia: indeed, it was to their estate at Futog, near Novi Sad, that the Breitenfelds initially fled after Walter’s opposition to Nazism made their continued residence in Austria untenable. In fact, as Walburga explained to me, Theodor Kern accompanied Walter Breitenfeld on the train journey to Futog, before he himself travelled onward, first to the Hildebrand villa in Florence, then to spend some time with the family of Hildebrand’s colleague Balduin Schwarz in Switzerland, before finally moving on to London.

Theodor Kern at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 1946

In a recent post I shared photographs of two wood carvings by Theodor Kern, now owned by Gerard Watts. One of these was a carving of the head of a girl, and I speculated that it might be the ‘carved wooden head of a young girl’ mentioned in the will of the artist’s widow, Frieda, and said to be located ‘on the staircase’ of their home in Bearton Green, Hitchin. Frieda left this carving to the ‘officers of Hitchin Art Club, Lavender Barn, Lucas Lane, Hitchin’, among whom were Gerard’s late mother Jean Watts.

However, as a result of further research, I wonder whether this carving might also be the wood carving labelled ‘Head of a Girl’ which Theodor Kern submitted to the exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, held at the Royal Academy of Arts in Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, in February and March 1946. This was also the year in which Kern, who had fled his native Austria in 1939, became a naturalised British citizen. Apparently the exhibition included 702 works in mixed media by both male and female artists and aimed to ‘prove the strength of designers and craftsmen in a new era’. In the words of the preface to the exhibition catalogue: ‘Materials and men are still lacking, but we are making our first post-war demonstration of our belief that great craftsmanship will play its part in the civilisation of the near future’.

Formed in 1887, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society set out to promote the exhibiting of decorative arts alongside fine arts and its exhibitions were important in the flowering of the British Arts and Crafts Movement in the decades before the First World War. William Morris was president of the society until his death in 1891.

In another recent post, I shared a local newspaper article from early 1946, about a wooden statue of the Madonna and Child which Kern was creating for a school chapel. The article claimed that the artist had another carving of the Madonna and Child ‘in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition currently at Burlington House’. However, this must be a mistake or a misunderstanding, since the carving of the head of a girl is the only work by Kern mentioned in the exhibition catalogue.

‘Lime wood statue for chapel by local artist’

I’ve come across another cutting from the Citizen newspaper, on the excellent Garden City Collection website (see previous post). Ostensibly about Kern’s creation of a statue for a school chapel, the article – from early 1946 – contains a wealth of information about the artist’s life and work at this period, shortly after he had moved from Letchworth to Hitchin.

The article reports on, and includes a photograph of, Kern creating a statue of the Madonna and Child for the chapel of All Hallows School in Cranmore, Somerset. At the time, this was an all boys’ Catholic school, though I understand that it is now co-educational and that its Catholic affiliation is rather more tenuous. Apparently the chapel is still there, but I’ve been unable to find out whether the statue is still on display. The newspaper article compares Kern’s statue to the famous Madonna and Child statue at Buckfast Abbey, which dates back to the Middle Ages. (A modern version was recently created for the abbey by the contemporary Devon artist Isabel Coulton, whose work I wrote about here.)

The Buckfast Abbey Madonna (via https://allaboutmary.tumblr.com)

Kern also created a gilded Madonna for his parish church in Hitchin (see this post) and another for the church of Our Lady and St Alphege in Bath (see these posts).

The article also reports that another of Kern’s statues, and a number of his stained glass designs, were on display at Burlington House in Piccadilly at this time. I’ve found the following photograph of that exhibition on the RIBA website:

(Photography by Sydney W. Newbery, via ribapix.com)

Also of interest is the information in the article that by 1946 Theodor Kern had already begun his relationship with Hitchin Art Club, which would continue until his death (see this post). However, perhaps the most interesting piece of information comes at the end of the piece, when we learn that at this time Kern was engaged in teaching art to patients in local hospitals, encouraging ‘mainly discouraged people by interesting them in drawing and in the appreciation of art.’ This would appear to be a continuation of the wartime work which, I believe, was the original cause of Kern’s move from London, where he initially lived on his arrival from Austria, to Hertfordshire. According to Karl Heinz Ritschel, ‘Kern wanted to help his host country, so he worked in hospitals, drawing and painting with, and helping to care for, wounded soldiers. Numerous drawings and sketch sheets, also humorous sketches, resulted.’ I remember reading somewhere that this work with wounded serviceman may have taken place in or near the village of St Paul’s Walden near Hitchin. However, Father Andrew O’Dell recalls Kern’s widow Frieda telling him that, on his arrival in the area in the early 1940s, her late husband also taught art to psychiatric patients at the Three Counties Asylum in the neighbouring village of Arlesey. In all probability the full extent of the charitable work undertaken by this most modest and unassuming of artists will never be known.

Visiting Vienna, with Kern in mind

Last week we were in Vienna, for the first time since the pandemic, indeed for the first time since 2018. The visit wasn’t directly related to my research on Theodor Kern: we were there to see a couple of exhibitions, enjoy a concert, do a bit of sightseeing, and generally renew our acquaintance with one of our favourite European cities. However, there were a number of indirect or incidental associations between our activities during our stay and Kern’s life and work.

Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, with statue of Friedrich Schiller in foreground, 10 November 2022

Of course, the Austrian capital played an important role in the artist’s life: it was where he studied as a young man – at the Academy of Fine Arts in Schillerplatz, which we passed on one of our walks around the city. And it was where Kern returned, in the mid-1930s, to eke out a living as a portrait painter, as the dark clouds of fascism and war gathered over Austria, and where he befriended the Catholic anti-Nazi philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and became part of the circle around him, which would continue to be an important network of friendship and spiritual support for the remainder of his life.

On our first full day in Vienna, we went to the Leopold Museum, which we first visited in 2015 to see its permanent ‘Vienna 1900’ exhibition, with its unrivalled collection of works by Egon Schiele, as well as many others. This time, however, our focus was the new exhibition ‘Hagenbund: From Moderate to Radical Modernism’. I was particularly interested to see the exhibition because of Theodor Kern’s membership of this group of artists, which flourished from 1900 until its dissolution by the Nazi regime in 1938. I’ve written about Kern and the Hagenbund in a number of posts on this site.

Franz Lerch, ‘Sitzendes Mädchen’, 1928 (Leopold Museum, Vienna)

Felix Albrecht Harta, ‘Bildnis einer Mädchens in Weiß’, c.1925-1927 ( Kriegner Collection)

Although none of Theodor Kern’s paintings were actually on display in the current exhibition, I was pleased to see one by his good friend Franz Lerch (see this post), and others by contemporaries whom he knew well, such as Felix Albrecht Harta (see this post), and Egge Sturm-Skrla, with whom Kern worked (under the supervision of Anton Faistauer, another Hagenbund member) on the murals in the Salzburg Festspielhaus. I was also interested to see that the film about the Hagenbund showing in the gallery’s auditorium featured two of the experts on the group with whom I’ve corresponded about my research on Kern: Professor Peter Chrastek and Dr Manfred Götz.

Albertina Modern, Vienna, 11 November 2022

The other exhibition that we saw also evoked indirect associations with Kern. It was at the Albertina Modern, a new gallery for contemporary art which opened in 2020, as a ‘spin off’ from the main Albertina gallery. The new gallery is in a magnificent building, next to the beautiful Musikverein (where we enjoyed a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic during our stay) and facing Karlsplatz and the lovely baroque Karlskirche. The building had been hidden behind scaffolding during all of our previous visits, while the refurbishments took place.

And the connections to Theodor Kern? The building which now houses the Albertina Modern was formerly the Künstlerhaus. Built in the 1860s, it became home to the Association of Austrian Artists and I believe that Kern kept a studio there at some point. Another connection was provided by the exhibition which we were there to see: ‘Ways of Freedom: from Jackson Pollock to Maria Lassing’, which explored the mutual influences between Abstract Expressionists in New York and Vienna in the late 1940s and 1950s. It was a fascinating exhibition in its own right, highlighting in particular the work of a number of women artists, both American and Austrian, who are often overlooked in the official histories. But there were also one or two major works on display by Pollock himself, perhaps the most influential of the Abstract Expressionists, and also someone who was certainly an influence on Theodor Kern’s late style.

Jackson Pollock, ‘Untiled’ (via Albertina Modern, Vienna)

Theodor Kern, ‘Untitled’ (Wardown Park Museum, Luton)

Another incidental reminder of Theodor Kern occurred during a guided tour that we joined at the Burgtheater on the same day. Our main interest was in the gorgeous ceiling panels painted by the young Gustav Klimt, his brother and an associate. However, the tour guide reminded us that, although these murals miraculously survived the Second World War, the main auditorium of the theatre was destroyed in a bombing raid. The work of reconstruction in the 1950s fell to the architect Michel Engelhart (1897 – 1969), who was the son of the painter Josef Engelhart and the brother of Christl Engelhart (Theodor Kern’s first wife), and thus Kern’s brother-in-law.

Guided tour of the Burgtheater, Vienna, 11 November 2022

‘Hagenbund’ exhibition in Vienna

All being well, in two weeks’ time, I’ll be in Vienna, for the first time in four years. Among other things, I’m planning to visit this exhibition at the Leopold Museum:

I wrote about Theodor Kern’s membership of the Hagenbund in these posts. While I’m not optimistic that any of Kern’s paintings will be on display in the current exhibition, there’s a good chance that it will feature works by his friend Franz Lerch, and other contemporaries and associates of his, such as Felix Albrecht Harta.

Watch this space for my review of the exhibition, and perhaps some photos of the exhibits.

Theodor Kern at Salzburg Museum

I’m grateful to Dr. Eva Jandl-Jörg of the Salzburg Museum for responding to my query about the museum’s holdings of artworks by Theodor Kern. Dr. Jandl-Jörg has confirmed that Salzburg Museum has a grand total of 69 pieces by Kern in its collection. Apparently, these don’t appear in the museum’s online database because the museum doesn’t own the rights to them (I wonder who does?).

Dr. Jandl-Jörg curated the groundbreaking exhibition of works by Faistauer, Schiele, Harta and their contemporaries at Salzburg Museum in 2019, as well as helping to organise the fascinating Schiele exhibition which we saw at the Belvedere in Vienna in 2018.

She has kindly attached to her email a detailed list of Kern’s artworks in the museum database, with a thumbnail image and a description of each item. The list includes paintings (landscapes, portraits, religious scenes, nudes and still lifes), drawings, stained glass pieces and preliminary sketches for frescoes, the earliest dating from 1913, when Kern was still a schoolboy, and the latest from 1955. Only a dozen or so of the artworks were familiar to me, including these paintings of his two wives, Christl Engelhart and Friedl Frank:

Theodor Kern, ‘Bildnis von Christl Kern-Engelhart’ (1931), Salzburg Museum

Theodor Kern, ‘Bildnis einer Frau im Liegestuhl (Friedl Kern)’ (1948 – 1950), Salzburg Museum

However, that leaves more than 50 works in the Salzburg Museum that were previously unknown to me, including some intriguing surprises, such as this rather beautiful portrait of the controversial graphic and ceramic artist Poldi Wojtek, designer of the iconic logo for the Salzburg Festival, about whom I’ll have more to say in another post:

Theodor Kern, ‘Brustbild der Keramikerin Poldi Wojtek’ (1927), Salzburg Museum

I’m looking forward to analysing these ‘new’ paintings and sketches in the coming days, and to discussing them in future posts.

Kern at the Belvedere

The Belvedere Museum in Vienna is one of the leading museums of the world, with a collection which presents Austrian art from the Middle Ages to the modern era in an international context and includes an impressive range of work from the periods of the Viennese Biedermeier, Austrian Baroque, the Belle Époque, and French Impressionism.

Upper Belvedere Palace, Vienna [my photo]

The museum is housed in an eighteenth-century palace, consisting of two buildings, the Upper Belvedere and Lower Belvedere, and set in beautiful botanical gardens, just a few minutes’ walk from the heart of the city. Habsburg history enthusiasts, not to mention admirers of Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, will remember the palace as the home of the rival court of Franz Ferdinand when he was heir to the imperial throne of Austria-Hungary.

Tourists viewing Gustav Klimt’s ‘Kiss’ at the Upper Belvedere [my photos]

The Upper Belvedere houses the main collection and is famous for its collection of works by Gustav Klimt. On our first visit a few years ago, we were amused to see that the highlight for many tourists seemed to be photographing themselves in front of Klimt’s famous ‘Kiss’: in fact, the museum has installed a special ‘selfie point’ for this very purpose. On a later visit, we were pleased to find that the Lower Belvedere was showing a fascinating exhibition of works by Egon Schiele, in collaboration with Salzburg Museum.

Egon Schiele exhibition, Lower Belvedere, November 2018 [my photo]

Until recently, I was under the impression that the Belvedere owned only one painting by Theodor Kern: ‘Akt in Landschaft’ (‘Nude in a landscape’) from 1926, depicting a naked but faceless woman set against a background that has been interpreted variously as mountains or waves. However, Stephan Bstieler (see these posts) has reminded me that the Belvedere also owns Kern’s ‘Kirche mit Brücke und Kahn’ (‘Church with bridge and barge’). The latter is described by the museum as undated, but I recalled that it is mentioned in Karl Heinz Ritschel’s book about Kern, where he claims it was executed in 1931 and that it was shown in 1980 as part of an exhibition dedicated to Austrian artists of the so-called ‘lost generation….who suffered persecution and emigration’. It was Ritschel’s used of the term ‘the Austrian Gallery in Vienna’ for the owners of Kern’s painting that confused me: I should have realised that this was another name for the Belvedere.

Theodor Kern, ‘Akt in Landschaft’ (Belvedere Museum)

Theodor Kern, ‘Kirche mit Brücke und Kahn’ (Belvedere Museum)

Alongside the mages of the two paintings, the Belvedere’s website includes this brief summary of Theodor Kern’s life and career [my translation]:

From 1918 he studied at the Vienna Academy with J. Jungwirth and K. Sterrer. In 1923 he became acquainted with A. Faistauer, whose pupil and collaborator he became with the frescoes in the church at Morzg and in 1926 with the frescoes in the foyer of the Salzburg Festival Hall. A joint study trip through Italy led to friendship with Faistauer that lasted until his death in 1930. 1927-36 member of the Hagenbund. Kern travelled to Paris and Sicily, he ran a painting school in his studio in the Kunstlerhaus. In order to refine the technique of lithography and etching, he studied at the Academy in Breslau in 1930. 1932/33 first stay in England, where he taught at Eton College. 1935-37 he exhibited with the Vienna Hagenbund. In 1938 he left Vienna for good and went to England, where he painted glass windows, frescoes, created sculptures and portraits, taught at the Luton Art School and served as an adviser to the Hitchin Art Club.

Kern later created frescoes, stained glass, wood and stone sculptures, often in very strong colours, with a religious influence. His binding role models, above all Faistauer and the French ‘classical modern’, lost importance in favour of abstract tendencies.

This summary, apparently taken from the museum’s own ‘inventory catalogue’, includes at least one piece of information that was new to me: I hadn’t realised that Kern taught painting at the Kunstlerhaus in Salzburg, just as he would at Luton Art School after he settled in Hitchin.

Kern at Salzburg Museum?

Some time ago, I found a reference to Theodor Kern’s ‘Nachlass’ – or estate – on the website of the Austrian Library Network: see this post. According to the website, Kern’s ‘Nachlass’, or rather his ‘Teilnachlass’ – or part of his estate, presumably that part which was in Austria – consisted of the following items:

• 18 oil paintings (portraits, landscapes, nudes)
• 1 stained glass
• approx. 50 watercolours, drawings and tempera works (portraits, landscapes, still lifes, fresco and nude studies)
• 10 prints.

The web page includes a link to the homepage of the holding institution (‘der aufbewahrenden Institution’) for these items – which is Salzburg Museum.

Salzburg Museum: Neue Residenz (via salzburg-portal.com)

However, if one enters Theodor Kern’s name in the search bar of the museum’s online guide to its collection, the only item that comes up is the exhibition poster reproduced below. Although the year of the exhibition, at the Mirabell Palace, is not given, the fact that it focused on Kern’s paintings of Italy and the South of France suggests that it was probably in the late 1920s or early 1930s, following the artist’s visits to these locations.

Mirabell Palace, Salzburg (my photo: November 2019)

The fate – and current location – of the 80 or so works of art from Kern’s estate that were originally held by Salzburg Museum remain a mystery. I wonder if the 18 oil paintings correspond to the pictures that found their way to the Residenzgalerie and ultimately to the Museum der Moderne (see these posts)? I emailed Salzburg Museum some time ago to enquire whether it still held any of Kern’s works in its collection but didn’t receive a reply. It’s probably time I tried again.

Kern on display in Salzburg, thanks (in part) to this blog

I was pleased to receive a letter today from Prof Dr Heinz Böhme, founder of the Museum Kunst der Verlorenen Generation in Salzburg. We discovered this relatively new gallery (it opened its doors for the first time in 2017) on the first day of our visit to the city in 2019. It houses Heinz Böhme’s impressive collection of work by the ‘lost generation’ of artists who experienced hostility, persecution, exile or death during the Nazi era.

Prof Dr Heinz Böhme (via https://verlorene-generation.com)

Heinz Böhme contacted me last year, having come across this blog, to ask where he might buy paintings by Theodor Kern. I directed him to an auction of Kern’s watercolour painting ‘London Underground’, to which I had recently been alerted to by Elise Nash from Wardown House Museum in Luton: I shared my thoughts about the painting in this post. Prof Böhme subsequently bought the painting.

Theodor Kern, ‘London Underground’ (Museum Kunst der Verlorenen Generation, Salzburg)

Prof Böhme’s recent letter was in response to an email I sent two weeks ago. Having recently become interested, as a result of my research for this recent post, in the work of the Salzburg-based painters Emma Schlagenhausen and Helene von Taussig, a Jewish victim of the Nazis, I enquired whether either of them was featured in the museum’s current exhibition of women artists, ‘Apropos Frauen’. In his reply, Heinz Böhme informed me that he doesn’t currently have any work by these artists in his collection. However, he thought I might be interested to know that Kern’s ‘London Underground’ – his recent acquisition – ‘is currently on display in our exhibition ‘Mit Pinsel und Farbe gegen die Zeit’ (‘With Brush and Paint against Time’) and is an interesting addition because of its Salzburg connection’.

The exhibition, which features newly-acquired works from the Böhme collection, runs until this summer. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to visit Salzburg this year, but even if I don’t, I’m pleased to know that I (and this blog) played a small part in ensuring that a painting by Theodor Kern is finally on display in his home town, for the first time in many years.