Night Moon; Accordion Player by Moonlight, 1924

About the Work

From the turn of the century onwards, chemist Carl Hagemann (1867–1940) began to collect Expressionist art, all the while communicating with the artists – even as they were being defamed by the National Socialists – and thus amassed an important collection. After his death, his collection was secretly removed into storage to escape the war, together with the Städel’s own collection. Out of gratitude for this hazardous but successful intervention, Hagemann’s heirs donated 935 works on paper to the Städel in the 1940s. Further donations followed in the decades that followed.

About the Acquisition

From 1900 onwards, the Frankfurt chemist and industrialist Carl Hagemann (1867‒1940) assembled one of the most important private collections of modern art. It included numerous paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially by members of the artist group “Die Brücke”. After Carl Hagemann died in an accident during the Second World War, the then Städel director Ernst Holzinger arranged for Hagemann’s heirs to evacuate his collection with the museum’s collection. In gratitude, the family donated almost all of the works on paper to the Städel Museum in 1948. Further donations and permanent loans as well as purchases of paintings and watercolours from the Hagemann estate helped to compensate for the losses the museum had suffered in 1937 as part of the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art” campaign. Today, the Hagemann Collection forms the core of the Städel museum’s Expressionist collection.