Sale 2500, Part I - The Ismar Littmann Family Collection, March 5, 2019

THE ISMAR LITTMANN FAMILY COLLECTION Few collectors in Breslau during the early 1900s had a passion for con­ noisseurship, collecting and the visual arts equal to Ismar Littmann (1878- 1934). Born in Gross Strehlitz, Upper Silesia, between Breslau and Kraków, Littmann completed doctoral studies of law in 1902 and several years later settled in Breslau where he established a legal practice. As his business grew over the next decade and he became enmeshed in Breslau’s art scene, Littmann began acquiring art with an unabated intensity from the late 1910s to the late 1920s. He married Käthe Frankel in 1907 and partnered with the lawyer Max Loewe to establish the firm of Littmann and Loewe around 1921. By the end of the 1920s, Littmann had amassed a collection of more than 6,000 works of art, incorporating some 300 oil paintings, 50 major watercolors and the remainder (more than 5,500 total), predominantly works on paper, including prints and drawings. His pursuit, aside from an unbridled enthusiasm for collecting, appears to have been ultimately to establish a permanent public collection formany of hisworks. Though he lent some to significant exhibitions in Breslau in 1929, 1930 and 1933, and was a co-founder of the Breslau Jewish Museum, his vision for a public collection went unfulfilled, halted by the Nazis’ rise to power and his ensuing personal misfortune. In the early 1900s, Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) was a rapidly ex­ panding, bustling commercial center in Eastern Europe and among the strongholds of left-wing liberalism during the late German Empire; it boasted a nearly tripled population between 1860 and 1910. At the time Littmann was collecting, the artistic, creative and intellectual center of the city was the Breslau Academy of Fine andAppliedArts. Now largely-forgotten, at the time it was a Weimar-era arts institution that rivaled the Bauhaus. Ismar Littmann at age 50, Breslau, 1928. Aerial view of Breslau, early 1900s, before the destruction of World War II.