Full Name: Buchheim, Lothar-Günther
Other Names:
- Lothar-Günther Buchheim
- Lothar Buchheim
Gender: male
Date Born: 06 February 1918
Date Died: 22 February 2007
Place Born: Weimar, Thuringia, Germany
Place Died: Starnberg, Baveria, Germany
Career(s): art collectors, art dealers, and art historians
Overview
German post-World War II art dealer, scholar and exponent of German Expressionism. Buchheim and a brother were born to the painter Charlotte Buchheim (1891-1964), unmarried at their births. The boys were raised by herself and her parents. The family moved to Rochlitz and then Chemnitz, Germany by 1932. After graduating (Abitur) in 1937, he travelled to Italy where he wrote his first book, a work of literature, published 1941. Intending to be an artist, he had exhibited work at 15, he returned to Germany to study art in Dresden and Munich in 1939. When war was declared, Buchheim volunteered for Kriegsmarine in Nazi Germany. He served as an officer in U-boat (submarines) U-96 assigned as a war correspondent and photographer rising to first lieutenant (Oberleutnant zur See). He was decorated by the Reich several times for his service.
After the war, Buchheim still an artist and interested in art, began collecting the modern, Expressionist art that had been disparaged by the Nazis as ‘Degenerate art’ and was still relatively cheap. He formed an art gallery and dealership. Buchheim married an artist, Geneviève Pierrette Militon (1921-2002), a French resistance fighter, in 1948. Beginning in the 1950s, Buchheim published histories of the artists he collected. Many of the books came from his own publishing company, Buchheim Verlag. A biography of Otto Müller appeared in 1963. He divorced Militon and married another artist, Diethild Gudrun Ingrid Wickboldt (1922-2014), in 1955.
A thinly-vailed autobiographical novel of his submarine experiences, Das Boot, appeared in 1973. The book and later the movie contributed the largest part of his fame. Royalties allowed him to collect more expensive Expressionistic work.
Buchheim saw his collection as a “museum of the imagination” (Museum der Phantasie). His search for a city to contain it ending in disagreements with many city figures. The Museum ultimately was located on the shore of Lake Starnberg in Bavaria in 2001 (today, Sammlung Buchheim Museum). Ever tempestuous, at least one city voted in referendum not to accept his collection. He was called the “Starnberg volcano”. His own writings on art are contained in his 1988 Malerbuch. He succumbed to heart failure in Starnberg in 2007.
It is an irony that the art Buchheim avidly collected and espoused after the war was the antithesis of government whose navy he volunteered for. His change of heart, sometimes referred to as “implicit beneficiary” of the damage he helped cause in the War, is documented in his writings (Guarnaschelli). However, the accusation that he was simply an opportunist may be born out by his personal behavior. Buchheim forged prints from the Expressionist artist Otto Müller, whose print blocks he owned. He avoided paying taxes and bought at least one work of art stolen from Jews who had committed suicide during the war.
Selected Bibliography
- Tage und Nächte steigen aus dem Strom. Eine Donaufahrt (“Days and nights rise from the river. A journey on the Danube”)
- Die Künstlergemeinschaft Brücke. Feldafing: Buchheim Verlag, 1956
- Picasso: eine Bildbiographie. Munich: Kindler, 1958.
- Der Blaue Reiter und die “Neue Künstlervereinigung München.” Feldafing: Buchheim Verlag, 1959.
- Graphik des deutschen Expressionismus. Feldafing: Buchheim 1958, English, The Graphic Art of German Expressionism. New York : Universe Books, 1960
- Otto Mueller: Leben und Werke. Feldafing: Buchheim, 1963
- Malerbuch. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lubbe Verlag, 1988.
Sources
[obituaries]
- van der Vat, Dan. “Lothar-Günther Buchheim” The Guardian (London) March 4, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/mar/05/guardianobituaries.germany
- Buchheim,Yves, and Kotteder, Franz. Buchheim: Künstler, Sammler, Despot–Das Leben meines Vaters. Munich: Wilhelm Heyne, 2018.
- Sammlung Buchheim Museum https://sammlung.buchheimmuseum.de/
- Guarnaschelli, Dean Jon, “LOTHAR-GÜNTHER BUCHHEIM’S DAS BOOT: MEMORY AND THE NAZI PAST” (2020). Theses and Dissertations. 131.
https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations/131