User:Eli185/Irmgard Schüler

Irmgard Schüler (born July 12, 1907 in Bochum; died after 1962) was a German-Israeli art historian.

Life
Irmgard Schüler was a daughter of the Bochum private banker Oskar Schüler (1879-1929) and Martha Liebhold. Her grandfather Hermann Schüler (1840-1926) came from Balve and founded a bank in Bochum during the Gründerzeit boom in 1872, which was managed solely by his older brother Paul Schüler (1876-1942) after Oskar Schüler's death. The bank went bankrupt in 1932 in the wake of the Great Depression. Paul Schüler owned an important collection of paintings by contemporary artists, including art that was considered degenerate art under National Socialism. The collection was part of the bankruptcy estate and was largely sold by 1939, a small part remained in the possession of the family, it was sold piece by piece under the pressure of the German persecution of the Jews in order to ensure survival, the remaining paintings were looted by the German police and have since disappeared. Paul Schüler and his wife became victims of the Holocaust in 1942; their two children were able to emigrate to the USA. They were compensated in 1955 in a restitution procedure in accordance with German administrative practice at the time.

Irmgard Schüler attended the municipal upper secondary school in Bochum and studied art history, archaeology and history in Heidelberg, Munich, Berlin and Bonn from 1927, completing her doctorate in Bonn in 1932 under Paul Clemen with a dissertation on the Master of the Gardens of Love. She found employment at the Suermondt Museum in Aachen, but was dismissed for racist reasons after the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933. From 1934 to 1938, she worked as an assistant at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She also worked as a librarian for the Jewish Community of Berlin. Together with Franz Landsberger, who had taken over the management from Erna Stein-Blumenthal in 1935, and the freelance curator Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, she organized exhibitions and processed the collections under the adverse conditions of rampant anti-Semitism. After the Reichspogromnacht in 1938, the museum was forced to close.

Schüler managed to emigrate to Palestine with her mother. From 1942, she was employed in the Jewish administration in the Mandate territory and became an administrative official when the state of Israel was founded. After her retirement in 1962, she devoted herself to art history again.

Writings

 * Der Meister der Liebesgärten. Ein Beitrag zur frühholländischen Malerei. Amsterdam : Munster, 1932
 * Der jüdische Lederschneider Meis Jafe. In: Jüdische Rundschau. 1934, Nr. 78/79
 * Das jüdische Museum. Zwanzig Jahre jüdische Kunstschau. In: Israelitisches Familienblatt, 25. Februar 1937, S. 16a
 * A note on Jewish gold glasses. In: Journal of glass studies. The Corning Museum of Glass. 8.1966, S. 48–61,
 * Ein unbekannter Stich des Meisters der Liebesgärten. In: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 30.1968, S. 345–348,
 * Jewish gold glasses, early fragments of Jewish art. In: Jewish Art Journal, 1977, 1, S. 28–32,

Literature

 * Schüler, Irmgard, in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil. Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. München : Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0, S. 626f.

Weblinks

 * Irmgard Schüler Collection 1901-1968, bei Center for Jewish History (CJH)
 * Irmgard Schüler Collection 1901-1968, bei Center for Jewish History (CJH)