User:Eli185/Otto Feldmann

Otto Feldmann (* February 26, 1881 in Vienna; † murdered May 12, 1942 in the Sobibór death camp, then Generalgouvernement, now Poland) was a German graphic artist, painter and gallery owner.

Life
Feldmann studied art in Munich and then went to Paris. There he was a student of Théophile Steinlen, among others. He became acquainted with the artists' circle of the Café du Dôme and August Macke. He appeared as an artist with drawings, etchings and watercolors as well as with designs for commercial graphics. At the beginning of 1912 he set up the Rheinischer Kunstsalon gallery in Cologne on Hansaring, followed by the Neue Galerie in Berlin at Lennéstrasse 6a at the end of 1913. After World War I, Feldmann married Ida Levy and settled with her and her daughter from her first marriage in Cologne-Deutz. In early 1939, the family left for Czechoslovakia. Feldmann himself, however, was arrested by German authorities in March 1939. In 1941 he was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto, from where he was transported to Sobibór in 1942, where he met his death. His widow managed to emigrate to the USA in the same year.

Galeries
In 1912, Feldmann established the Rheinischer Kunstsalon gallery in Cologne, where he exhibited artists of today's Classical Modernism, such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir, Braque, Derain and Pablo Picasso, as well as representatives of Italian Futurism. Among the German artists shown, in addition to Macke, other representatives of Rhenish Expressionism were in the gallery.

Feldmann seems to have had contacts with the Parisian Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler through the German-Jewish gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim, who gave him works by Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin, and Jules Pascin, among others, on commission for his branch at the Neue Galerie in Berlin. Feldmann's second Berlin exhibition at the end of 1913 was entirely devoted to Pablo Picasso and was entitled Picasso - Negro Sculpture. The catalog of the exhibition shows the image of the head a wooden statuette from the Ivory Coast, from the Baule people. The catalog mentions to the Berlin audience for the first time the connection of African sculpture with the new art of cubism.