Margarete Oppenheim (born Margarete Eisner, October 10, 1857, in Leipzig – September 2, 1935, in Berlin) was a German art collector and patron. She was among the first personalities to collect works of modern art in Germany and owned one of the largest collection in Germany.
Early life
Margarete Eisner was born in Leipzig into a Jewish family in 1857, the daughter of Isidor Isaak Eisner and his wife Alwine (Lea), née Schlesinger. She was the second youngest of six children. Her father was a co-founder of the Leipzig company Callmann & Eisner, which traded in German and English manufactured goods. The family moved to Berlin in 1876.
First marriage and children
In the same year, Margarete Eisner married Georg Reichenheim, a chemist with a doctorate, whose family owned textile factories in Silesia. Margarete Reichenheim converted from Judaism to Christianity around the time of their wedding. The couple moved into an apartment at Viktoriastraße No. 26 in Berlin's upscale Tiergarten district. In 1877 their daughter Charlotte was born, and in 1879 their son Hans was born. The son died in 1900 as a student in Munich. In 1902 the daughter married the banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, from whom she divorced in 1927. She then married Georg Graf von Wesdehlen. The family circle also included the entrepreneur, art collector and patron James Simon, who had married Georg Reichenheim's sister Agnes in 1878.
Georg Reichenheim collected art. After his death in 1903, Margarete Reichenheim continued to add to the collection, including many modern paintings before it was fashionable. Historian Felix Gilbert noted in this regard that "they thought she was crazy in the family" to buy "so many of these awful modern paintings."
Second marriage
In 1906 Margarete Reichenheim remarried, with chemist Franz Oppenheim, who worked as general manager for the Agfa company. Franz Oppenheim was also widowed; his two children, already grown up, were the chemist Kurt Oppenheim and Martha Oppenheim, who was married to the entrepreneur and later diplomat Ernst von Simson. After the wedding, Franz Oppenheim moved - unusually for the time - into his wife's apartment on Viktoriastrasse. In 1913, Franz Oppenheim acquired the property at Corneliusstrasse No. 7, also located in the Tiergarten district, as a joint city residence.
The town house built there according to plans by the architect Hugo Wach was designed to meet the needs of the collector Margarete Oppenheim with gallery space and special wall display cases. In addition, the couple had a summer residence built in the Alsen villa colony in Berlin-Wannsee. For this purpose, three contiguous plots of land were purchased, on which the Oppenheim country house was built according to plans by the architect Alfred Messel. The villa had its own gallery wing for Margarete Oppenheim's collection. Even though Franz Oppenheim supported his wife in building up the art collection, he made it clear in a letter to Wilhelm Bode what division of responsibilities he saw in the Oppenheim household: "I am responsible for the management of the factory, the art department is under my wife.“ A fountain with penguin figures by the sculptor August Gaul was installed in the extensive garden of the country house. The garden architect Willy Lange laid out a rose garden for the rose grower Margarete Oppenheim. Among the neighbors at Wannsee was the painter Max Liebermann, a friend, who portrayed Margarete Oppenheim in various drawings in 1917 and painted various views of the garden. Another neighbor at Wannsee was the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch.
Franz Oppenheim went with Margarete on a study trip to Egypt in 1929 where he died.
Philanthropy
Starting in 1906, Margarete Oppenheim was a member of the Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein, the sponsoring association of the museum headed by Wilhelm von Bode (today the Bodemuseum). In 1905 she donated the sculpture Hercules with the Lion to the department of Christian sculptures in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and in 1913 a bust of King Henry IV of France. After World War I, the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts received three pieces from her collection. She gave further objects to the Museum of Decorative Arts as a permanent loan for exhibition in the Berlin Palace. Together with the banker Robert von Mendelssohn, she donated the painting The Garden Bench by Max Liebermann to the National Gallery in 1917 on the occasion of the artist's 70th birthday. Oppenheim, also owned a large collection of Chinese arts and crafts and was a member of the German Society for East Asian Art.