A significant part of Georg Kolbe’s written legacy was brought to Vancouver in the 1970s by Kolbe’s granddaughter, Maria von Tiesenhausen, where she lived until her passing in 2019 at the age of 90. From 1969 to 1978, she managed the Georg Kolbe Museum and, in this capacity, compiled a selection of letters by Kolbe (published in 1987). A review of her estate revealed the large number of documents and works by the artist that had been with her in Canada and belonging to the Georg Kolbe Foundation. With the return of this collection to Germany in Spring 2020, Georg Kolbe’s estate was reunited for the first time in over 50 years. For the history of 20th century art, this is an extremely important find that is unrivalled in terms of quantity and quality. The objects found in Canada (in addition to documents, sculptures, drawings and prints) form an essential part of Kolbe’s estate. In addition to the approximately 3,000 letters to and from Georg Kolbe, the collection includes notebooks, pocket diaries, private photos and images of his work as well as official documents. They allow the artist to be understood anew and in a more precise way, not only in terms of his working processes and artistic ambitions, but also as a personality. The documents cover the period from around 1900-1947 and thus the most decisive decades of the 20th century in German and European history. They provide important information about the reality of an artist’s life during these years, about which previously very little was known.

Thanks to the generous support of the Ernst von Siemens Foundation and the Hermann Reemtsma Foundation, the museum was able to begin the scientific cataloguing of this valuable part of the estate and since April 2020, the material has been classified and inventoried. The aim is to integrate the material into the museum’s existing archive and make it accessible for use by the museum and other scholars. As the digitisation of the material is one of the Georg Kolbe Museum’s highest priorities, these documents will also be successively made accessible via Kolbe Online, Kalliope and the German Digital Library.

Project leader: Dr Elisa Tamaschke