The human face is the guiding star of the Grisebach founder's surprising collection of art on paper, which will be auctioned on 25/26 October for his new life's ambition.
It is the personalities behind the pictures, their thoughts, experiences and most intimate passions that have always fascinated Bernd Schultz, fuelled his curiosity and will continue to inspire him in the future. This universe gazes out at us from the sheets of his collection - all character heads, indeed lifelines on paper, from which the foundation of an unheard-of vision is being formed with this special auction: the founding of an exile museum in Berlin that commemorates the great expellees of German history. In line with the founding idea of Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, it will be a museum for pausing, a place of "education for compassion" for this and future generations. To this end, and only to this end, Bernd Schultz is contributing his collection of hand drawings, amassed over six decades, with a radiant passion.
The almost 400 sheets range from the Gothic period to the immediate present. Watteau and Warhol, Menzel and Baselitz, Corinth and Picasso are represented, as are Matisse and Giacometti, Toulouse-Lautrec and Kirchner. The nervous lines of the early 20th century by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka lead on to Max Beckmann's unsentimental image of man and the touching existentialism of Käthe Kollwitz. But the portraits of Paul Holz, the constructions of Hermann Glöckner, the sweeps of Ernst Wilhelm Nay and the masterful draughtsmanship of contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Bruce Nauman also provide a precious depth that is unrivalled.
As with the hand drawing, whose lines lead directly from the artist's head, clever minds, friends and companions of our time have written about these works - personally, passionately, poetically. Their texts bear the conscious farewell of the collector, a force field for an energetic new beginning.