Max Stern (gallery owner)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Max Stern, Dr. (1904-1987) was a German-Canadian arts benefactor, art historian, and owner of Montreal's landmark Dominion Gallery (in French, Galerie Dominion).

[edit] Life & legacy

Dr. Max Stern

Max Stern was born in Germany in 1904. He studied art in several European cities before returning to Düsseldorf to direct his father's gallery, the Julius Stern Gallery. In 1937, Stern was ordered by the Nazi government to liquidate his gallery's holdings because they had forbidden Jews to sell art. Before leaving Germany, his collection was sold through Lempertz auction house in Cologne. Not all the art was sold however, and he placed it in storage. After the war he discovered that the auction house had sold them as well.

Stern fled Germany and lived for a short time in Paris and then London. He started another gallery in the latter city, but was interned on the Isle of Man as an "enemy alien". In 1943 he moved to Canada, where he partnered with Dominion Gallery of Fine Arts founder Rose Millman. Finally able to recover some of his lost art in Europe, in 1947, Max and Iris Stern bought the gallery and made it a focal point for the dissemination of "living art". Max Stern was also interested in modern European art. He was the first dealer to sell works by Kandinsky to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and held the exclusive rights in Canada to sell the work of Auguste Rodin.

Also great art collectors, Max and Iris Stern donated numerous works by Canadian and European artists to over twenty public institutions in North America and Israel.

Max Stern was instrumental in promoting numerous Canadian artists that he represented from the 1950s until his death. The Max Stern Art Restitution Project is an undertaking of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Concordia University in Montreal - in association with the Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York - that is attempting to locate and recover works from the Max Stern collection lost during World War II. There are estimated to be about 400 pieces in total, of which about 10 percent had been located by 2006.