NEW YORK CITY — After a long, tumultuous journey, Hans Sachs’ multimillion-dollar poster collection has been rescued from Germany — and will be sold to the highest bidder beginning Friday at an auction house in New York.
Despite the collection’s artistic and financial value, what really makes an impression is not the works’ stylistic diversity or price tag — it’s the sweeping historical and legal drama behind them.
Surrendered by the German Historical Museum in the fall, the collection got its start in the 1890s, when a family friend gave Sachs — then 17 — posters depicting Sarah Bernhardt on the Paris stage.
A poster by German artist Walter Schnackenberg that promotes a pair of cabaret performers is expected to sell for about $40,000. (Courtesy of the Sachs family via Guernsey’s Auction House)
Over the following decades, the Berlin-bred Sachs would become a renowned collector, building an artistic trove that in 1926 encompassed more than 10,000 posters. The collection would include pieces by top-flight artists from across Europe — including Toulouse-Lautrec, some of whose works Sachs later smuggled out of Nazi Germany.
Rather than shielding the pieces from public view, Sachs considered it his mission to share the art with European society. As the founder and president of Verein der Plakatfreunde, an organization devoted to poster art, Sachs published and edited the group’s periodical, helping to generate recognition of the genre as a legitimate artistic form.
A patriot who displayed his posters on German U-boats during World War I, Sachs would later serve as an artistic consultant to the private and public sectors. When Germany dissolved universal conscription after World War I, it was Sachs whom the new government sought for advice on how to attract volunteers through advertising........
FULL ARTICLE HERE: Stolen by the Nazis, hidden by the Soviets, now on sale in New York | The Times of Israel
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