Last year I wrote about my email exchange with Canon Edward Gardner from the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, based in Bayerisch Gmain, Germany, in which he told me about a commemorative plaque to Theodor Kern on the institute’s memorial wall, and about the recent purchase of two of Kern’s paintings by one of his fellow priests.

Just recently that priest, Father Andrew Marlborough, emailed to let me know about a ‘significant collection’ of Kern’s paintings being sold by a dealer in Salzburg – the same dealer from whom he had bought one of the pictures he now owns. Fr Andrew informed me that the paintings all come from a gallery that recently closed. They include some that have been shown in recent exhibitions and that I’ve written about on this site. One can’t help thinking that they should really be in a public gallery rather than private ownership. Fr Andrew has kindly sent me reproductions of the paintings and has given me permission to post them here.

The largest group among these paintings is a set of depictions of the Virgin and Child, one of Kern’s favourite subjects, while there are two semi-abstract pictures of the Nativity, one of which resembles other post-1950 paintings in Kern’s ‘Madonna Cycle’ and the other a design for a stained glass window. There are four completely abstract paintings, representing the range of styles with which Kern experimented in his later years. The street scene is one of the series that Kern painted during his sojourn in Sicily. The portrait of a young girl dates from 1920 and is featured in Karl Heinz Ritschel’s book about Kern. Like the auction at Roseberys mentioned in my last post, the collection includes a series of sketches for Stations of the Cross, while the depiction of the Crucifixion immediately below may also have been a sketch for an ecclesiastical commission.

For those who may be interested, the paintings are being sold by the Salzburg art dealer Robert Rath, who is in the process of downsizing prior to retirement. Telephone number: +43 650 5007130.

Although he doesn’t say so in his emails to me, I’m fairly sure that Fr Andrew is the same Andrew Marlborough who was ordained in the diocese of Plymouth in 2022, after a number of years working in the art and antiques business, primarily in auctions. Interestingly, this is a background he shares with Fr Patrick Van Der Vorst, the founder of the popular Christian Art website, who before his ordination in 2023 worked for 25 years in the art trade, rising to the position of Director of Sotheby’s Europe.

Following on from my last post, I can report on another collection of works by Theodor Kern sold recently at auction, this time in England, his adopted homeland. The auction house Roseberys of London recently offered a series of watercolours and a group of charcoal drawings by Kern as part of a sale of modern British and 20th century art.

The watercolours were studies for the Stations of the Cross, though for which church they were intended is not clear. We know that Kern created Stations for a number of English churches, including St Anselm and St Cecilia in Kingsway, London (which happens to be one of my favourite churches) and for his (and my) own parish church of Our Lady Immaculate and St Andrew in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.

These watercolour studies were sold between March and June this year, realising prices between £250 and £450 each. In my view, they are among the more conventional and less interesting of Kern’s religious works. His Station of the Cross in Hitchin, for example, though perhaps less superficially attractive, are more artistically interesting and convey more immediately the spiritual drama of their subject:

A group of drawings by Kern offered for sale by Roseberys earlier this year remains unsold at the time of writing (estimated value is £300 – £500). The main charcoal drawing has been given the title ‘Women under trees’ and is reminiscent of the drawings from Kern’s sojourn in Italy in the 1920s, while one of the smaller drawings may be a sketch for a portrait. The other two are more intimate depictions of a woman in bed, one sleeping and the other leaning on her elbow, her breasts half-exposed. My suspicion is that these are also early works and that the woman in the latter two pictures is Kern’s first wife Christl Engelhart:

Finally, in March this year Roseberys sold another group of works by Kern together for £341. These included a watercolour given the title ‘Cubist figure’, an ink drawing of a ‘Landscape with country house’ and an ink portrait which, curiously, has the name ‘Marion Rima’ (?) where one would expect the signature to be. This last portrait is an enigma: is this really by Kern (it certainly resembles other portraits of children by the artist), and if so, who is the child? If not, is the name that of the artist, and is ‘Rima’ the correct reading of it?

Once again, these are almost certainly works dating from Kern’s early years in Austria, and their unframed and often unfinished nature means they were probably part of his private collection and may have been among the many pieces given away to friends by his widow Friedl after the artist’s death. In fact, it’s also possible that all of the works of Kern’s sold by Roseberys this year came from the same private collection: perhaps they belonged to someone who recently passed away?

In my next post, I’ll write about an even more substantial collection of Theodor Kern’s works that recently went on sale, this time in his native Austria.

As I’ve noted in previous posts on this site, artistic works by Theodor Kern are frequently offered for sale at auction, principally but by no means exclusively in Austria. Among the most intriguing items by Kern sold recently is a pencil portrait of the Austrian-born architect and artist Jean Welz.

The drawing was part of an auction organised last month by Strauss & Co, a company based in South Africa, to which country Jean Welz emigrated in 1937, a year after the portrait was made. It was one of a number of items from a sale of the collection of Welz’s son Stephan, who was himself an auctioneer and one of the founders of Strauss & Co, and included 58 drawings and prints by Jean Welz. The portrait is described on the company’s website as ‘signed, dated and indistinctly inscribed in pencil on paper’, and as measuring 41.5 by 30.5cm excluding frame and 62 by 49.5 by 2.5cm including frame. It was sold on 27th May for ZAR 9,610, which equates to approximately £440 sterling or $590 US.

Jean Welz was born in Salzburg in 1908, so he was a near contemporary of Theodor Kern (who was born in the same city in 1900) and it seems likely that they would have known each other from an early age. According to Wikipedia:

Johann Max Friedrich Welz was born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1908, into a family in the picture-framing and gilding trade. Called Hans in his youth, he studied art and architecture, and in 1925 traveled to Paris, and worked with prominent modern architects producing a handful of villas of his own until 1937. It was during this period that he adopted the name Jean.

The commercial gallery owned by Welz’s family – Galeriee Welz – still exists in Salzburg, and indeed it hosted a number of Theodor Kern’s earliest exhibitions, so perhaps that was how the two young artists first met? It’s also possible that the two men were working in Paris at the same time (Kern spent some time there in 1930-31), though by the time the portrait was made Kern was living in Vienna, so perhaps Welz returned there before finally emigrating to South Africa. The Wikipedia article continues:

In 1937 Welz emigrated to South Africa with his wife the Danish journalist, Inger Christensen, and their young son, and began work as an architect at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he designed the entrance foyer of the Great Hall and the Institute for Geophysical Research. In 1939 he became ill with tuberculosis and moved with his family to Barrydale in the Little Karoo, where he and his family operated a tea-room.

In 1941 Welz became principal of the Hugo Naudé Art Centre in Worcester, Western Cape, remaining in Worcester for 28 years. He held his first exhibitions in Stellenbosch and Cape Town in 1942, and the same year became a member of the New Group of South African artists, a loose association of mostly younger artists. Welz was a successful and influential artist until he again became ill in 1968. His health deteriorated and he died in 1975.

Welz obviously valued the portrait of himself drawn by Theodor Kern enough to take it with him when he emigrated. I’d be really interested to hear from anyone with information about the possible friendship and connection between the two artists.

Today – 28th February – is the 55th anniversary of Theodor Kern’s death. It’s good to see that his anniversary is still remembered, and prayers for him still requested, at the church of Our Lady Immaculate and St Andrew in Hitchin, which he attended for many years and where a number of his paintings and sculptures, as well as his Stations of the Cross, can still be seen. This is an extract from the church’s current newsletter:

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.