Walter Bondy

Walter Bondy came from an assimilated Jewish family. He was born in Prague on 18 December 1880 as the first son. Other siblings were Hans (1881-1917), Antonelle or Toni (1883-1961), Edith Lili (1893-1977) and Martha Maria (1888-1942).

The family lived in Prague, where they had been at home for a long time. There the Bondy family had risen economically in the 19th century.

His father was Otto Bondy (1844-1928), son of the metal merchant, factory owner, house owner Aron (Anton) Bondy.

After Walter Bondy's birth in 1880, the family moved from Prague to Vienna, where he and his siblings grew up. On the role of Judaism in the family, Walter's sister Toni wrote "We were brought up without religion. Father's family was no longer ritualistic, even in the third generation, and my father was so far removed from the ghetto type that he believed in assimilation in all seriousness and wanted it." (see Cassirer, My Life with Ernst Cassirer, p. 13 - quoted in Bojankin: Kabel, Kuper, Kunst)

In 1878 Otto Bondy married Julie Cassirer (1860-1914), who came from Breslau (now Poland). Breslau was part of the German Empire at the end of the 19th century and was home to a large Jewish community.

Through Otto Bondy's wife Julie, he became related to the Cassirer family, resulting in an impressive family network of well-known personalities. A special role was to be played by his cousins Bruno and Paul Cassirer - both art dealers/gallery owners - who will be discussed later. Walter's sister Toni married her cousin, the philosopher and author Ernst Cassirer. Both emigrated to the USA in 1933.

The husband of Walter's sister Martha - Otto Bondy's nephew Oskar Pollak (1878-1942), who came from Vienna - held leading positions in the Austrian banking industry. He had to resign from all positions after Austria's "Anschluss" to Nazi Germany. While their children were able to emigrate, he and his wife were deported from Vienna to Maly Trostinec (Belarus) in May 1942, where they were murdered.

From 1880, the family lived in Vienna, where Walter Bondy grew up. His passion for art was instilled in him not least by his father, who collected modern paintings and sculptures.

In 1882 he founded a company under the name "Otto Bondy", which was a representative of the copper and brass works Gustav Chaudoir & Co in Pitten, Lower Austria. From 1888 the company produced itself in Vienna-Penzing as a cable and posametry* factory (*furniture textiles) and developed well economically. From 1904 the company had a factory site at Oswaldgasse 33 in Vienna-Meidling and by now was running as a joint-stock company called Kabelfabrik und Drahtindustrie AG Wien. After sales, Otto Bondy himself owned only a minimal share in 1908 and in fact played no role on the board of directors. He died in 1928 and did not notice how the company came under the influence of Alin AG für Elektrische Industrie from 1935. During the Nazi period, forced labourers from the Czech Republic, France, Italy and Ukraine - including Hungarian Jews in 1944/45 - were used in the cable factory. A large part of the factory was destroyed by Allied bombs in the spring of 1945. When the company closed as Österreichische Kabelwerke in 1997, employees handed over a portrait that Walter Bondy had made of his father, the founder of the cable factory, to the Viennese refuse collection service along with the contents of the management rooms.

Around 1900, Walter Bondy moved to Berlin. Here he began studying at the Royal Academy of Arts, the predecessor institution of today's University of the Arts (UdK). It belonged to the state of Prussia and was based in the Palais Arnim at Pariser Platz 4, where painters, sculptors and engravers were trained. Walter Bondy studied painting here.

Walter Bondy became a member of the Berlin Secession. This was an association of artists that was founded in 1898 in protest against the rigid academic art world. The artists of the Berlin Secession initiated a turnaround in the Berlin art world, for which they also organised exhibitions. Walter Bondy also showed his art in group exhibitions of the Berlin Secession, for example in the winter of 1910/11.

In 1902 he stayed in Munich, where he studied at the private painting school of Simon Hollósy. The Hungarian painter had founded it in 1886 and soon enjoyed great renown, not only among Hungarian students. It was at the painting school that Walter Bondy met his later friend and companion Jules Pascin. Pascin, who was born Julius Pincas in Bulgaria and grew up in Bucharest, Romania, also came - like Bondy - from a Jewish family.

Walter Bondy's time in Vienna ended in 1903. After that, he only had connections to this city through relatives and through his supervisory board mandate in the Kabelfabrik und Drahtindustrie AG founded by his father, which he held from 1929 to 1936.

In 1903, Walter Bondy went to Paris together with Rudolf Levy.

Together with other old acquaintances from Munich, they founded a circle of artists in the Café du Dôme in the Montparnasse district of Paris. Soon after, other German-speaking artists from Levy's circle joined them, such as Jules Pascin.

Walter Bondy's painting in Paris was clearly influenced by the work of Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, and later by Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.

Like many artists of the "École de Paris", Walter Bondy was drawn to Switzerland and the South of France to paint in the summer. The summer of 1908 made Paris an empty city, as it was every year. Bondy also went to the countryside, following the conventions of the avant-garde. Meulan on the Seine was his destination. There he demonstrated his talent as an art dealer for the first time. In a bar he bought two paintings by Vincent van Gogh from the landlord, which he sold on shortly afterwards. One of them was given to his cousin Paul Cassirer, who was an art dealer and was in Paris at the time. Today, one of van Gogh's masterpieces hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the other is privately owned.

Even in Paris, Bondy kept in touch with his friends and acquaintances in Berlin. From 1904 onwards, his works were repeatedly exhibited at the Berlin Secession. In 1911 and 1913, Paul Cassirer also exhibited Walter Bondy and his friends from the Café du Dôme in his gallery. In 1914 Bondy was represented in Düsseldorf at the first group exhibition of the gallery owner Flechtheim.

In 1912 Walter Bondy's daughter Rachel Andrée was born, whose mother Cecile Houdy he married in August 1914. Little is known about her.

When the First World War broke out, Bondy left Paris after about ten years.

In 1914, the young family moved to Berlin, where they lived in a rather luxurious flat at Friedrich Wilhelm Straße 19, south of Tiergarten (Klingelhöferstraße from 1961).

To earn a living, Walter Bondy worked as an art dealer during this period. He owned art collections in both Paris and Berlin and always had an eye for worthwhile acquisitions. Together with his cousin Erich Cassirer, he ran an art trade near Lützowplatz with a focus on antiques. Walter Bondy developed into an expert on woodcuts and paper. He had his private collection of Asiatica (Asian art) auctioned off in 1927 at the Cassirer and Helbich art dealership or auction house in Berlin. His Paris collection of non-European art was also sold at auction one year later at the Hôtel Drout in Paris.

Walter Bondy soon became a well-known art critic. He wrote his first reviews in the early 1920s in the magazine "Kunst und Künstler", which was published by his cousin Bruno Cassirer. In 1927, he founded the weekly magazine "Die Kunstauktion" in Berlin and eventually its successor "Weltkunst", which Bondy edited until July 1929 and which still exists today.

In Germany, the growing anti-Semitism in the early 1930s was also felt by Bondy. In 1930/31 he was insulted in the street as a "dirty Jew". This was the reason why Bondy left Germany in autumn 1931. He made a stopover in Ascona, Switzerland, where he painted some landscapes and finally settled in the small town of Sanary on the French Mediterranean coast. While many non-Jewish intellectuals had not recognised Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933 as an immediate threat to themselves, Bondy seemed to have been more alert to this period and recognised it as dangerous.

Sanary became Walter Bondy's permanent residence from 1933/34. In the 1930s, Sanary was a small harbour town with fishermen and farmers on the Côte d'Azur (Arrondissement Toulon) with 300 inhabitants.

At the time of the Nazi takeover in Germany, Bondy was among the large number of artists and writers who had made the south of France their place of exile. Between 1933 and 1942, about 500 Germans and Austrians sought refuge in the Var department (between Marseille and Cannes). Of these, 80% stayed in the three coastal towns of Bandol, Sanary and Le Lavandou. Walter Bondy's friend, the painter Jules Pascin, also stayed here. And Rudolf Levy also worked in Sanary time and again, in addition to other places on the Côte d'Azur. In this way, Bondy and his artistic environment in Sanary were able to establish a continuity with their life and work in Montparnasse.

In a travel book from 1931, Klaus and Erika Mann wrote of this place: "Sanary seems at first to be the friendly and intimate harbour town that there are many on the Riviera. (...) In truth, however, Sanary has its own significance, for for some years now it has been the declared summer resort of the Café du Dôme, the summer meeting place of the Parisian-Berlinian-Swabingian world of painters, of the Anglo-Saxon bohemians." (From: Erika and Klaus Mann "Das Buch von der Riviera", 1931 quoted in Flügge, Von Montparnasse nach Sanary, p. 59)

Shortly before moving to Sanary, Walter Bondy had met Camille Bertron, who also painted. At Quai Marie Esmenard No. 8 in Sanary, they opened a photo studio together, from which they wanted to finance themselves. Soon they were photographing escaped intellectuals such as Lion Feuchtwanger.

In the mid-1930s, the couple undertook various trips. In the winter of 1934, they transported to Vienna a painting that Bondy had been commissioned by the Vienna Cable Factory to paint by his late father for the supervisory board room. The stay provided an opportunity to see his sisters again. In the winter of 1935/36 Walter painted a portrait of the late wife of his cousin Herbert Bondy von Bondrop in Prague. A year later, Walter and Camille, who was about 30 years younger, married.

Unlike many German and Austrian refugees, Walter Bondy escaped imprisonment in the Milles internment camp in southern France from the beginning of the war in September 1939. His wife was able to convince the administrative director of Sanary, whose portrait Bondy had painted, that Bondy was unfit for transport. Since they could no longer openly pursue their photographic work, the couple lacked money for rent. Soon their lease on the photo studio, which they had since moved to neighbouring Toulon, was terminated. With the support of their friendly domestic help, the Bondy couple were able to find refuge in an empty villa.

Walter Bondy had been diabetic since childhood. When German Wehrmacht troops invaded (northern) France in June 1940, he began to take the insulin injections that a cousin sent by post only irregularly. He fell ill with blood poisoning and died on 17 November 1940.

Walter Bondy owned about 300 paintings, which were in Berlin with his cousins - the art dealers Bruno and Paul Cassirer. After the National Socialists came to power, not only did the rent become too expensive, but the National Socialist cultural policy also pushed for the destruction of art they defamed as "degenerate". For this reason, Walter Bondy's works were transported to Vienna in 1934, where they were stored in his father's cable factory in Vienna-Meidling.

After the "Anschluss" of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich in March 1938, the director of the cable factory handed over the pictures to Bondy's youngest sister Edith Waller and her husband Maximilian Waller. He ran a leather goods wholesale business at Kaiserstrasse 43 in the 7th district with a branch in Donaustrasse in the 15th district. The Wallers lived at Dreihufeisengasse 3 (today Lehargasse, 1060 Vienna). During their stay in Vienna in 1934, Walter and Camille Bondy also lived here. At that time they still got to see the 300 paintings - including many landscapes, still lifes and portraits.

In December 1938, shortly after the November pogroms, Edith and Max Waller emigrated to Sweden and New York respectively. Their flat and company were "Aryanised" shortly afterwards. To this day, it is unclear where Walter Bondy's paintings were stored from that moment on. They were lost in connection with Aryanisation in Austria and have since disappeared. Only a few photographs of them exist, which are in the possession of Camille Bondy. The loss of the pictures is probably the reason why today it is rare to find a picture by Walter Bondy on the open art market.

Since the 1990s, however, researchers have set out to find the works. The art historian Annette Gauthrie-Kampka also worked on Bondy as part of her dissertation on German-speaking representatives of the Café du Dôme circle of artists. She noticed sales at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna, where she received no information. With the help of a wanted ad, she also came across several works by Bondy that were privately owned in Salzburg or were being traded at a French art fair. In the early 2000s, Gabriele Anderl, an Austrian expert on Nazi looted property, conducted research. She tracked down individual paintings in the trade. However, she could not "completely break through the wall of silence" (Döpfner, Im Kunstmarkt). This is because the Austrian law on Nazi art theft only obliges public - but not private - owners to provide information about collection holdings.

Walter Bondy's wife Camille made it clear in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) in 2003 how important it was to her to find the works that are presumably still in the possession of the former Ariseurs or their unlawful descendants: "I am not concerned with restitution, but with the possibility of appreciating Walter Bondy, in his exuberant variety of painting, drawing and writing." (Döpfner, In the Art Market)