Benno Geiger as a collector of Old Master drawings
After completing his doctorate under Heinrich Wölfflin and working as an assistant under Wilhelm von Bode, Benno Geiger (Rodaun 1882–1965 Venice) rose to become a glittering but controversial figure at the interface of art history, connoisseurship and the art market. Considered to have rediscovered Arcimboldo and Alessandro Magnasco, he also translated Dante and Petrarch and counted Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan Zweig, as well as Emile Bernard, Oskar Kokoschka and Filippo De Pisis, among his acquaintances. This project focuses on Geiger’s collection of Old Master drawings, which at times encompassed 3,000 sheets (among them, important examples by Perugino, Solario, Michelangelo, Barocci, Guercino, Ribera, Preti, Magnasco, Tiepolo and Solimena), his role in the international art trade and his later involvement in art theft under the National Socialists. The quality of his collection of drawings is reflected not least in the fact that many sheets are today housed in prominent museums on both sides of the Atlantic, e.g. in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Biblioteca Vaticana in Rome, the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
