Armin Stern. Journeys and Escapes
Presentation by Erik Riedel, Frankfurt a.M. (Germany)

The artist Armin Stern (1883–1944), born near Pressburg (now Bratislava), moved to Frankfurt in 1900 to study painting. Despite numerous travels and periods of study in Paris, Brittany, the Netherlands, and Ticino, Frankfurt remained the center of his life. After being excluded from an exhibition at the Frankfurt Kunstverein in 1933 because he was a “non-Aryan artist,” he relocated with his family to Bratislava, which had by then become part of Czechoslovakia.

Image above: Armin Stern, Ascona, 1928. Watercolor. Donated by the descendants of Armin Stern. Jewish Museum Frankfurt

As the situation there also grew increasingly perilous, Stern initially sought to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. By his own account, the painter had become a Zionist while still a schoolboy; during an extended stay in Eretz Israel in 1933–34, he had already gained intimate knowledge of the country while simultaneously looking for a place to settle with his family. In 1938, he obtained an entry visa for the USA; he settled in New York and participated in several exhibitions. After five years of exile in the United States, Armin Stern died of heart failure in July 1944, just days before he was due to be naturalized.

Although Stern had been a successful and popular landscape and portrait painter, he had all but fallen into oblivion. This changed only with the publication of his biography by his granddaughter in 2008 and a cabinet exhibition at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt a year later. Now, the artist’s estate—gifted by his grandchildren—enriches the art collection of the Jewish Museum.

Erik Riedel is head of exhibitions at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt and curator of the museum’s Ludwig Meidner Archive. The archive consists of the artistic estates of Ludwig and Else Meidner and several other artists who were forced into exile. Erik Riedel has curated numerous exhibitions on 19th- and 20th-century art, for instance on Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Ludwig and Else Meidner, Charlotte Salomon, and Arie Goral. Apart from several exhibitions catalogues he has published the catalogue raisonné of Ludwig Meidner’s sketchbooks and the conference proceedings “Ludwig Meidner. Expressionism, Ecstasy, Exile” (2018), as well as the catalogue raisonné of Ludwig Meidner’s paintings until 1927 (2023).

This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.”

A special exhibition Armin Stern: Painter and Zionist is on view until January 3, 2027, in the “Art and Exile” room of the permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt.