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Alma del Banco, 1897

Alma Aline Henriette del Banco (*December 24, 1862 in Hamburg; †March 8, 1943 in Hamburg) was a German painter during modernity. After being persecuted during national socialism for being Jewish, she died in 1943 by suicide to avoid deportation to a death camp.

Life

Family

Alma del Banco came from an assimilated Jewish family. Her father Eduard Moses del Banco (1810-1881) ran a retail business selling furs, pig bristles, horsehair and feathers for bedding, located at Deichstraße 16. Her mother Therese Vallentin (1824-1884) originally came from Sweden. While the family was Jewish, the children were not raised religiously. After her father died, her youngest half-brother Siegmund (1846-1938) took over his fathers business at 21 years old and continued running it, presumably until 1890. After her mother died, Siegmund became head of the family and also the main provider for his three half-sisters Alma, Fanny (1857-1923) and Eleonore (1862-1934), who would later marry Hans Lübbe. The siblings lived together at their parents' apartment at Katharinenstraße 20. Alma and Siegmund would continue to live together from 1919 onward, since they were both unmarried. They moved a couple of times, but always stayed in the Old Town and New Town districts of Hamburg, which at the time were home to three quarters of the citys entire Jewish population. Siegmund rented a studio located at Große Theaterstraße 34/35, in which Alma lived from 1934 onward.

Education in painting

Ernst Eitner with students of Malschule Röver on a field trip to Neustadt in Holstein, 1897

At age 30, Alma del Banco shifted her main focus from arts and crafts to painting. From 1895 to 1905, like many female artists of the time, she got a painting education at the private Malschule für Damen (“painting school for ladies”) in Hamburg, founded by Valeska Röver. She studied impressionism under northern-german influence under her teachers Ernst Eitner and Arthur Illies.
Eitner was a formative influence on her early works, as well as Cézanne and Matisse, whose works she studied autodidactically. She also travelled a lot through southern Europe, which led to her painting motives from the Hamburg area in an impressionistic way using the vivid color palette associated with the South. Additionally, she started experimenting with graphic simplification.
Shortly before the start of World War I, she pursued further education in Paris, studying under Jacques Simon, André Lhote and Fernand Léger, with a focus on Légers early works as well as the contemporary art styles of cubism and expressionism.

Activity in the Hamburg art scene

Sommertheater, oil on canvas, around 1918-22

Berglandschaft mit Ziegen, around 1932

She made her return to Hamburg in 1914 to work as a freelance artist in her studio at Große Theaterstraße 34/35, which subsequently became a popular meeting spot for painters in Hamburg. However, her orders were not making enough profit to fund her living necessities.
Alma del Banco developed her own signature style in the years after Paris. In the 1920s, she enhanced her preliminary sketches to optically shift the focus towards graphic elements. Cubist influences caused her motives to be slightly distorted, and she also used methods like the application of paint only in a very thin layer as well as leaving parts of the canvas completely unpainted, in order to intentionally generate a sketch-like overall impression. She traveled to Italy (with Gretchen Wohlwill, 1922), France and the Balkan countries, where she continued to educate herself further.
Del Banco established herself as one of the most important persons in the Hamburg art scene. In 1919, she became one of the founding members of the Hamburg Secession. In 1920, she joined the Hamburgische Künstlerschaft (association of Hamburg artists) and a year later, she also became a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (association of German artists). At this time, she also was a member of the Tafelrunde (“round table”) hosted by journalist and author Hans W. Fischer. In 1931, she was one of the founding members of the first German Zonta club.
In the early 1930s, at 70 years old, her art style changed, including elements of the characteristic style of the Hamburg Secession. Her late works are not as sketch-like, more developed, and the outlines transformed into soft, dark brushstrokes. Her paintings are formatively influenced by her cheerfulness and her critical, uncompromising art style. She preferred to paint motives and still lives of the northern German area, mainly around Hamburg and Cuxhaven, and she became a popular portraitist who painted many prominent members of Hamburg society, like mayor Wilhelm Burchard-Motz, Ida Dehmel, Max Sauerlandt and government building officer Ludwig Wendemuth (1860-1929). Along with her Secession colleagues Anita Rée and Gretchen Wohlwill, she was a valued painter in Hamburg during the late Weimar Republic.

Prosecution and confiscation of her works

However, this changed due to the increasingly antisemitic atmosphere in the late 1920s, which resulted in the national socialist dictatorship. In 1933, the association of Hamburg artists expelled Alma del Banco because she came from a Jewish family, as these expulsions had become government mandated. In contrast, the Hamburg Secession disbanded itself, partially because they wanted to spare their Jewish colleagues the humiliation of being expelled.
13 of her paintings were confiscated from the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1937 during the Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) movement. Nine of these paintings were subsequently destroyed, the fate of three more paintings is unknown. Only one painting, Bildnis Pastor Hunzingers (portrait of Pastor Hunzinger), could be recovered. The oil painting was sold to art dealer Bernhard A. Böhmer in 1940 for “recycling”, recovered after 1945 and, as of March 2021, now resides in the Kulturhistorisches Museum Rostock (cultural-historical museum of Rostock) for the sake of repatriation. In 1938, Alma del Banco was expelled from the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture). She was persecuted by the regime both for being Jewish and for being an avantgarde artist. The government banned her from partaking in exhibitions, and due to her expulsion from artistic societies as well as the public contempt for her works, she began spiraling more and more into artistic and social isolation.

Final years

Gravestone of Alma del Banco on Ohlsdorf Cemetery

After the death of her still unmarried half-brother Siegmund del Banco, Alma moved out of their shared apartment at the Jungfernstieg and moved in with her brother-in-law Hans Lübbert in Hamburg-Blankenese, who had already set up a studio for her in his house years prior. There, she was put on house arrest by the government. In her last years, she suffered from heart insufficiency and at age 79, she felt too weak and too old to emigrate. When she received her deportation notice for Theresienstadt, Alma del Banco ended her own life with morphine on March 8, 1943.
She was buried in the area of the Lübbert family grave on Ohlsdorf Cemetery, where a pillow stone reminds of her.
Due to her persecution as well as the confiscation and partial destruction of her paintings during the Nazi regime, she and her works faded from collective memory. Art historian Maike Bruhns helped to bring her back into the public eye.

Estate

Her estate is in possession of the Forum für Künstlernachlässe Hamburg (organization for artists’ estate Hamburg).

Gallery

• 
  Japanerin, 1910, Hamburger Kunsthalle
• 
  Fördeufer, about 1911
• 
  Apfelsinen und Narzissen, 1911
• 
  Hamburg, about 1912
• 
  Im Garten, about 1915
• 
  Atelierstillleben, about 1918
• 
  Blick von der Süllbergterrasse in Blankenese auf die Elbe, 1918
• 
  Taormina, 1918–1922
• 
  Porträt August Wilhelm Hunzinger, about 1920
• 
  Porträt August Wilhelm Hunzinger, year unknown
• 
  Rote und gelbe Segel (Segelschiffe in Cuxhaven), about 1922
• 
  Porträt Dr. Wendemuth, about 1922, Hamburger Kunsthalle
• 
  Mädchen mit roter Schleife, 1925
• 
  Fischerboote im Hafen, about 1925

Honors

Stolperstein of Alma del Banco

In front of her last residence in Blankenese, a Stolperstein was installed for Alma del Banco .
In 1985, the street Del-Banco-Kehre in the Hamburg district Neuallermöhe was named after her.
The Forum für Künstlernachlässe Hamburg set up an award, the Alma del Banco-Preis, which is given away since 2017 for the best Bachelor's thesis of Art & Design students at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences in Hamburg.

Exhibitions

• 1999/2000: Verfemt, Vergessen, Wiederentdeckt. Kunst expressiver Gegenständlichkeit aus der Sammlung Gerhard Schneider ("Ostracized, forgotten, redisvovered. Expressive art from the collection of Gerhard Schneider"), Kunstverein Südsauerland Olpe (art association Südsauerland Olpe), at Museum Baden, Solingen-Gräfrath. Catalogue of exhibitions published by Rolf Jessewitsch and Gerhard Schneider. Wienand, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-87909-665-1, p. 425
• 2004/2005: Viermal Leben – jüdisches Schicksal in Blankenese. ("Four times life – Jewish fates in Blankenese"), Verein zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Blankenese (association for research of Jewish history in Blankenese), at Gemeindehaus der Ev.-luth. Kirchengemeinde Blankenese, April 12th – May 18th 2004, at Handelskammer Hamburg, January 20th - February 25th 2005
• 2005: Ausstellungspremiere. Das Forum für Nachlässe von Künstlerinnen und Künstlern präsentiert Werke von elf Künstlerinnen und Künstlern ("Exhibition opening night. The organization for artists’ estate Hamburg presents works by eleven artists"), at Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg.
• 2006: Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde (Teil 1) in Hamburg zwischen 1890 und 1933 ("Avantgarde artists in Hamburg from 1890 to 1933, part 1"), at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
• 2011/2012: Kunstausstellung Alma del Banco, Ausstellungen jüdischer Künstler in Blankenese ("Art exhibition Alma del Banco, exhibitions of Jewish artists in Blankenese"), Verein zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Blankenese together with Arbeitskreis Kirche und Kunst (working group Church and Art), closing event with Thomas Sello and Maike Bruhns, at Gemeindehaus der Blankeneser Kirche am Markt
• 2011/2012: Alma del Banco. Elbe, Alster, Mittelmeer ("Alma del Banco. Elbe, Alster, Mediterranean Sea"), at Ernst Barlach Haus, Hamburg
• 2016–2018: Eigensinn. GEDOK-Künstlerinnen in der Hamburgischen Sezession ("Willfulness. GEDOK-Artists in the Hamburg Secession"), at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, October 21st 2016 – February 4th 2018

Literature

• Dankmar Trier: Banco, Alma del. In: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon. Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (AKL). Volume 6, Saur, München 1992, ISBN 3-598-22746-9, p. 557.
• Banco, Alma Del. In: Hans Vollmer (publisher): Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler des XX. Jahrhunderts. Volume 1: A–D. E. A. Seemann, Leipzig 1953, p. 106.
• Maike Bruhns: Kunst in der Krise. Vol. 2: Künstlerlexikon Hamburg 1933–1945. Dölling und Galitz, München/Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-933374-95-2, p. 48–50.
• Maike Bruhns: Alma del Banco. In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (publishers): Hamburgische Biografie. Personenlexikon. Volume 2. Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0099-6 (online)
• Ausstellungspremiere. Das Forum für Nachlässe präsentiert Werke von elf Künstlerinnen und Künstlern. Catalogue of exhibitions. Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg 2005 (online).
• Friederike Weimar: Alma del Banco (1862–1943). Eine Hamburger Künstlerin. Including a register of all works. Wachholtz, Neumünster 2011, ISBN 978-3-529-02852-6.
• Britta Reimers: 84. Station Große Theaterstraße 34/35 (alte Nummerierung) Alma del Banco (Aline Henriette), Malerin, Graphikerin, Modelliererin (20. Jh.). In: Rita Bake: Verschiedene Welten II. 109 historische und aktuelle Stationen in Hamburgs Neustadt., Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-929728-52-1, p. 254–255, (online) (PDF; 5,1 MB)
• Britta Reimers: Del-Banco-Kehre. In: Rita Bake: Ein Gedächtnis der Stadt. Nach Frauen und Männern benannte Straßen, Plätze, Brücken in Hamburg. Vol. 2. Wer steckt dahinter? Nach Frauen benannte Straßen, Plätze, Brücken: Biographien von A bis Z. Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-929728-91-0, p. 90–92, (online) (PDF; 5,8 MB)
• Katja Behling, Anke Manigold: Die Malweiber. Unerschrockene Künstlerinnen um 1900. Elisabeth Sandmann, München 2009, ISBN 978-3-938045-37-4, p. 56 f.

Weblinks

• Media related to Alma del Banco at Wikimedia Commons
• Literature by and about Alma del Banco in the catalogue of German National Library
• Friederike Weimar. "Biografie auf der Website Stolpersteine Hamburg". Retrieved 2012-04-09.
• Alma del Banco at Forum für Künstlernachlässe
• Alma del Banco at Hamburger Persönlichkeiten
• Works by Alma del Banco at museen-nord.de
• Alma del Banco at Exilarchiv (archived August 15th 2017 at Internet Archive) today Bürgerstiftung für verfolgte Künste – Else-Lasker-Schüler-Stiftung – Kunstsammlung Gerhard Schneider
• Alma del Banco at Artnet