Berlin to Broadway
Until Fred Ebb's death in 2004, the team of Kander and Ebb was Broadway’s longest running partnership. And for fans of sophisticated musical theatre: one of the greatest. Between them they created unforgettables such as Chicago, Cabaret, Kiss of the Spiderwoman and so on.
In the mid-60s, when the $$ began rolling in via Cabaret, Fred Ebb started collecting art, specifically work by the most prominent artists of the German expressionist movement and the Vienna Secession. On his death a major bequest was made to New York’s Morgan Library and Museum and this northern summer, the a collection of 43 drawings and water-colours is on view.
Many of these works have never been publicly displayed before and the 22 artists represented include Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The earliest work is from 1899, by Paula Modersohn-Becker, the most recent by Max Beckmann, from 1947; the bulk of the work was made from 1910 to 1925.
According to the Morgan catalogue, a particular strength of the Ebb collection is the large number of portraits. These include a self portrait by Erich Heckel and another by Egon Schiele (there are eight works by this artist in the collection).
If you can’t get to New York, there’s a fully illustrated catalogue documenting the entire bequest. It includes an introduction by Isabelle Dervaux, Morgan Library and Museum curator, as well as reminiscences of Fred Ebb by John Kander.
From Berlin to Broadway: the Ebb Bequest of Modern German and Austrian Drawings to September 2, 2007 at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, NYC 10016 or check out www.morganlibrary.org
