The collection of Ludwig Leicher, Berlin (1895 - 1963) When the Walter Schmidt collection, offered in the first part of this May auction (see separate catalogue), reflects the young African collectors in post-war Germany, so the Berlin collection of Ludwig Leicher is a testimony especially of those years before 1945. Little has been documented but what really made this collection can be seen in the historical photographs of the Berlin apartments [1] where an impressive collection with several (?) 100 of objects from Africa, Oceania and the Asia were collected.
Ludwig Leicher, an architect, artist and passionate collector, was born in Munich in 1895 and lived from 1918 until his death in 1963 in Berlin. Even as a young man, he collected non-European art. He can be seen standing next to a life-size Sepik figure in a photograph taken in the 1920s and on the back of a ground plan of his apartment, which was later destroyed by bombs, he notes: »You are born to be a collector as you are to be an artist [...] Only a few of us have remained true to ourselves from childhood, but that is true happiness for a mature
man, who knows the collector‘s delight, [...]« The consequences of the war are devastating for his family and for his collection. He believes that about 170 works of art were safe when he took the precaution of giving 14 boxes, containing the art, to his sister in Raitzen near Oschatz (Thuringia) in March 1944 all of which were meticulously listed. Unfortunately »almost everything« [2], he notes, was lost in October of the same year to plunderers. Among the objects that were saved is an extremely old, very finely worked, –7–