Renée Sintenis
Ruhendes Zebu / Liegendes Zebukalb, 1924

Alfred Flechtheim and Renée Sintenis

The German sculptress and draughtswoman was descended from Huguenot refugees by the name of Saint-Denis. Sintenis knew that she wanted to be an artist from an early age. She left Gymnasium at the age of 17 without a school-leaving certificate and enrolled at the college of arts and crafts. She started drawing nudes and heads having previously focused primarily on animals. Her small-scale animal sculptures are her most important works. She did, however, also make a number of self-portraits and small statues of athletes. After leaving the Kunstgewerbeschule, also without completing her course, she modelled for the sculptor Georg Kolbe. She met the typographer and painter Emil Rudolf Weiss who later became her husband. Like Karl Hofer, he also enjoyed the financial support of the industrialist Theodor Reinhart of Winterthur, Switzerland. In 1910 Sintenis created her first self-portrait in terracotta based on an etching. In 1913 the artist first exhibited at the Berlin Secession.
In the 1920s she had her greatest success. She was represented by the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim who staged a number of group exhibitions of sculptures and drawings by the artist between 1920 and 1933. In 1931 Renée Sintenis was the first sculptress to become a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. After being classified a ‘half Jew’ according to the National Socialists’ Nuremberg Laws, the artist was excluded from the Akademie in 1934 although she was allowed to remain in the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) and continue to work. Works of hers were confiscated from museums in Berlin, Erfurt, Düsseldorf and Bremen as part of the ‘Degenerate Art’ campaign in 1937. After the war Sintenis worked as a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. Her large-format sculpture of the Berlin Bear was exhibited in 1957 in Berlin, in 1960 in Düsseldorf and 1962 in Munich. At the Berlinale, small-format silver and gold-plated versions of her Berlin Bear are presented to award-winners.

Sintenis and Flechtheim met before World War I. Even if Flechtheim never organised a solo exhibition for her, she was one of his favourite artists. Among all the German painters and sculptors she was represented time and again very prominently together with Hofer, Levy, Nauen, Purrmann, de Fiori and Haller. Flechtheim can be considered her ‘gallery discoverer’. One of her largest animal sculptures used to stand at the entrance to the Berlin gallery in Lützowufer, underlying the great importance of her art for Flechtheim. Museums and private collectors also bought her works of art in equal measure.