Julius Bretz
Schlossallee in Grafenberg, 1906

Alfred Flechtheim and Julius Bretz

Julius Bretz, a German painter of landscapes and still lifes and a graphic artist, initially studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf but was dismissed as ‘untalented’ after just a short while. He then trained as a landscape painter under Helmuth Liesegang and spent one year, 1890, studying in Holland, where he worked with the marine artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag and met the landscape painters Jacob and Willem Maris. After Holland and trips to Paris, he returned to Düsseldorf following a fire at his house near Siegburg in 1902 which destroyed a large proportion of his early work. In 1909 he helped draft the founding manifesto of the ‘Sonderbund Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler’ and took part in the Sonderbund’s annual exhibitions in Düsseldorf until 1911 and in Cologne in 1912. In 1917 he was elected an honorary member of the Düsseldorfer Akademie, was co-founder of the ‘Rheinischer Sezession’ in 1928 and was awarded the Cornelius Prize in 1936.

The artist Julius Bretz and the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim already knew each other from the Sonderbund and its exhibitions in Düsseldorf. Bretz later participated in a total of three group exhibitions in 1919, 1920 and 1927 at the Galerie Flechtheim. In 1919, Flechtheim held his first large solo exhibition for the artist in his gallery in Düsseldorf. The Düsseldorfer Museumsverein bought two paintings by Bretz that same year ('Schloßallee and Bergische Landschaft') that can still be seen in the Museum Kunstpalast today.