Ernst Grosse

Stendal, Germany, 1862 - 1927, Freiburg, Germany

BiographyAfter completing his doctorate in philosophy in 1887 at the University of Halle , Grosse completed his habilitation in 1888 at the University of Freiburg . In 1889 he became a private lecturer in ethnology and gave a first lecture there on the art of indigenous peoples . In the same year he became curator of the Freiburg municipal art collections and held this office until 1902.

From 1892 he lived in a shared household in Freiburg with the patroness Marie Meyer (1834–1915, widow of the factory owner Heinrich Adolph Meyer ), who was a maternal friend to him and even wanted to adopt him (in vain for legal reasons). With her he built up a considerable collection of East Asian art over the years . His book “The Beginnings of Art” , published in 1894 , made him a pioneer of modern ethnology. In 1895 he became an adjunct professor at the University of Freiburg, but took a leave of absence and developed extensive travel activities in Europe. In 1898 Marie Meyer gave him works of art of considerable value, including many East Asian objects.

Great interest in Japan is evident for the first time in a lecture on Japanese art and a first publication on this took place in 1903 with the text Japanese Art in Europe . In 1907 and 1908 he was in Japan and supported Wilhelm von Bode , among others, with purchases for the Berlin museums. As early as November 1908, on Bode's recommendation, he traveled there again as an art expert for the German embassies in Tokyo and Beijing . In 1913 he married a Japanese woman and returned to Freiburg, where he resumed his lectures in 1914.

After Marie Meyer had bequeathed her collections to the Berlin museums in 1913, after her death in 1915 there were disputes about the inheritance, which Grosse ended when he also donated his donations from Marie Meyer to the Berlin museums in 1916.

In 1919 he made friends with Julius Bissier , on whose later work he was to have a great influence due to his knowledge of East Asia. In 1926, Grosse was appointed as a regular associate professor at the University of Freiburg, after he had given the university a house in the Black Forest he had inherited from Marie Meyer, but died just four months later in Freiburg.

Grosses diary shows that he could neither read nor speak Japanese , but rather approached the art there emotionally. One of his sources was the reference to the Japanese art magazine KOKKA with very good illustrations, but the texts of which he could not read, and the relationship that Bode brokered with a Japanese art dealer in Paris, Tadamsa Hayashi, who had a major influence on his understanding of Japanese art exercised.

Grosse developed the idea that every part of the culture has a certain effect on the organization and function of the family. For technical reasons he limits himself to the investigation of the influences of the economy. For this purpose, he divided the forms of production and economic activity into an overview of five levels [1] : Lower hunters, higher hunters, cattle breeders, lower arable farmers and higher arable farmers. At the same time, Grosse emphatically emphasizes that this is not a historical series of developments. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Grosse_(Ethnologe) DJackson 4/2/2021]

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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