Hildegard Bachert, force in NYC art world, dies

Hildegard Bachert, a refugee of Nazi Germany who became a vital behind-the-scenes force in the New York City art world, introducing American collectors to German and Austrian Expressionists including Gustav Klimt and the Upstate New York farm wife who became known as Grandma Moses, died Oct. 17 at a hospital in Brattleboro, Vt. She was 98.

The cause was a ruptured colon, said Jane Kallir, director of the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan, where Bachert worked for more than three quarters of a century. She was hired in 1940 as an assistant to the founder, Otto Kallir, an Austrian Jew who also had fled Nazi Europe, and after his death in 1978 served as co-director with his granddaughter Jane.

Bachert, who dedicated nearly her entire life to cultivating the legacies of artists who might otherwise have gone unnoticed or underappreciated, once remarked that she developed her “consciousness of art” only after arriving in the United States when she was 15. “After all,” she said, before that time “there were other concerns.”

She was 12 when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and initiated his campaign of anti-Semitic persecution. Three years later, according to an account of her life that she gave to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, she was expelled from her school because she was Jewish.

Jews were banned from the Kunsthalle Mannheim, the art museum in her hometown. Her youth notwithstanding, she said, she understood that modern art, deemed “degenerate” under National Socialism, had become taboo.

Her father, a lawyer, saw the “handwriting on the wall,” Bachert said in the 1993 Smithsonian oral history, and sent her and her older sister to the United States, where a relative had agreed to help support them.