Christoph Graf Douglas, one of the international art market’s most prominent and most distinctive figures, died suddenly on 9 September at the age of 68, struck down by a stroke. For everyone who knew him, news of his death is not only sad but also shocking, as he was in his prime, full of joie de vivre and full of plans. The former head of Sotheby’s in Germany was born in 1948 in Konstanz, and had since 1995 been based in Frankfurt, where he worked as a dealer.
Those who knew Douglas delighted in his charm and wit. Sometimes his laughter would mutate into a riotous bark as ever more hilarious ideas sprang to mind. The fortune that he amassed, and that which his wife Bergit Oetker brought to the marriage, offered him possibilities that others could only dream of. Art, old and modern, was not his only passion. His heart was set on his family, his native Baden, the world of nature, the woodlands on the shores of Lake Constance set amid the volcanic landscape of Hegau (which he steadily bought up), as well as shooting and literature.
Some 20 years ago, he embarked on perhaps his biggest enterprise when he bought the family castle, Schloss Langenstein. The restoration of the property and its furnishings and the extensive renewal of the surrounding countryside were projects that would take decades to complete. Over the years, he, his wife, an interior designer, and the British landscape architect Arabella Lennox-Boyd transformed the castle and the nearby Dauenberger Hof. They planted 16,000 trees and shrubs and landscaped a flower garden. Cy Twombly, once a guest there, described it as a paradise on earth.
Schloss Langenstein, which has a tower that may date back to Roman times, tells the story of his forebears. In 1826, Grand Duke Ludwig I of Baden bought the ruined building. The grand duke had an illegitimate daughter, Louise, for whom he remodelled Langenstein in the Empire style—a “testimony to a love affair”, according to Douglas. The castle passed to a Hesse descendent married to a Swedish nobleman whose ancestor belonged to the Douglas clan, from which Douglas descended. Douglas spent, by his own account, a happy childhood at Langenstein in a large and unconventional household: his grandfather with his second wife, the ex-Queen of Portugal, his parents—his Swiss mother and his father, who founded the Südkurier newspaper in Constance in 1946—as well as his uncle with his four children.
After completing an art history degree at Freiburg, he began a doctoral thesis on Konstanz silver of the 1300s under the supervision of Erik Forssman. “The rumour spread around Sotheby’s that I was a great silver expert,” he said. He started work at the auction house but never wanted or had a permanent contract. In his late thirties he became the head of Sotheby’s Germany and, for family reasons (his wife had brought two children to the marriage and three more followed), he relocated the auction house’s German headquarters from Munich to Frankfurt. At Sotheby’s he orchestrated the famous Thurn und Taxis and House of Baden sales of works, but the constant travel took its toll on family life and in 1995 he set up his own business as a dealer.
Douglas was arguably Germany’s most successful art dealer, yet for decades, he worked in an office in Frankfurt with his wife. “I insisted on an office on the top floor and no lift so that no one would visit me.” Of course, he had no website and printed no catalogues, but concentrated solely on a few extremely lucrative deals. He frequently used his profits to purchase more land at Lake Constance.
Douglas’s deals were not uncontroversial. In 2011, he negotiated the sale to the entrepreneur Reinhold Würth for €55m of the Holbein Darmstadt Madonna (1526), a masterpiece belonging to the prince of Hesse and listed under the German cultural property protection act. The private sale thwarted the bid from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, which could only raise €40m.
Douglas was well equipped by his expertise as a dealer and his background to facilitate various exchanges that resulted from the interface of medieval rules of inheritance and contemporary notions of ownership. When the princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, the former Margaret Campbell Geddes, died without issue in 1997, bringing the line to an end, Douglas negotiated the return of the palaces and works of art (as stipulated by a 16th-century ruling) to the senior branch of Hesse-Kassel. Similarly he was involved, after German reunification in 1990, with restitution claims of various noble houses to property in the former East Germany and other Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe.
With his connections to the European aristocracy and high-powered collectors, his connoisseurship and his joie de vivre, Douglas could operate at the highest level within the international art trade. Whether critic or admirer, no one can doubt that Germany has lost one of its finest dealers.
• Christoph Graf Douglas, born 13 July 1948, died 9 September 2016
• Lisa Zeitz is the chief editor of Weltkunst and of Kunst und Auktionen. A longer version of this article appeared in Weltkunst.de on 12 September
From our archives: May 1998 In April, the Russian constitutional court decided that President Yeltsin was obliged to sign the law passed by Parliament nationalising the war booty transported to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Although Gorbachev signed an agreement with Germany to hand back these works of art, archives and libraries, the issue has become bogged down in Russian politics.
Parliament, for nationalistic reasons, sees no reason to give the booty back to an old enemy. This is just another sign that the matter has become a stand-off between an over-mighty president and the ultra-conservative and inward-looking deputies.
Talking to one of the most able negotiators in the German cultural world, Christoph Graf Douglas, now a university lecturer but formerly head of Sotheby’s Germany, I [Anna Somers Cocks, the then editorial chief of The Art Newspaper] discussed how to stop this sterile, zero sum game. Like all good conciliators, he has come up with something for everyone, but presupposes a climate of virtuous realism.
“There is no point in pretending that we Germans didn’t wreak havoc in Russia,” he says. “The booty may be legally ours, but it would be a great deal more elegant if we gave something to make up for all the things we destroyed.”
He proposes that in exchange for the booty, the German government should invest a sizeable sum over ten years—say, $300m—in a specially created foundation based in a neutral country. This would have a board consisting of three Germans, three Russians and three neutrals. Their job would be to spend the income on projects to help Russians and Germans get to know each other better: university exchanges, for example, or research projects.
As for the booty, ownership would be vested in the foundation, so that neither side would be the winner or loser. On the other hand, regular, long-term exhibitions drawn from this material would be arranged in Russia and Germany.
It has, as I said to Christoph, the simplicity of genius; someone should tell Chancellor Kohl about it.A proposal to resolve the German-Russian war booty restitution ended in stalemate.