Hugo Simon (art collector)

He grew up on his father's farm in Kahlstädt in the Kolmar district (Posen province) and completed an agricultural training course and an apprenticeship in a bank in Marburg.

[7] These included Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Alfred Döblin, Arnold Zweig, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig[8] and Carl Zuckmayer, also visual artists such as Max Pechstein, Oskar Kokoschka and George Grosz, also the actress Tilla Durieux, the publishers Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt and the Ullstein brothers and politicians like the Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun.

[11] In 1921 Hugo Simon bought the former “Schweizerhaus” restaurant in Seelow (Brandenburg) and built a model farm there with cattle, poultry, fruit and vegetable cultivation.

as a founding member of the pacifist organization Bund Neues Vaterland (later renamed Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (German League for Human Rights)) .

[13] The couple initially lived in Rio de Janeiro, then moved to Barbacena, where Hugo Simon devoted himself to raising silkworms.

Nazis justified the confiscation claiming that Simon was finance minister of the “Marxist Prussian government” and a member of the USPD “ -The Schweizerhaus was taken over in 1936 by the state experimental institute in Landsberg / Warthe and continued as the “Staatliches Versuchsgut Oderbruch”.

After the Second World War, the estate was first occupied by the Soviet Red Army and then, in 1950, taken over by the Association of Nationally Owned Enterprises and operated as VEB Gartenbau.

[24] After his death, his heirs continued the process of trying to locate and recover artworks from his collection, notably Munch's The Scream which Simon consigned to a Swiss gallery in 1937[25] as he fled the Nazis.

[26][27] In 2021, following the French government's restitution of Max Pechstein's Nus dans un paysage (1912),[28] the Centre Pompidou in Paris held an exhibition in honor of Hugo Simon.