a chemist's art collection

On the second-last full day of my recent trip to Germany I accidentally discovered a catalogue of the Ziegler collection, a corpus of more than 100 20th century paintings collected by Nobel laureate Karl Ziegler (as in Ziegler Natta catalyst), his wife and their children. Ziegler held the patent for a process that is used globally to make plastics like polyethylene, so with the royalties from that, the Zieglers were able to decorate their home with original art.

I must have seen his name on labels back in the 1980s, when visiting exhibitions of painters like Karl Schmidt-Rotluff or Christian Rohlfs eg at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, and more recently at the big Marc/Macke exhibition at Bonn in 2014. But I completely missed the memo when the collection got its permanent home at the Kunstmuseum Mülheim, now housed in the former central post office of that city, where it can be seen in various reshuffles. The museum was closed for renovations for a few years until May 2024, but I also missed the memo when it reopened. So after finding out about it rather belatedly, I obviously had to visit on the following day.

Currently they are showing part 1 of a 2-part (or more?) exhibition showcasing the Ziegler collection, with Nolde, Klee and Feininger being the stars this time. The special exhibition is housed in a suite of six rooms, with three dedicated to Nolde, one each to Klee, Feininger and the Zieglers.

This exhibition runs until January 11, 2026. From February, part 2 will be focused on the works of Marc and Macke. One of my favourite works in the first exhibition is Lyonel Feininger's Roter Turm II:

Wikipedia

I also loved Klee's Seiltänzer, 1923 and Deutsche Stadt BR., 1928, along with most other things on show. I was a bit grumpy that they didn't show all of the 115 works at once, that would be quite spectacular (it's worth buying the catalogue to see them all at once!). I'm looking forward to seeing all of the 15 Macke paintings in the second exhibition, they make a very impressive set (wheras Franz Marc is less well represented in the collection and their fellow Blue Rider Kandinsky is surprisingly absent). The thing to remember about the collection is that the Zieglers very much chose pretty pictures to decorate their home. Luckily they had good taste (from my point of view) but when browsing the entire catalogue, the dominance of the decorative and the absence of challenging abstract art like, for instance, Kandinsky's are quite obvious. Also, the collection is very German, so no Chagall, van Gogh, Miro, Braque, Picasso, although some of these artists are represented elsewhere in the museum's collection. (I seem to remember from the history bits written on the staircase walls that the museum lost 90% of its collection to a fire during WW II, which would explain why their holdings outside the Ziegler collection are quite limited.)

PS there is a recent Chiuz article on chemists as art collectors which includes a short biography of Ziegler, but no more than you would find in his German Wikipedia entry as well. The other example that also occurred to me is also covered, namely Alfred Bader, of Aldrich chemicals, whose art works were featured on the covers of Aldrich catalogues back in the days (before they were swallowed by Sigma).

prehistoric women ruled

While reporting on the revolutionary findings coming out of the sequencing of ancient DNA in the last two decades, I have occasionally come across the cases of buried bodies assumed to be male because they were associated with insignia of a warrior or a ruler, but then proven to be female by their DNA analysis. Which is always heartwarming but doesn't necessarily provide enough material to base a feature on.

Now the field progresses from individual genomes to systematically sequencing entire cemeteries and compiling family trees of humans who lived many millennia ago. Therefore we can now move beyond the stage of identifying single ancient women in apparent positions of power to looking at networks, such as matrilinear families, where the association with land and property appears to have been passed on in the female line.

Recent research into ancient genalogies has revealed several examples of such matrilinear groups (which may or may not have been matriarchies too), enough to base a feature on, which also highlights some of the unique women in roles previously assumed to be reserved to males.

My feature is out now:

Recognition for prehistoric women

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 22, 17 November 2025, Pages R1065-R1067

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

If I have crunched my numbers correctly, this is the 350th feature in this format, since I accepted the challenge to provide a feature for every issue, back in February 2011. I missed a couple of issues in the first few months, then one in 2014 and one in 2017.

The widespread use of ancient DNA sequencing to archaeological finds is now showing that women may have been more influential in some societies than hitherto appreciated. The photo shows excavation work at a burial site attributed to the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe in southern Britain.
(Photo courtesy of The Durotriges Project and © Bournemouth University.)

becoming Franz K

Some thoughts on

Franz
by Agnieska Holland
Czech Republic 2025

We know Franz Kafka through so many reflections and distortions that the cultural phenomenon has long outgrown the real life writer and his work. Everything imaginable and its opposite has already been written about him so I don't need to feed the AI bots with more of that. Like everybody else on the planet, I have read more words about him than by him. Agnieszka Holland's film is also about the cultural phenomenon at least as much as about the person.

What I find really interesting is the reflected light falling on the other people in his life. I've always been a huge fan of Milena Jesenská, who only turns up quite late in this movie, and not quite like I had imagined her. I do recommend her journalism work,a selection of which I read a couple of years ago and forgot to review. I just saw that a new German version has been published (after the copyright expired) with a hefty 400 pages and a new title (see the cover below) - my copy only had 300. It's such a shame her letters to Kafka went missing. After seeing the movie, I've started reading his letters to her (in an edition I remember seeing on my parents' shelves when I was a child).

It was interesting to discover Felice Bauer, of whom I only knew the name, as well as Kafka's favourite sister, Ottla, who steals the show throughout the movie. The last lover, Dora Diamant is missing here, but she had a whole movie for herself (Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens (The glory of life)), which I sadly missed when it came out last year.

The other fascinating character in this story is the city of Prague. Luckily the city hasn't changed much since he was alive. All the important buildings in Kafka's life are still standing, enabling the director to jump back and forth in time effortlessly. Interestingly, the small and isolated German language community of Prague had an amazing run at producing writers in that generation, including Rilke, born 1875, Kafka, 1883, Egon Erwin Kisch, 1885 and Franz Werfel, 1890.

The movie poster used in Germany. Is the hand-written K part of the title or just a decorative element? Some sources cite the title as Franz, others as Franz K. Note that the sliced head echoes a metal sculpture of his head on display in Prague outside one of the (at least two) Kafka museums there. That sculpture also makes a brief appearance in the film.

The other important question is: will it get a UK release? Given Kafka's unbeatable brand recognition, I would expect it does, but I'll slap on my "films not shown" tag until that release is confirmed. Come to think of it, The glory of life, which came out in time for the centenary of Kafka's death, hasn't had a UK release yet. So maybe even the name Kafka doesn't guarantee a release these days ...

Heck, I even have a kafka tag, due to the fact that I visited Prague a couple of times when this blog was young and still had illusions ...

Review in epd-film

The new(ish) edition of Milena's journalism work (from 2020). I'm finding it rather hard not to buy the book when she looks at me like that, but I'm trying to establish whether there is anything in there that I don't have in my older collection of her writings (Alles ist Leben, published 1984 and republished several times with the same photo on the cover).

an oud from Syria

A few years ago, before I got obsessed with fixing fiddles, I found a lovely oud on gumtree. I was told it was made in Syria by a well-known maker around 2000. Back then, I didn't quite get my head round to learning to play it but I reckon now that I have figured out how to play folk tunes on the fiddle I should try again. It also helped that I saw a very inspiring oud recital by Wassim Mukdad (also from Syria) at the JDP in October. If in doubt, I could always tune it as a fiddle ...

So it looks like this:

And here's the label - a helpful facebook friend kindly translated it for me:

Oud Al-Sharq Al-Asil (which means “The Authentic Eastern Oud”)
Made by Mohammad Sobhi & Sons
Damascus – Jobar
Hammama Jadbani Awwal (a local area or landmark name)

A practical consideration: it came in a very heavy hard case, additionally protected by a soft bag inside the case. I now worked out that the oud with the soft bag fits inside my cello bag, so it is actually transportable. Which means I might try it in the slow session ...

ants in the anthropocene

We know that various groups of insects are declining, and we tend to worry about them if they are beautiful butterflies or busy bees, but we wouldn't normally think of ants as being at risk. A recent paper has shown, however, that the diversity of ant species in island habitats is declining, which may be a warning sign for ant biodiversity everywhere. A big part of the problem is that those ant species that are best adapted to cope with human-made disruptions are spreading everywhere and displacing the ones that are less robust to the impacts of the anthropocene.

So this has been a good reason to look at those disappearing ants and the kind of ecosystem functions that we may lose when they go.

My feature is out now:

Ant diversity at risk

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 21, 3 November 2025, Pages R1029-R1031

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

The study of ant biodiversity and population declines in Fiji made use of museum specimens like these.
(Photo: Peter Ginter (CC BY).)