The Klassik Stiftung Weimar has received a donation from the estate of the artist couple Ivo Hauptmann and Erica von Scheel, adding ceramics, prints and personal documents to its holdings. The gift includes portrait studies Hauptmann made of his wife, as well as images of the designer Henry van de Velde.

Ivo Hauptmann was the son of the writer Gerhart Hauptmann. He studied at the Weimar art school from 1904 to 1909 and married von Scheel, a ceramicist, in 1912. Alongside the donation, the foundation has acquired eleven of von Scheel's ceramics, bringing her work into the collection in its own right rather than as a footnote to her husband's.

The documents from the estate — letters, manuscripts, diaries and historic photographs of well-known artists — will go to the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar, where they will be available to researchers.

The gift strengthens Weimar's holdings in the art of the early twentieth century, a period in which the city was a crossroads for modernism: van de Velde, whose image appears in the donated material, helped found the school that became the Bauhaus. For the foundation, the donation is both an artistic and an archival windfall, tying a family story to the city's wider cultural history.

Gerhart Hauptmann, Ivo's father, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912, the year Ivo married. Van de Velde, the Belgian architect and designer whose portrait appears among the donated works, was a leading figure of Art Nouveau who founded Weimar's School of Arts and Crafts, the institution that later became the Bauhaus.