Grete Ring was born Margarete Ring into a prominent Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1887. She studied Art History in Berlin and Munich Universities, later joining Paul Cassirer's gallery in Berlin as a manging partner. Following the liquidation of the gallery, and in order to escape Nazi persecution, in 1938 she immigrated to London, where she founded the new branch of Paul Cassirer, also contributing articles and reviews to a range of art publications.
Art historian and gallerist Grete Ring was born Margarete Ring into a prominent Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1887. Her father was Victor Ring, a distinguished judge of the Superior Court of Justice, and her mother, also Margarete, was a sister of Martha Liebermann, wife of the famous German impressionist painter, Max Liebermann. Important collectors such as Oskar Huldschinsky and Eduard Arnhold paid frequent visits to Ring’s parents’ home. She studied art history, archaeology and philosophy at Berlin University, completing her doctorate in 1913 under the supervision of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. She began her career during the early part of the First World War as an assistant at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and for about a year at the National Galerie in Berlin, where she acquired her knowledge of 19th-century painting and became interested in the relationship between German and French art of this period. Recommended by the art historian Max J. Friedländer to take over the scholarly writing and editing of Cassirer’s auction catalogues, in 1919 Ring entered the employ of the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin, becoming partners in the business with Walter Feilchenfeldt in 1924. After Paul Cassirer’s suicide in January 1926, the couple continued managing the affairs of the gallery, organising successful exhibitions of 19th century and contemporary artists, among them Oskar Kokoschka (1927) and Van Gogh (1932). Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the gallery was shut down and, in November 1933, Ring became sole owner. Soon afterwards, she received notice from the Nazi authorities banning her from continuing to conduct business. In 1935 the gallery was liquidated, and in May 1938 Ring immigrated to London.
After her arrival in England, the Home Office granted Ring permission to work as an art dealer and an art historian for one year. As noted by Christina Feilchenfeldt, upon being summoned to a Metropolitan Police Station on 8 November 1939, Ring wrote a résumé in English, describing herself as being 'of Protestant faith and not of Aryan origin (according to the Nuremberg laws)' (Feilchenfeldt 2015, p. 135). In July 1938, Ring inaugurated the newly founded branch of Paul Cassirer on Cleveland Row in London's St James's, with an exhibition of 45 watercolours and drawings by Cézanne. In 1941, she had to leave the premises after heavy bombing destroyed most of the stock she had brought from Berlin. In a letter to the art historian Ludwig Grote in Munich on 29 June 1945, Ring wrote how her collection of drawings from the German Romantic period – now part of the Bequest Grete Ring at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford – had luckily been spared. After the destruction of her house and gallery space, Ring moved into a small house in Richmond, together with the art dealer Arthur Kauffmann and his wife Tamara. In an intellectually stimulating environment, she spent her time writing in the garden, visiting libraries and attending lectures. She later moved into a beautiful house in South Street, Mayfair, where she displayed the drawings from her collection. It soon became a meeting place for international scholars and intellectuals, and Ring developed close friendships with English and continental art historians and important figures from the museum world, including associates of the Warburg Institute and the director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark, who issued an affidavit to the English authorities on her behalf (Feilchenfeldt 2015, p. 136). Ring contributed scholarly articles and reviews to a range of publications including The Burlington Magazine and Master Drawings, The Art Bulletin and in 1949 published A Century of French Painting 1400–1500 (Phaidon Press). Grete Ring died in hospital in Zurich, Switzerland in 1952. In 1998, the Ashmolean Museum celebrated Ring's collection in the exhibition 19th Century French and German Drawings from the Grete Ring Bequest.