Stolen WWII Art Exhibited At Berlin Museum

Written by Hermann Klauser Saturday, 11 December 2010 22:00

Berlin – More than 60 years World War II finished a painting of the Florence skyline that hung in Adolf Hitler's Berlin apartment  and was missing for decades went on show in an exhibition of works returned to the collection of Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The exhibition centers on 18 works returned to the German museum more than half a century after they were removed from its premises. The exhibit also has official shipment and loan lists, photographs and other documents to show how these pieces were taken down from the museum walls to wind up on odysseys through flak towers, salt mines and water-soaked cellars. A year after the Nazis came to power in 1934, Berlin's National Gallery loaned some 70 works to decorate Adolf Hitler's Reich Chancellery. Among them was an evocative landscape, "View of Florence," by the German Romantic painter August Wilhelm Ahlborn. In 1945, the painting disappeared into the postwar chaos, along with many other German artworks and artifacts. For decades, "View of Florence" was thought to be lost for good. The painting was found in a Berlin auction house offered it for sale in 2009. Earlier this year, after reaching an agreement with the seller, the Berlin-based Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs the city's major museums and state libraries, reacquired "View of Florence." The masterpiece can be enjoy with around two dozen other 19th century paintings, in a special exhibition called "Loss and Return," which documents Berlin's most recent attempts to recover works lost during the Second World War. The exhibition opened Friday at Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie and runs through March 6. Last week, German and Ukrainian art and government officials held a meeting, in part to clarify the status of outstanding artworks seized by the Soviets during and after World War II and now in Ukrainian museums and collections. The on-and-off again meetings are set to increase in frequency, says Gilbert Lupfer, head of provenance research at the Dresden State Art Collections, who attended the latest meeting.

Many of these works found their way into private hands, but museum officials say a recent international push for restitution has resulted in an increase in the number of works returning to the museum in the past 10 years. "In recent years, attitudes have changed," said Dorothea Kathmann, a legal expert with for the Prussian Culture Foundation. Efforts to track down and restitute art looted from Jewish collectors by the Nazis have helped encourage a broader focus on tracing pieces that were stolen or went missing during the Nazi era and World War II.

"Today not only the question of ownership is in focus, but attempts to trace Jewish collections, have brought an ethical and moral —even political — element" to research, Kathmann said. "We get a lot of information from auction houses," says Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. When a work that once resided in Berlin is discovered, says Mr. Parzinger, "we try to negotiate" with the seller—in many cases offering 10% of the work's market value. In some cases, German museums are still prepared to file suit.

At the end of the World War II in 1945, some 800 works that had been in the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie were missing. About two-thirds of them were recovered by the end of the 1950s. Since 1990, more than two dozen others have been returned, including those in the exhibit. Political developments, including Germany's — and Berlin's — reunification and use of the Internet to circulate databases, however, have made it easier to spread the word about missing artworks, leading to a jump in the number of returns since 2000, Berlin Museum director Michael Eissenhauer said. museums in Germany's Soviet-occupied zone often saw the bulk of their collections seized as de facto reparations, or else simply looted by individuals. East Germany got hundreds of thousands of these works back starting in the 1950s. Klaas Ruitenbeek, director of Berlin's Museum of Asian Art agreed with his counterpart and said that 90% of Berlin's prewar East Asian collection is largely in the Hermitage Museum and Moscow's Pushkin Museum.  However under a Russian statute said that German "cultural treasures" moved to the Soviet Union and still in Russia are now "national treasure of Russia", so it is unlikely that any of the looted masterpieces would be returned.

Another work in the exhibit, which opened to the public last Friday and runs through March 6, was reacquired by the museum in October. In 1942, "Dog with Gray Horse" by English painter William Cole, had been hung by Nazi officials in a Berlin villa that was to house the then exiled Iraqi prime minister. At the war's end, he moved south to a village outside Dresden and the painting was given to a housekeeper as payment .A descendent of the housekeeper identified it through a database of lost artwork and contacted the museum — reflecting what Eissenhauer called a generation change that is benefiting the museum. "Many paintings are changing hands and the younger generation is starting to ask where they come from," Eissenhauer said. "We are hoping that the curve will continue to go up."

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