Provenance Research

The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart has to date reported 42 paintings to the Lost Art Databank of the German Lost Art Foundation – including an early work by the Dutch landscape painter Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709) and a history painting by an unknown Dutch painter that until recently was attributed to Philip van Dijk (1683–1753). Both paintings were among the costliest postwar acquisitions. The city purchased them for 400,000 Reichsmarks from an art dealer who is suspected of having been involved in the Nazi theft of cultural goods.

Max Rosenfeld (1867-1943) was a Jewish tobacco dealer and art collector in Stuttgart. Before the First World War, his Art Nouveau villa was well known. Due to his death in the Dutch transit and concentration camp Westerbork, the destruction of his villa in World War II, and the repression of the genocide of the Jews in German post-war society, his fate and that of his family fell into oblivion. 

Around 1937/38, 23 prints by the artist Carlos Grethe (1864-1913) from the Rosenfeld art collection came into the possession of the city of Stuttgart. Under what circumstances the city acquired the prints is unknown: Circumstantial evidence points to a Nazi persecution-related seizure.

Rosenfeld's younger son Paul Georg (1906-1988) emigrated with his family to the USA via the Netherlands in early December 1938. Max Rosenfeld fled to Amsterdam in August 1939, where he lived until his deportation to Westerbork in February 1943.

In 2022, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the City of Stuttgart decided to return the Grethe graphic collection and a small portrait painting depicting Max Rosenfeld to his heirs, who live in the USA. This is done on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition “Grafik für die Diktatur. Die Geburt der Grafiksammlung des Kunstmuseums Stuttgart im Nationalsozialismus” at the beginning of November 2024. All 23 graphics will also be shown in the exhibition.

A current german contribution of SWR Aktuell about this can be found here.

Otto Dix’s “Selbstbildnis als Soldat” (1914) (verso: “Selbstbildnis mit Artilleriehelm” (1914)) is among the most significant works in the Dix Collection of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Its provenance, however, was not clarified until July 2021. New research reveals that this work was acquired by the young Austrian secretary Paula Risch (1897–1999) – under mysterious circumstances. She was unaware that there was a second self-portrait on the back of the painting, even though the artwork had been hanging in her home for decades.

Kai Artinger: Das Geheimnis der kunstliebenden Österreicherin Paula Risch. Die rätselhafte Herkunft des ‘doppelten Dix’, in: Kunstgeschichte. Open Peer Reviewed Journal, 2022.

“Spargelstillleben” (1941) by Käthe Loewenthal (1878–1942) was acquired by the Städtischen Galerie Stuttgart in 1972. Research has revealed that the painting was confiscated in connection with Nazi persecution. Under the Nazi regime Loewenthal was prohibited from working and in 1942 ultimately deported and murdered. In 2019 Loewenthal’s descendants decided that the painting should remain in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. As part of a fair and equitable solution, the community of heirs donated the artwork to the City of Stuttgart. With the donation, the museum committed itself to keeping the memory of the artist alive. In conjunction with the exhibition “Das Kunstmuseum Stuttgart im Nationalsozialismus: Der Traum vom Museum ’schwäbischer" Kunst’”(February 1–November 1, 2020), the painting was exhibited, its provenance presented, and documents used to commemorate the life and work of the Stuttgart artist.

On June 16, 1948, the city of Stuttgart purchased two old Dutch paintings from the art dealer Dr. Erwin Sieger for the exorbitant sum of 400,000 Reichsmark. They were a landscape by Meindert Hobbema and a supposed depiction of Jacob and Rebecca at the Well, attributed to Philip van Dijk. No expert opinions on authenticity were obtained and the art dealer Sieger was blindly trusted, even though he had been interned by the American military government in 1945 and paintings from his art collection were restituted. The examination of the two artworks revealed that the van Dijk is a replica and the authorship must be questioned. In addition, the provenance is very questionable. Against this background, questions arise: Was the extremely high price justified at the time? How should the value and significance of the paintings be assessed today? Why did the acquisition come about?

Kai Artinger: Der rätselhafte van Dijk im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Über einen spektakulären Gemäldeankauf der Stadt Stuttgart 1948 und ein Fall für die Provenienzforschung, in: Kunstgeschichte. Open Peer Reviewed Journal, 2020.

The portrait “Grete Marx” (1915) painted by Bernhard Pankok belonged to Babette Marx, the widow of a Jewish entrepreneur from Stuttgart’s Bad Cannstatt district. She had four children: the three sons Leopold, Julius, and Alfred, along with a daughter, Grete. Marx died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp; the children survived the Holocaust. Immediately following the National Socialist seizure of power, the Marx company was listed in the defamatory writings “Deutscher kaufe nicht beim Juden!” (Germans, don’t buy from Jews!) and in 1938 ’aryanized’. After the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9, 1938, Alfred and Leopold Marx as well as other members of the family were imprisoned for a short time at the Dachau concentration camp. In 2019, the painting was restituted to the heirs now living in Israel and the United States and repurchased from them.

The marble sculpture “Die Sinkende” (1933) by the German-Romanian painter and sculptor Margarete Depner (1885–1970) was purchased in 1942 at the first touring exhibition “Deutsche Künstler aus Rumänien” — although the artist never received any money for it. The work’s provenance raised questions even in the postwar period, because it was unclear whether the city had ever paid for the piece. The investigation into its origins in connection with the current provenance research revealed that this in fact had not occurred. The Depner case can be regarded as a “Nazi war-related” seizure of cultural goods. In 2019 the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the City of Stuttgart decided to retroactively reimburse the artist’s heirs for the fee.

The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart recently investigated the history of the beginnings of its sculpture collection. The National Socialists built it up against the backdrop of the founding of the Stuttgart Municipal Art Museum. The old inventory of sculptures burned during the destruction of the city of Stuttgart's art protection camp shortly before the end of the war. Sculptures were also destroyed, among others by the sculptor Joseph Zeitler. Because very few documents have survived, it is difficult to fully reconstruct the creation of the sculpture inventory and its composition.

In the course of researching the inventory, a very unusual Nazi sculpture by Joseph Zeitler has now been examined for the first time, about which nothing was known until recently, except that it was purchased by the city of Stuttgart from the Württenbergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (WKV) for a project entitled “Zeitgeschichte 1981” and later integrated into the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart's sculpture collection. Inventoried with the title “Kriegsplastik”, the sculpture is an example of Nazi propaganda art and the only work of its kind that the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart owns. Why the museum accepted it, although it has never been exhibited since, and why the WKV kept Nazi propaganda art in its art holdings until 1981 are just some of the questions to which art historian and provenance researcher Kai Artinger attempts to provide answers in an essay. They include why a Stuttgart artist made a three-dimensional caricature of the defeated nation after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 - a sculpture that seems to be unique in ‘Third Reich’ art because nothing comparable can currently be placed alongside it.

Kai Artinger: In Polen brummt ein wilder Bär (1939). Die merkwürdige NS-Plastik des Stuttgarter Bildhauers Joseph Zeitler, in: Kunstgeschichte. Open Peer Reviewed Journal, 2023.

Das Gemälde »Die schwarzen Männer« (1934) des württembergischen Malers Hermann Sohn (1895–1971) gehört zu den rätselhaften und außerhalb Südwestdeutschlands unbekannten Beiträgen der deutschen Kunst im Dritten Reich. Der Künstler hielt es jahrzehntelang versteckt. Bei seiner Ausstellung im Jahr 1985 wurde es zur ›Inkunabel schwäbischer Widerstandsmalerei‹ und zu einem ›der ganz wenigen wirklich antifaschistischen Bilder jener Zeit‹ erklärt. Allerdings hatte Sohn 1933 noch das Gemälde »Deutsches Turnfest 1933« hergestellt, auf dem er die große NS-Propagandaveranstaltung in Stuttgart festhielt. Dieses Bild fand den Gefallen der Machthaber der Stadt, sie kauften es im Dezember 1934 für die städtische Galerie Stuttgart an. 1935 erschien die ›Fibel für die Volksschulen Württembergs‹, ein von den Machthabern der NS-Regierung neu herausgegebenes Lesebuch, an dem Sohn als Illustrator mitarbeitete. Ein Jahr später bewarb er sich für einen Lehrauftrag an der gleichgeschalteten Kunstakademie Stuttgart, allerdings erfolglos. Angesichts der Widersprüche und Ambivalenzen in Sohns Leben und Werk erhebt sich die Frage, wie »Die schwarzen Männer« zu deuten sind.

Kai Artinger: Furcht im Dritten Reich. Hermann Sohns ›Die schwarzen Männer‹ (1934) und die Widerstandsfrage, in: Kunstgeschichte. Open Peer Reviewed Journal, 2020.