Was Alfred Rosenberg Ww Ii Hitlers Art Collector Jewish

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Pensive Young Brunette

Pensive Young Brunette, 1845-1850
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, French
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In the course of provenance research on the European painting collection, the Museum discovered that a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Pensive Young Brunette (1963-181-18), had been confiscated past the Nazis from the French collector Alphonse Kann. In 1945 the painting was found by the Allies in a salt mine in Austria, and in July 1946 information technology was returned to Kann. The World War II history of the painting highlights the systematic seizure of works of art by the Nazis and the activities of the Allies to render those works to their rightful owners, too as the efforts of researchers today to understand fully and document these activities.

The Corot painting was sold in the posthumous sale of the artist on May 26–June 9, 1875, where information technology was purchased by Monsieur Legendre of Paris. It was subsequently in the drove of Alexis Rouart (1839–1911), a Parisian engineer whose collections were sold on his death in 1911. Prior to Globe War II, the Corot portrait formed function of the noted collection of Alphonse Kann (1870–1948). At his townhouse at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, Kann assembled of import Impressionist and Modern masters as well as Gothic tapestries, Medieval objects, and Pre-Columbian art.^ane Because his large collection was seized and meticulously catalogued by the Nazis, Kann'southward proper name is among the "ruby-red-flag" names in provenance research. In the jump of 1940, as the Nazis approached Paris, Kann fled Paris for London. He was unable to remove or hide his collection of more than 1202 objects, and it was confiscated in the autumn of 1940 by a Nazi chore strength called the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or "Special Job Force of the Reich Leader [Alfred] Rosenberg") on the grounds that it was "abandoned property."

The ERR was the dominant Nazi agency responsible for the seizure of works of art in occupied French republic. An efficient and well-planned organization, the ERR established a complex record-keeping and cataloguing system in society to document the removal and dispersal of artwork from Jewish collections. They used a series of letters and numbers to identify each seized object and its origin. Such ERR codes frequently included the initials of a collector and an inventory number that is unique to each object and corresponds to a card containing the artist, title, dimensions, and other relevant information for each object. In the example of Alphonse Kann's drove, ERR cataloguers used the messages 'Ka' to identify works from his drove. Between 1941–42, the ERR catalogued Kann'south collection at the Jeu de Paume, a building in the Tuilleries Garden that had been used earlier the war every bit a gallery for Impressionist and modern paintings. The Philadelphia Corot was presumably one of the earliest paintings catalogued by the ERR because the lawmaking 'Ka 38' is painted on the stretcher [meet detail of dorsum], indicating that it was the 38th object (of an eventual 1202) to be recorded from the collection of Alphonse Kann.

The ERR cards were seized past the Allies later on the war and today are extremely useful to provenance researchers. Now housed at the National Archives and Records Administration in Higher Park, Maryland, the ERR cards relating to Kann's collection were consulted to observe that card 'Ka 38' describes a Corot portrait of a adult female with dimensions matching those of the Philadelphia painting.^two It is non known where the painting was between 1942–45, but in May 1945 it was recovered by the Allies along with a significant, though far from complete, portion of Kann's collection. In Munich the Allies established a collecting point to assemble, catalogue, and return to their countries of origin, works of art that were discovered in warehouses and repositories throughout Europe. Munich Central Collecting Bespeak carte du jour no. 366/Aussee 292/2 documents the discovery of the Corot painting, described equally a "portrait of a sitting lady" having the identifying mark 'Ka 38,' in the salt mine at Alt Aussee.³ Notes on the back of the card indicate that the painting arrived at the Munich Central Collecting Point on June 23, 1945, and was sent to Paris on May 23, 1946.

After working to determine their owners, the Munich Fundamental Collecting Point sent paintings dorsum to their countries of origin. The Corot (item no. 119) was included in a shipment of 594 items sent to Paris nether the authority of Captain Hubert de Brye on May 23, 1946.⁴ The shipment included works from the Kann collection also as those of other French collectors. Upon the painting'southward arrival in Paris, the Ministry building of Foreign Diplomacy arranged for its render to Kann. Recent correspondence with the French Ministry of Strange Affairs has confirmed that the painting was restituted to a representative of Kann in July 1946. Shortly thereafter it may take been placed with the André Weil Gallery in Paris past a representative of Kann or his family. On May 31, 1949, André Weil sold the Corot to the American collector Louis E. Stern of New York; Stern gave it to the Museum in 1963.

Endnotes

1   H. Feliciano, The Lost Museum, New York, 1997, pp. 110-11.

ii   National Archives, RG260, OMGUS Belongings Partitioning, Misc. Records, ERR Carte File, 1940-45, Box 6.

3   National Archives, RG260, Records of the Munich Collecting Point, Records Relating to Belongings Accession 1945-50, Box 492.

4   French Receipt No 7a, shipment 660. National Archives, RG260, Records of the Munich Collecting Point, Receipts: Restitutions 1945-49, Box 286.

Courbet's Nude Reclining past the Ocean

Nude Reclining past the Sea, 1868
Gustave Courbet, French
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Courbet's Nude Reclining by the Sea (1963-181-20) has long been published as belonging during World War II to Paul Rosenberg, an art dealer with offices in Paris and New York. In April 1953, Rosenberg sold the painting to the New York collector Louis E. Stern (1886–1962). Overlooked inside this history is the fact that the painting was stolen from Rosenberg by the Nazis in 1941, and spent function of the war in the private art collection of Hitler's 2nd-in-control, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

The World War 2 history of the painting was uncovered in 1964 when curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine art prepared a catalogue of the recently acquired Louis E. Stern drove. Henry G. Gardiner, so the curator of European painting, was interested in the provenance of works in the collection and wrote to European and American dealers request for information on Stern's purchases. On behalf of Paul Rosenberg & Co., Alexandre Rosenberg replied to Gardiner in June 1964 that the Courbet was acquired by his father'southward firm from another dealer in 1933 or 1934 and had been seized during the war by the Nazis. In the late 1940s, the Allies returned the painting to Paul Rosenberg, who was then living in New York City.ⁱ

Recent provenance research at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has farther documented the wartime history of the painting. An examination of the dorsum of the painting has confirmed that information technology was confiscated by the ERR, a Nazi task force responsible for the seizure of artworks owned by Jews and Freemasons. In 1939, Rosenberg hid part of his collection in a bank vault near Bordeaux, French republic, for safe-keeping. On September 5, 1941, the Nazis discovered Rosenberg's banking concern vault and removed 162 paintings.ⁱⁱ The paintings were afterwards sent to the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris and catalogued by the ERR, who painted "ROSENBERG BORDEAUX" in black capitals onto the stretcher and canvas of the Courbet, identifying the work as one taken from Rosenberg'southward collection in Bordeaux. In Paris, the Courbet painting caught the middle of Hermann Göring, a voracious art collector who used his authority to select seized works for his ain drove and for exchange. The ERR catalogue card, numbered "PR 137" for Paul Rosenberg, forms the official Nazi tape of the Rosenberg seizure.³ In the lower right corner of the ERR card, now at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, the heading "Verbleib" or "Whereabouts" is marked with the initials "HG," for Hermann Göring.⁴ Traces of this cataloguing are still visible in the grade of a typed characterization in German that is glued to the painting's upper stretcher. The label lists the artist, title, the owner from which information technology was taken, and the appointment "2 December 1941," when this group of objects selected by Göring at the Jeu de Paume was shipped from Paris to Berlin.

Towards the end of the war, to protect both the looted art and art belonging to High german national collections from Allied bombs, the Nazis hastily gathered it in huge repositories, including remote castles and a network of disused salt mines in Deutschland and Republic of austria. At the end of the war the Allied forces and particularly the division known as the "Monuments Men" made heroic efforts to recover and catalogue the looted art that had been secreted abroad. The Monuments Men was the nickname of a group of approximately 345 mostly civilian men and women, many of them arts professionals such as art historians and museum curators, who were charged with protecting European art and monuments in impairment'southward manner, and after the war, with restituting Nazi-plundered art to its rightful owners.⁵

As the Centrolineal forces closed in on Berlin, Göring attempted to evacuate his collection via private train to the town of Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, a Nazi land retreat where he, Hitler, and other loftier-ranking Nazi officials owned villas. Ironically, the Göring train cars proved too tempting for the townspeople of Berchtesgaden, who looted them looking for valuables. Fortunately in May 1945 the Monuments Men intervened, recovering the Courbet along with hundreds of other objects from Göring'south collection.

To house and process the recovered cultural objects, the U.Southward. war machine set up four central collecting points in the U.S. zone of Deutschland, the near famous of which, the Munich Central Collecting Point, specialized in objects looted from private collections that were to exist restituted outside of Germany. The Courbet arrived at the Munich Central Collecting Point on Baronial 1, 1945, where it was catalogued and assigned Munich no. 6125/Berchtesgaden 1077, meaning that it was the 1077th object from shipment no. 6125.^{half dozen} Estimates of the total number of objects that passed through the Munich collecting bespeak alone range from 150,000 to over i million. The restitution endeavor was every bit massive: the Monuments Men returned three.45 million items of cultural property to their countries of origin.^vii Estimates are that of the total number of looted artworks, well-nigh 85% were somewhen returned to the original owners or their heirs.

The Munich cataloguing card records that the painting was seized for Göring's collection from its presumed owner, Paul Rosenberg. Information technology notes the marks on the reverse, including the Göring collection number, G-82, placed when information technology was inventoried by the Allies in Berchtesgaden. The card also records that it was repatriated to France on April 18, 1946. From France it was restituted to the Rosenberg house in New York, who after sold information technology to our donor, Louis E. Stern, in 1953.

Endnotes

i   The following is a transcription of Alexandre Rosenberg's letter to Henry G. Gardiner, June 9, 1964, at present in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Athenaeum, Marceau Object Files; Stern, Louis E. (Collection); Research for Catalogue.

"Dear Mr. Gardiner:

I have your letter of June 4th, concerning the Courbet "Reclining Nude" in the Louis East. Stern Collection. . . As information technology is our custom, nosotros always include all the information at our disposal pertaining to the item sold. In the present case, the details are spotty due to the fact that our pre-state of war records accept been lost. The picture belongs to the numerous group of works of fine art looted during the war past the Germans, and restituted to us in the late forties.

The Courbet was caused from Bernheim-Jeune, Paris about 1933-34. Previously, it had been exhibited in "Exposition d'Art Français", in 1917, at Paul Rosenberg, Paris, and in the Courbet exhibition held at the Petit Palais, Paris in 1929.

I regret that in that location stops the knowledge of the history of the painting.

Hoping however that even then little information might be a assistance.

Sincerely yours,
PAUL ROSENBERG & CO.
Alexandre Rosenberg"

2   A fuller account of the Nazi seizure of Rosenberg's property in Bordeaux may be found in Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum, New York, 1997, pp. 52–74.

3   National Archives, RG260, OMGUS Property Partitioning, Misc. Records, ERR Card File, 1940–45, Box nineteen.

4   Nancy H. Yeide, Konstantin Akinsha and Amy L. Walsh, The AAM Guide to Provenance Enquiry, Washington, D.C., 2001, p. 58; and Nancy H. Yeide, Across the Dreams of Forehandedness: The Hermann Goering Collection, Dallas, 2009, pp. 13-14, and no. A1153, p. 377.

v   See Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, New York, 1994; and Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Centrolineal Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Chase in History, New York, 2009.

6   National Archives, Munich Central Collecting Point Property Card no. 6125.

7   MFA&A Terminal Written report, cited past Michael Kurtz, "The Cease of War and the Occupation of Frg, 1944-52. Laws and Conventions Enacted to Counter German Appropriations: The Allied Control Council," in The Spoils of War, ed. Elizabeth Simpson, New York, 1997, p. 116.

Marc Chagall'southward Purim

Purim, c. 1916-1917
Marc Chagall, French (born Vitebsk, Russian Empire)
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Earlier the Nazi rise to ability, the Museum Folkwang in Essen was a leader in the collecting and display of modern art in Germany. Past 1934 Hitler's regime had dismissed the Folkwang's progressive director and replaced him with the ardent Nazi Count Klaus von Baudissin, an SS officer and fine art historian. One of the Count's starting time acts was to paint over the museum'due south famous murals by the German Expressionist Oskar Schlemmer. Baudissin also served on the Ziegler commission, responsible for impounding "degenerate" art from German museums. From the Museum Folkwang the committee seized and dispatched to Munich an astounding total of 1,202 works of fine art, including Chagall'due south Purim, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art'south Louis Due east. Stern Collection. The painting—the Folkwang'due south only Chagall—had been caused in the 1920s by the previous director, Ernst Gosebruch.¹ Fix in a Russian town, its theme is the celebration of Jewish festival of Purim, which commemorates the deliverance of the Western farsi Jews. In the center a boy carries Purim sweets from the marketplace stall-keeper on the right. Nazi officials chose Purim, along with three other works by Chagall, for brandish in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, which opened in Munich in July 1937.

Although the propaganda surrounding the Degenerate Art exhibition emphasized its "Jewishness," of the 112 artists represented in the exhibition, merely 6 were Jews, including Chagall. Chagall was a Russian-built-in artist who spent most of his career in France. About probable he was included in the Degenerate Art exhibition because his early on work had go famous in Germany. Purim was displayed in Room 2 of the exhibition, which contained only works by Jewish artists. On the walls quotations from Hitler and the Nazi art theorist Alfred Rosenberg (soon to go head of the art-looting task force, the ERR) condemned the "incompetents and charlatans," the "Jews and Marxists," whose works appeared there.²

Following the Degenerate Art exhibition the German language dealer Ferdinand Möller, one of the four appointed to dispose of the confiscated art, exchanged Purim for other artwork.³ The Berlin collector and gallery owner Dr. Kurt Feldhäusser next acquired the painting, probably straight from Möller. Although German citizens were prohibited by law from ownership "degenerate art," in practice the ban was often ignored. Feldhäusser, in fact, seems to have fabricated a specialty of acquiring Nazi-condemned art from German museums, especially works past Chagall and past Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Afterward Feldhäusser died in a bombing raid on Frankfurt in 1944, Purim was brought to the U.Due south. by his mother Marie Luisa. She sold it through a New York dealer, Erhard Weyhe, to New York collector Louis Due east. Stern on October eleven, 1949. ⁴

Endnotes

1 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Museum der Gegenwart - Kunst in öffentlichen Sammlungen bis 1937 (exhibition catalog), Düsseldorf, 1987, p. 106.

2 Barron, ed., "Degenerate Fine art", 1991, pp. 52, 218-219.

3 The painting, designated number 15949, is marked "T" for Tausch (exchange) in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) confiscation inventory. Such exchanges of fine art (usually twentieth-century works for more desirable nineteenth-century art), became mutual after the German declaration of war in September 1939 made it difficult to obtain foreign currency; see Andreas Hüneke, "On the Trail of Missing Masterpieces," in Barron, ed., "Degenerate Art", p. 128. We are grateful to Margaret Doyle at the Smithsonian Institution for providing a copy of the confiscation register entry. The original typescript inventory is at the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, bequest of Harry Fischer.

4 Dated receipt in PMA Athenaeum, Stern files.

Limerick with Blue by Piet Mondrian

Composition with Blueish, 1926
Piet Mondrian, Dutch
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In the early 1920s, Piet Mondrian began a friendship with Sophie Küppers (1891–1978), a German citizen living in Hanover and the widow of Paul Küppers (d. 1922), creative director of the progressive Kestner Society. Küppers, later known every bit Sophie Küppers-Lissitzky after she married the creative person El Lissitzky in 1927, hoped to promote Mondrian's work in her country and asked him to send paintings on assignment for her to sell in Germany. In 1924 he sent four canvases, which she showed to Alexander Dorner, the managing director of the Hanover Provinzialmuseum (also known as the Landesmuseum); Dorner purchased one of them for the museum.ⁱ In 1926, Mondrian painted the unusual diamond-shaped Limerick with Bluish.

Every bit a major proponent of modern abstract and Expressionist fine art in Germany Dorner was forced to resign his position as director of the Hanover Provinzialmuseum in 1936. He left Deutschland and became director of the Rhode Island School of Blueprint Museum in 1938. As Dorner recalled, Mondrian'south Composition with Blue, together with Lissitzky's Proun 2, once hung in the famous Abstract Gallery (Abstraktes Kabinett) of the Hanover museum. In 1937, as part of its campaign against "degenerate art", the Nazi government dismantled the Abstract Gallery and confiscated some 270 works from the museum.ⁱⁱ Although Composition with Bluish is known to have been one of those seized, its ownership presented a puzzle. The painting does not appear in the records of the Hanover museum, the 1930 catalog of the museum'south holdings, or in the official list of works owned by museum at the time of the Nazi seizures.ⁱⁱⁱ Only 1 Mondrian is listed; this is most certainly the painting purchased through Küppers in 1924, which was sent to the Nazi-organized "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich in 1937 and is now lost. ⁴ Oddly, Composition with Blue does not announced either on the listing of confiscated works on loan to the museum at the time. Again, only one Mondrian is recorded: nearly probable the 1926 painting entitled Schilderij No. 2, listed in the museum's 1930 itemize as a loan from the Sophie Küppers drove.⁵

An obvious question presented itself: Could the Philadelphia Museum of Fine art's Composition with Blue also have belonged to Sophie Küppers-Lissitzky? She lent thirteen works by various artists from her private collection to the Hanover Provinzialmuseum in 1926 before moving to Russia, all of which were confiscated in 1937 as part of the "degenerate fine art" campaign. Commonly, Nazi officials returned or compensated for privately endemic works impounded from museums; Küppers' collection represents an exception. Nigh likely she was singled out for penalization not merely considering she had emigrated to Russian federation, thereby forfeiting her German language citizenship and rights in the optics of the Reich, but also because she was married to Lissitzky, a prominent supporter of the Soviet Wedlock's Communist regime and a Jew. The Lissitzkys' son and heir, Jen Lissitzky, has recently sought the return of several confiscated works from his female parent's collection now housed at other museums (two of which take been returned).⁶ The thirteen paintings in question are listed in a document written by Sophie Küppers when the works were entrusted to the Hanover museum.⁷ However, simply i Mondrian appears on the list, and this is almost certainly the painting Schilderij No. ii, recorded in the museum'due south 1930 itemize every bit her loan. Together with Composition with Blue, this work was confiscated from the museum in 1937 and stored at Schloss Niederschönhausen (run across beneath), where it was registered as number 7034, the number preceding Composition with Bluish. Its whereabouts today are unknown.

Since there is no doubt that Composition with Blue was at the Hanover museum in 1937, information technology must accept been present every bit an unofficial loan. The question is who owned it, if non Sophie Küppers? The likeliest scenario is that Mondrian consigned the painting to Küppers after it was exhibited in Amsterdam in 1926, hoping she could sell information technology to the Hanover museum for him, as she had done with his earlier painting. Afterwards, earlier leaving Germany for Russia in 1927, Küppers probably asked Dorner to keep Composition with Bluish in storage, however hoping for a chance to sell it to the museum in the futurity and piffling anticipating that information technology would fall victim to a Nazi purge.⁸ Therefore, Mondrian himself was probably the owner of the painting at the time of its confiscation.

The "purification" of High german museums continued until March 1938. A salesroom was set in the Schloss Niederschönhausen outside of Berlin, where the nearly "exploitable" works of fine art were collected (that is, those with the highest potential resale value on the international art market), totaling 780 paintings and 3,500 works of art on paper.^nine Composition with Bluish was sent to Niederschönhausen, as demonstrated by a label on the back of the painting stamped with the number 7035, which corresponds to the "Degenerate Art" confiscation register.¹⁰ From there, the painting made its manner to the dealer Karl Buchholz, and so to his associate Curt Valentin (run across Lissitzky, Proun 2). Neither Composition with Blue nor Lissitzky's Proun 2 appeared in the notorious "Entartete Kunst" exhibition of 1937.

The New York collector Albert E. Gallatin purchased the painting, forth with Proun 2, from Brusk Valentin's Buchholz Gallery in New York on August 24, 1939. Mondrian was informed of the travels of his painting and apparently approved of its eventual home in the U.Southward.: in a alphabetic character to Ben Nicholson of Dec 6, 1939, Mondrian noted that "[Gallatin] has bought as well one of my two Hannover museum pictures, rejected past Hitler."^xi In tardily 1940 Mondrian offered to restore his painting at Gallatin'south Museum of Living Art in New York.¹² Composition with Blue was bequeathed by Gallatin to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1952.

Endnotes

1 Sophie Küppers-Lissitzky, El Lissitzky, Greenwich, Conn., 1968, p. 52. The Hanover Provinzialmuseum is now known as the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum; the modern art collections are housed at the Sprengel Museum.

2 Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum: Experiences of an Art Historian and Museum Managing director, Alexander Dorner, New York, 1958, pp. 55, 119, repr. p. 62 and p. 63 (both horizontally). For discussion and photographs of the Abstract Gallery every bit installed, see Cauman, pp. 100-103, and Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond 'Art', New York, 1958, pp. 114-116.

3 See alphabetic character from Joop Joosten, May 14, 1983, in curatorial file, regarding his research in the museum'southward records; see Alexander Dorner, Katalog der Kunstsammlungen im Provinzialmuseum zu Hannover, Hanover, 1930, Bd. ane, p. 274; and Landesmuseum Hanover, Beschlagnahme-Aktion im Landesmuseum Hannover, 1937: Liste der konfiszierten Werke und unveröffentliche Dokumente, Hanover, 1983, section entitled "Gemälde aus dem Besitz der Landesgalerie Hannover", for the museum's holdings and for the listing of confiscated works.

4 Joop Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of 1911-1944, Blaricum and Paris, 1998, no. B149.

5 Joosten catalog no. B174, illus. Schilderij No. two was described in the 1930 catalog of the Hanover Provinzialmuseum (Bd. 1, p. 274) every bit "Abstrakte Komposition in Schwarzem Rahmenwerk mit Blau, Gelb, Schwarz und verschieden hellgrauen und weißen Tönen" (abstract composition within a black framework with blue, yellow, black and various calorie-free gray and white tones), "Leihgabe der Slg. Küppers" (loan from the Küppers collection). It was also photographed equally installed in the museum's Abstruse Gallery; for references come across the Joosten catalog entry. The list of confiscated works on loan to the museum is published in Beschlagnahme-Aktion im Landesmuseum Hannover, 1937 (see note 3), section entitled "Gemälde aus fremden Besitz, die sich als Leihgabe in der Landesgalerie Hannover befanden."

half dozen Meet Art News, Summer 1992, Apr. 2001, Sept. 2001, and June 2002.

vii The Philadelphia Museum of Art is indebted to Joop Joosten for providing a copy of this document, entitled, "Sammlung Dr. P. Due east. Küppers als Leihgabe übergeben zu Händen von Dr. Alexander Dorner an das Provinzial-Museum der Stadt Hannover, 1926."

8 Letter of the alphabet from Joosten, November 15, 2001, in curatorial file, and Catalogue Raisonné, 1998, vol. 2, pp. 133 and 324.

9 Nicholas, Rape of Europa, pp. 24-25; and Barron, ed., Degenerate Fine art, pp. 125, 128-129. The remaining sixteen,000 or more than works filled storerooms at the Köpenicker Strasse.

x Joosten, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2, pp. 323-324.

11 Quoted past Joosten, Catalogue Raisonné, p. 323. Mondrian seems to accept forgotten that the Hanover Museum actually housed three of his paintings: the one bought past the museum in 1924, the one on loan from Küppers, and Composition with Blue, all of which were confiscated.

12 See letter from Mondrian to W. Nicholson, quoted in Joosten, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. ii, p. 323.

Proun 2 by the Russian artist El Lissitzky

Proun 2 (Construction), 1920
El Lissitzky (Eleazar Lissitzky), Russian
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The Russian Jewish artist El Lissitzky gave the proper noun "Proun", an abbreviation of the Russian words meaning "Project for the establishment of a new art," to a group of his abstract works. Proun ii was i in a total of 46 oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Lissitzky that the Städtisches Museum fümlr Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Municipal Museum of Fine and Applied Arts) in Halle, Federal republic of germany purchased in 1929.ⁱ At an undetermined appointment before 1937, the Halle museum loaned it to the Hanover Provinzialmuseum (also known as the Landesmuseum).

Alexander Dorner (1893-1957), the director of the Hanover Provinzialmuseum until his forced resignation by the Nazis in 1936, recollected that Mondrian'southward Composition with Bluish and Lissitzky's Proun 2 were displayed in the museum's groundbreaking Abstract Gallery (Abstraktes Kabinett) designed by Lissitzky in 1927-28.² A 1958 Art News article past Ella Winter quotes a alphabetic character from Dorner's widow, stating that "the Lissitzkys you refer to hung in the Abstruse Gallery; [the gallery] was destroyed past the Nazis while my hubby was opening the first Munich exhibition in London. When he returned he establish that unique and beautiful room dismantled and himself accused of promoting 'degenerate' fine art. The Lissitzky on loan was sold . . . and is now in the Philadelphia Museum."³

The "EK" (Entartete Kunst) confiscation inventory number 14283 is stamped on a label on the back of the painting. It is not sure where the painting was stored after confiscation. Four prominent High german dealers were appointed to market the inventory of confiscated works, including Karl Buchholz. Buchholz, owner of the Buchholz Gallery in Berlin, was the mentor and pre-state of war partner of Brusk Valentin (1902-1954), who named the New York gallery he opened in 1937 in Buchholz' honor. Valentin, a German citizen, left Germany in 1937 to go into exile simply maintained contact with Buchholz, with whose help he was able to larn much of the fine art that established him as a major New York dealer of modern art. ⁴

Albert Eugene Gallatin, the pioneering American collector of twentieth-century art, purchased both Lissitzky's Proun 2 and Mondrian's Composition with Blue for his Museum of Living Art in New York from Brusk Valentin's Buchholz Gallery on August 24, 1939, knowing that they had come from the Hanover Provinzialmuseum.⁵ In 1952 Gallatin bequeathed his collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Fine art. The Hanover Provinzialmuseum is now known as the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum; the mod fine art collections are housed at the Sprengel Museum. The Städtisches Museum in Halle was afterwards incorporated into what is at present known as the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle. The Moritzburg museum in Halle is aware of the present whereabouts of the painting, one of some 200 works lost to the "degenerate art" campaign of 1937.^{half dozen}

Endnotes

one See Andreas Hüneke, Die faschistische Aktion "Entartete Kunst" 1937 in Halle, Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 1987, p. 38, no. 42; Im Kampf um die moderne Kunst: Das Schicksal einer Sammlung in der 1.Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, exhibition itemize, Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, [1985], p. 48 and p. 52; and Peter Nisbet, ed., El Lissitzky 1890-1941, (exhibition itemize, Busch-Reisinger Museum), Cambridge, MA, 1987, listed in Proun inventory, no. 14, p. 160.

2 Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum: Experiences of an Art Historian and Museum Director, Alexander Dorner, New York, 1958, p. 55, repr. p. 62 and p. 63, respectively (both horizontally). For discussion and photographs of the Abstract Gallery every bit installed, see Cauman, pp. 100-103, and Alexander Dorner, The Mode Beyond 'Art', New York, 1958, pp. 114-116.

3 "Lissitzky: A Revolutionary Out of Favor," Fine art News, April 1958, p. 63.

iv Lynn Nicholas, Rape of Europa, New York, 1994, pp. 3, 24; Nancy Yeide, et al., AAM Guide to Provenance Research, Washington, D.C., 2001, pp. 239, 290.

5 Dated receipt in PMA Archives, Gallatin files.

vi See the book by Hüneke, cited above, which is published past the Moritzburg museum in Halle.

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