Berliner Mäzenatentum. Die Kunstsammlung Rudolf Mosse (1843—1920). Aufbau — Bedeutung — Verlust

On the recommendation of Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen (then General Secretary of the Kulturstiftung der Länder) and Hermann Parzinger (President of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) - who initiated the Mosse Art Research Initiative (MARI) - the project was established at the Art History Departement of Freie Universität Berlin, a public institution unaffected by restitution claims and therefore neutral.

The subject of the research project was the art collection of the German-Jewish publisher Rudolf Mosse (1843-1920), who was one of the most influential figures of the Berlin economic elite in the late German Empire. As a wealthy man, Mosse assembled an extensive art collection of paintings, works on paper, arts and crafts, antiquities, Egyptian antiquities, East Asian art and Benin bronzes in his city palais on Leipziger Platz in Berlin. The focus of the

collection was on German art of the 19th century. A special feature was the collection of the sculptures and statues, which, due to their size, were rarely collected by private individuals.

Mosse also acquired the extensive library of the literary scholar Erich Schmidt.

After Rudolf Mosse’s death in 1920 and that of his wife Emilie four years later, their only (adopted) daughter, Erna Felicia, inherited the entire estate. Her husband Hans Lachmann-Mosse took over the management of the company. During the 1920s Mosse oHG got into financial difficulties due to inflation and the world economic crisis. From the spring of 1933, the publishing group was the target of Joseph Goebbels’ efforts to bring the press into line.

Parallel to this, preparations were made for the auctioning of the art collections of Rudolf Mosse as well as Felicia and her husband Hans Lachmann-Mosse (29th/30th May 1934 Auction House Rudolf Lepke; 6th/7th June 1934 Auction House Union). The couple did not receive any shares from the liquidation proceeds.

In the 1950s, Felicia Lachmann-Mosse was confirmed in her reparation proceedings that she had lost the free disposal of her private assets since April 1933. However, she had to withdraw her claims regarding the art collections auctioned in 1934, as she was unable to provide the necessary “proof of transfer” of the works. A good 60 years later, this state of affairs was the starting point for Rudolf Mosse’s heirs to resume their search for the looted works of art.

The aim of the project was to reconstruct the former Mosse collections as far as possible and to localize the current place of the individual works. MARI was faced with the multiple challenge of first identifying the works of the very heterogeneous collection, some of which only rudimentary information had been handed down, before research could begin into the individual stations of their whereabouts up to their present location.

In addition to researching individual works, the aim was to determine the history of the collection in the context of the time. What motivated Rudolf Mosse to acquire which works of art from whom and under what conditions? What does the profile of his art collection say about himself? What connects Mosse with other collectors of his time, what distinguishes him from them? The initial questions served to clarify contexts of injustice prior to 1933, as did Mosse’s acquisitions of Benin bronzes, East Asian or Egyptian art. Above all, the economic situation of the Mosse company had to be researched, the mechanisms of the “Gleichschaltung” of the press immediately after 1933, as well as the individual persecution situation of the family and the emigration paths of the individual members, in order to be able to record, on the basis of the findings, the hitherto little researched early expropriation strategies of the Nazi regime and the control regulations of auctions by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts before the enactment of the Nuremberg racial laws.

(c) Kunsthistorisches Institut der Freien Universität