Discovery of annotated auction catalogs from Adolf Weinmüller’s companies in Munich 1936–1943 and Vienna 1938–1944

During preparatory work for a follow-up project to the project “Adolf Weinmüller’s galleries and auction houses in Munich and Vienna 1936–1945”, funded by the Bureau for Provenance Research (AfP), a bundle of annotated auction catalogs was discovered on March 18, 2013, in a steel cabinet in a plant room of NEUMEISTER art auctioneers. Weinmüller, who played a key role in the art market in Munich and the Reich during the National Socialist era, had always denied the existence of such business papers to the officers of the MFA&A (the “Monuments Men”) after 1945—he claimed that the documents had been destroyed in air raids. The discovered bundle contains catalogs with handwritten annotations and personal copies for all 33 auctions in Munich in the period 1936–1943, as well as auction catalogs for 11 of 18 auctions held in Vienna between 1938 and 1944.

As a result, much more detailed information is available now than it was before for a large number of the total of 34,500 objects traded in this period. It is therefore hard to overstate the importance of this discovery for international provenance research and for ongoing restitution cases.

On March 27, an application for short-term funding was submitted to the Bureau for Provenance Research for the purpose of making the research material accessible as quickly as possible. Within the framework of an immediate measure, the documents are now being digitized, the data captured and analyzed and the results made available in an appropriate manner.

Publication

In close coordination and cooperation with the Bureau for Provenance Research in Berlin and the Commission for Provenance Research in Vienna, the bundle (annotated personal and office copies with up to four parallel versions) was digitized and transcribed by NEUMEISTER and the ZI. The transcription was complex, firstly because names and prices were noted orally during the auction, which is why spellings often vary, and secondly because the notations of the different (parallel) copies did not always turn out to be identical. The data was therefore evaluated and, as far as possible, validated and standardized, before being prepared for export to the Lost Art Database maintained by Magdeburg Coordination Office. There, it is accessible in the module “Provenance Research” in the Database of Art and Artifacts Auctions 1933–1945.

The results of the transcription of the catalogs, which was carried out by the ZI to the best of its ability, and copies of the digitized documents in JPG format were also made available to the Bureau for Provenance Research and the Commission for Provenance Research at the Federal Chancellery, Vienna, for internal official use.

The German Lost Art Foundation, as the successor organization of the Bureau for Provenance Research, provides information on the names of the private buyers (which are not published in the database in order to protect the privacy rights of third parties) to verifiable and authorized interested parties upon request. In such cases, a note in the database states “Information on the names of buyers may be requested from the German Lost Art Foundation. Proof of a legitimate interest must be provided”.