Provenance research on the painting Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow, Self-Portrait

In November 1972, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf acquired a self-portrait of the former director of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Wilhelm Schadow (1788–1862), at an auction at Lempertz auction house in Cologne.

In summer 2011, the Dr. Max Stern Estate (Stern Estate), represented by the Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) in New York, approached the city of Düsseldorf with a request for its comments on the origin of the self-portrait of Wilhelm Schadow, which had been in the Stadtmuseum’s inventory book since March 1973 under the number B 596. Dr. Heike Krokowski of Berlin was commissioned to undertake the research in this case.

The self-portrait of Wilhelm Schadow had not been sold at auction 392 at Lempertz auction house on November 13, 1937. According to several pieces of information from Lempertz auction house in the 1950s and 1960s and from March 2012, no bid was accepted for the self-portrait at the auction of November 13, 1937. The painting was therefore taken back to Düsseldorf and probably sold there in the period up to the closure of Galerie Stern on December 15, 1937.

In the compensation proceedings according to German restitution law (BEG) before Düsseldorf regional court, with the partial final judgment of February 24, 1964, Max Stern had been awarded compensation for the loss of profit he had suffered due to the forced sale of his artworks in 1937 at the Lempertz auction and also in the four weeks up to the final closing of the gallery. It is thus documented—and confirmed by the final report’s assessment of April 5, 2012—that the sale of the gallery stock took place under conditions that were attributable to Max Stern’s situation as a Jew in the Third Reich and under the conditions of repressive measures that Jewish citizens were subjected to during the National Socialist regime.

The painting was restituted to the Stern Estate and is now displayed in the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf on loan.

(c) Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf