Systematic provenance research at the Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen

As part of the Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen displays an important collection of Classical Modernist works. It is named after Heinz Berggruen who compiled the collection over five decades. In 2000, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SMB–SPK) acquired the outstanding collection which contains works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Henri Laurens. The project, which has been funded by the German Lost Art Foundation since February 2015, aims to investigate the provenance of 135 masterpieces which were created before 1945 and are now publicly owned. These include paintings, works on paper and sculptures.

The provenances known so far make reference to names of art dealers and collectors who are proven to have been victims of Nazi persecution, such as Paul Rosenberg, Alphonse Kann and Alfred Flechtheim. To rule out the possibility that the SMB–SPK’s own holdings contain cultural goods confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution, the provenance of individual works is being investigated for the period 1933–1945.

In addition to examining the individual works, this project is exploring the history of the collection. As a former private collection, it has a different development history and documentation situation and different acquisition sources compared to the purchases made by public institutions. The project is therefore making a contribution to basic research, particularly with regard to the provenance of works of the five artists Picasso, Klee, Braque, Matisse and Laurens as well as their dealers and collectors, and to the methodical approach to former private collections.

The artists mentioned lived and worked in various European countries and were also popular in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Their dealers operated internationally and had extensive networks of connections. This situation changed suddenly when the National Socialists took power and the Second World War broke out. While parts of the existing art market structures were destroyed, new relationship networks were formed as a result of the fact that, before and during the war, the sale of previously expropriated artworks served as a means of obtaining foreign currency for the Nazi regime. The research is therefore focused on the confiscation of private property as a result of persecution by the Nazis in Germany and abroad and also on the connections to the international art market. One particular area of focus in the project is the situation in occupied France, specifically Paris in 1940–1944. Many of the artists whose works are being examined in this project for the purpose of clarifying their provenance were resident in France immediately before and during the occupation and sold many of their works there.

In the first year of the project, it was possible to ascertain that four artworks had been confiscated from the Jewish collectors Alphonse Kann and Paul Rosenberg by German embassy personnel or the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, ERR) in France, specifically in Paris and Bordeaux. All four works were restituted to their rightful owners immediately after the war as Nazi-looted property. Only then did they come into the Heinz Berggruen collection. Even though in these cases there is no longer any need for further action because the restitutions have been carried out, it has been possible to obtain valuable information from the research into the precise circumstances, from the documentation of the confiscation campaign by Nazi institutions and subsequent return of objects by the Allies or the Commission Récupération Artistique (CRA) in Paris and also from the analysis of the marks that were made on the masterpieces when they were confiscated. This information, in turn, may be important for future investigations and provide useful insights regarding other works in the collection.

Some of the SPK’s stock in Museum Berggruen was traded on the US art market. Closer examination of the circumstances, determining dates and conducting in-depth research into these works form another key area of the project and are relevant for two reasons: Firstly, a complete US provenance between 1933 and 1945 removes the suspicion of confiscation as a result of persecution. Secondly, these provenances provide fascinating insights into the history of the collection and the popularization of the artists Klee, Picasso, Braque and Matisse in the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

The provenance information obtained in the project will be incorporated into future publications, particularly into new editions of the Museum Berggruen inventory catalog. There are also plans to publish it on SMB-digital, the online database for the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s collections. A small exhibition at Museum Berggruen will showcase the results at the end of the project. Upon completion of the project, works for which there is concrete evidence of loss as a result of Nazi persecution will be entered into the Lost Art Database and published on the German Lost Art Foundation website.

(c) Museum Berggruen