Works acquired by the “Drawings Collection” (formerly at the Nationalgalerie) during the period 1933 to 1945 and their provenances

The Drawings Collection has been held by the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin since 1992. It consists of oil sketches, watercolors and drawings dating mainly from the 19th and early 20th century. The Drawings Collection was established as a separate department within the Nationalgalerie in 1878 following a transfer from what had been the Royal Kupferstichkabinett. During the National Socialist period, around 1,300 works were acquired for the Drawings Collection. They came directly from the artists’ studios, from private owners or from galleries and, increasingly from 1938 onwards, from auctions.

When purchasing from auctions, the Nationalgalerie’s directors during the Nazi period, Eberhard Hanfstaengl and Paul Ortwin Rave, concentrated predominantly on large and well-known auction houses such as C. G. Boerner in Leipzig, Karl & Faber in Munich and Hauswedell in Hamburg. Only a few works on paper came into the collection from Berlin auctions, purchased from Max Perl, Rudolph Lepke, Hans W. Lange, Reinhold Puppel and Adolf Herold. Galleries, art dealers and antiquarian art shops, on the other hand, preferred to buy mainly from the local Berlin firms.

Systematic provenance research, funded by the Lost Art Foundation, was carried out in the holdings of the Drawings Collection at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin between October 1, 2013 and September 30, 2016. The aim was to locate any artworks that had been confiscated from their previous owners, particularly Jewish owners, as a result of Nazi persecution. This project broke new ground in provenance research because this type of research had rarely been dedicated to the systematic investigation of graphic works in museum holdings before then. It was facilitated firstly by a concept designed in advance by the Kupferstichkabinett for provenance research in so-called large scale collections, and secondly by the exceptionally good state of the documentation available. As well as the fully preserved inventory book, which gives an acquisition source for each individual work, the acquisition files in the Nationalgalerie’s file holdings in the central archives of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin have survived almost in their entirety.

During the project period itself, it was possible for four works to be restituted to the descendants of their Jewish former owners. Two drawings by Friedrich (or Ferdinand) von Olivier and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld originated from the property of Dr. Marianne Schmidl, an ethnologist from Vienna. The Nationalgalerie had bought them at auctions held at C. G. Boerner in Leipzig in April 1939 and May 1941. Marianne Schmidl, a great-grandchild of Friedrich von Olivier, worked at the Austrian National Library in Vienna until she was made to take early retirement in 1938 due to “Jewish ancestry on her father’s side”. After being deprived of the financial means necessary to support her livelihood, she sold the drawings from her family possessions. She was deported to the Izbica ghetto in Poland in April 1942. The last sign that she was still alive comes from May 11, 1942.

Two other drawings by Christian Bernhard Rode were attributed to the collection of the Jewish art historian and professor Curt Glaser. He lost his position as director of the Kunstbibliothek in 1933 and emigrated, first traveling to France, then Switzerland, Italy and Cuba before eventually arriving in the United States in 1941. The Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and Glaser’s heirs reached a fair and just solution in the spirit of the Washington Principles and agreed that the works would remain in the Kupferstichkabinett in return for a compensation payment.

In the course of the research, loss as a result of Nazi persecution could be ruled out or deemed highly unlikely for a good half of the works examined. The other half still have gaps in their provenance, which the research has not filled as yet. This is primarily down to the medium: drawings were seldom depicted as prominently as paintings in the art books of the time, or described as extensively as sculptures in auction catalogs. Many works came from auctions whose consignors are identified only with anonymous ownership abbreviations in the catalogs. In addition, the private former owners rarely had well-known names and consequently are difficult or impossible to track down in the archive records: For a smaller owner, a drawing was more affordable than a prestigious oil painting.

In order to drive forward the basic research in these areas, the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz decided that when the German Lost Art Foundation funding came to an end, it would continue financing the project out of its own resources up to October 2017.

The provenance of the works acquired for the Drawings Collection between 1933 and 1945 will be published gradually in SMB-digital http://www.smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus.

Provenance research at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin:

- Provenance research at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, URL: http://www.smb.museum/forschung/provenienzforschung.html

- The Galerie des 20. Jahrhunderts in West Berlin, URL: http://www.galerie20.smb.museum/

- German/American Provenance Research Exchange Program for Museum Professionals (PREP), 2017–2019, URL: http://www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrichtungen/zentralarchiv/forschung/provenienzforschung-am-zentralarchiv/deutsch-amerikanisches-austauschprogramm-zur-provenienzforschung-fuer-museen-prep-2017-2019.html

(c) Kupferstichkabinett