A German Museum Director Tracked Down 6 Missing Works by Anselm Kiefer in a Chinese Warehouse. But China Is Blocking Their Return

The German museum director Beate Reifenscheid was relieved to
personally track down six important works by Anselm Kiefer in an
art storage facility in China last month. Lent for a major touring
exhibition, which the artist angrily disowned and failed to stop,
the Kiefers from the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz had been missing for
almost a year.

Reifenscheid is still battling to retrieve the paintings from
Asia, however, while many other works are still unaccounted for
from the ill-fated show she co-curated against the artist’s
wishes.

In 2016, the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz and Hamburg’s Bell Art
Center joined forces to organize an unofficial Kiefer
retrospective, which opened at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine
Arts. The last stop of its tour was meant to be the new
Jupiter Museum of Art in Shenzhen, but the museum’s opening was
delayed until last November, according to its website, and the show
never took place.

Reifenscheid, who is also the head of the German branch of the
International Council of Museums, has been in hot water over the
ongoing saga. She had stopped hearing straight answers from her
Chinese contacts months ago. But on Wednesday, January 8, she told
the German news outlet SWR the
good news that she had finally located the museum’s Kiefers in an
art warehouse in Shenzhen. The bad news is that she has hit a wall
trying get the works back to Germany.

Reifenscheid says she visited the warehouse in Shenzhen several
times to locate the missing works of art, which some feared had
disappeared onto the Chinese black market. She kept getting a
different answer every time: “They said that the customs papers
were not correct, or that others would claim that the works
belonged to them, and not to the Ludwig Museum.” In December,
Reifenscheid was in the warehouse when the crates were
located. She was relieved to find that the works inside are in
good condition. The Ludwig Museum’s loans include Pasiphae, a
monumental work that Kiefer made over 14 years, from 1994 to
2010.

According to Reifenscheid, the Shenzhen museum contact has
refused to return the works for unconfirmed reasons. The city of
Koblenz has stepped in to demand the return of Kiefer’s works,
threatening to claim damages. The paintings are reported to be
worth several million euros. The German foreign office and the
German Embassy in China have also reportedly put pressure on
Chinese authorities, but there has been, so far, no response from
China, according to media reports.

Margit Theis-Scholz, the cultural head of the city of Koblenz,
told the DPA news agency that the city has
nothing to do with the other 300 artworks
from Germany, including further Kiefer works, that are also
currently missing somewhere in China. Artnet News
asked Reifenscheid to confirm this, but did not hear back by
publishing time.

The ill-fated Kiefer exhibition consisted of 87 works, 80 of
which came from the collection of the Chinese-born, German
collector Maria Chen Tu. Beijing Central Academy of Fine
Arts’ website states
that the show was co-curated by Reifenscheid and organised by
the Bell Art Center with major loans from Chen Tu’s MAP
collection.

Kiefer and his galleries Thaddaeus Ropac, Gagosian, and White
Cube made a joint statement supporting Kiefer’s opposition to the
exhibition back in 2016. Kiefer told Artnet News via a
statement that year: “I am deeply disappointed that it is taking
place without my involvement or consent.”

The post A German Museum Director Tracked Down 6 Missing
Works by Anselm Kiefer in a Chinese Warehouse. But China Is
Blocking Their Return appeared first on artnet News.