Germany Returns Three Paintings and Six Pieces of Antique Silverware Looted By the Nazis to Rightful Heirs

Germany will return three paintings to the heirs of a
French-Jewish collector whose art was looted by the Nazis. The
works all passed through the hands of the notorious German art
dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. Two were found in the Munich hoard of
his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, and the third in a private collection
in Southern Germany.

The works stolen from the lawyer and art collector Armand
Dorville (1875–1941) are by the French Impressionist painter
Jean-Louis Forain. A watercolor Lady in an evening
gown, and the oil painting Portrait of a lady in
profile, were both recovered from Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich
apartment in 2012.

The drawing Amazon with rearing horse by the Dutch
artist Constantin Guys was in the collection of Hildebrand Gurlitt
for a time before it ended up in a private German collection. The
restitution of the works is due to take place in Berlin on January
22 in the presence of German culture minister Monika Grütters. Her
office declined to comment on this story.

After the German occupation of France in 1940, the Nazis seized
thousands of works of art or forced their owners to sell them for
bargain prices. Dorville’s collection was dispersed across Europe,
ending up in private hands and prominent institutions. A curator at
the Louvre bought a dozen piece in a four-day auction of Dorville’s
collection in 1942, one year after he died, according the
New York Times.
Several from the Louvre received restitution claims from Dorville’s
heirs just last year.

According to Germany’s Lost Art Database, Forain’s Lady
in Profile, was acquired by a Parisian art dealer, Raphaël
Gérard, in April 1944. Hildebrand Gurlitt acquired the work
sometime after 1953. The Lost Art Database speculates that Forain’s
other work, Lady in Evening Gown, may have been
acquired by Hildebrand in France in the 1940s, though it is unclear
if it was from the forced auction.

Stolen Silverware

The planned restitution of the three paintings by Germany comes
as six pieces of silver from the National Bavarian Museum in Munich
have been returned to the heirs of two German-Jewish families.

The objects seized from the Marx and Neumeyer families by the
Nazis include a goblet, spice vessel, three candlesticks, and a
chalice.

The German Lost Art Foundation reports that the Munich museum
acquired more than 300 silver objects during the Nazi era, when the
the city became the regime’s power base. Karl Neumeyer, chair at
the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, and his wife Anna, a
trailblazer for women’s rights, took their lives at their home in
Munich in 1941 amid the Nazi’s growing persecution of the Jewish
population. Leo Marx was a musician and businessman who was
imprisoned in Dachau from 1933 to 1935 and in Oranienburg in 1938
and 1939 before he emigrated to Shanghai 1939; his wife and two
children were murdered in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1941.

Since its establishment in 2015, and under the direction of
culture Minister Monika Grütters, the German Lost Art
Foundation,  is shedding new light on the tainted provenance
of art and artifacts in the nation’s museum collections. Since
2019, the foundation has expanded its remit to include research
into cultural objects looted during the colonial era.

The post Germany Returns Three Paintings and Six Pieces of
Antique Silverware Looted By the Nazis to Rightful Heirs
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