The Nazis Wanted to Put This Painting in a Museum Dedicated to Hitler. Now It’s the Star Lot of Germany’s First Live Auction Since Lockdown

A small auction house in Munich is holding its first in-person
sales this week as Germany begins to ease its lockdown
restrictions.

Neumeister is selling 200 pieces of jewelry, as well as a group
of fine-art objects, on May 5 and May 6. Pre-registration is
required for in-person bidding, but the auction house would not
confirm how many collectors planned to attend the live
sales. Katrin Stoll, the company’s CEO, said that between 50
and 300 people generally attend its auctions. Call-ins and online
bids will also be accepted.

“After almost two months in lockdown, it is now time to set the
first positive impulses on the art market,” Stoll tells Artnet
News.

The May 6 sale includes eight artworks by German Romantic artist
Carl Spitzweg, including one picture with an especially fraught
provenance.

Spitzweg’s The Eye of the Law (Justitia) (1857),
the star lot of the auction, once belonged to Leo Bendel, a
Jewish-Polish tobacco merchant and art collector who died in the
Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940 after selling the painting
under duress. It was restituted to his heirs in 2019, after it hung
in the offices of eight German presidents.

The picture is estimated to sell for between €500,000 and
€750,000 ($550,000 to $830,000).

Bendel sold the work in 1937 to Galerie Heinemann in Munich to
make money to flee Nazi Germany to Vienna, where he was arrested in
1939. In 1938, art dealer Maria Almas acquired it for the Führer
Museum, which was being planned in Adolf Hitler’s hometown of Linz
in Austria.

The work was sized by the Allies in October 1945 and transferred
to Munich’s Central Collecting Point. The picture was then handed
over to the Office of the Federal President in Bonn, the
capital of West Germany, in August 1961, and became
a permanent fixture in the Villa Hammerschmidt, the official
residence of the president of West Germany. The work was taken
off view in 2007 after its troubling provenance was uncovered.

The painting’s fraught political life is reflected pictorially:
it depicts a sculpture of Lady Justice, her scale broken and a
fissure running through her foundation, before a soldier who lurks
in the shadows.

Another high-profile restitution of a work once owned by Bendel
took place last fall, when the Oetker family returned another
painting by Spitzweg, Der Hexenmeister, to his heirs.
It was part of the same group of works Bendel was forced to sell to
fund his escape from Germany.

Five other works by Spitzweg in the Neumeister sale come
from a German private collection that had been on permanent
loan to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

In 2000, Neumeister set an auction record for a work by Spitzweg
when it sold Der ewige Hochzeiter for 2.4
million DM ($1.1 million).

The post The Nazis Wanted to Put This Painting in a Museum
Dedicated to Hitler. Now It’s the Star Lot of Germany’s First Live
Auction Since Lockdown appeared first on artnet
News.