“THE RAISING OF LAZARUS”

“The Raising of Lazarus”, painted by an anonymous German artist, was salvaged by the Monuments Men at the end of World War II before entering the Bavarian State Paintings Collection in 1961, where it remained until now.

The work, painted in oils on wood, is thought to have been created between 1530 and 1540 and was part of a collection assembled by James von Bleichröder, the son of Gerson von Bleichröder, a Jewish banker who rose to fame as Otto von Bismarck’s personal financial adviser. James von Bleichröder died in 1937.

Nearly 80 years after it was stolen from the family, the painting, valued at about $250,000, was returned to Frank Winkel at a ceremony in Munich. Mr. Winkel lives in Munich and is the heir of James von Bleichröder’s daughter Ellie, who survived incarceration at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

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SERGEI SHCHUKIN’S COLLECTION – THE PICASSO ROOM

Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin (1854 – 1936) was a Russian businessman who became an art collector, mainly of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.

After the 1917 Revolution, the government appropriated his collection while Shchukin escaped to Paris, where he died in 1936.

Below, a 1914 photograph of Sergei Shchukin’s cabinet at home, called the Picasso Room, which was crowded with almost 50 Picassos.

JAN FRANSE VERZIJL – “YOUNG MAN AS BACCHUS”

The FBI returned a Nazi-looted painting to officials of the Montreal-based foundation named for the German Jewish art dealer whose gallery once owned it.

The painting “Young Man as Bacchus”, by Jan Franse Verzijl (1599-1647), was the latest tracked down since 2002 as part of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project. Stern, who died in 1987, saw scores of artworks confiscated and sold off by the Nazis from his gallery in Düsseldorf before he fled to Canada in the mid-1930s.

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