HANS BALUSCHEK

Hans Baluschek (1870-1935).

 

MAX LIEBERMANN – “WASCHE TROCKNEN – BLEICHE”

In 2009 the Museum Kunst der Westküste, a small, fine house that has been presenting German and North-West European art from 1830 to 1930 in changing exhibitions, was opened in Alkersum, a community on the North Frisian island of Föhr. On the museum’s website, you can watch a nine-minute film showing a virtual tour of the opening show eight years ago: hundreds of works including paintings by Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde and Max Liebermann.

After two and a half minutes the camera swings around an intermediate wall and shows a small painting in a gold frame. For two seconds only where you can see a woman hanging on a meadow pink and lilac-colored clothes on a leash. The breeze winds the colorful fabrics, hair and dress of the woman flutter. The picture is called “Wäsche trocknen – Bleiche“; Max Liebermann painted it in 1890.

9000 kilometers west from the small Frisian island of Föhr, Mitchell Ostwald almost stopped his heart when, a few days ago, he watched the film from the museum on his computer. He pressed the pause button at minute 2:30 and stared disbelievingly at the screen for minutes. “Then I realized: we finally found it,” he says. “Our painting.”

The Liebermann picture belonged to the Jewish art collector Moritz Ury, the great-grandfather of Mitchell Ostwald. Together with his wife Selma, Ury had to flee from Nazi Germany to Switzerland in 1937. He was not allowed to take his art collection, the Gestapo confiscated the works and auctioned it in 1941.

Among the sold works of art was also the Liebermann painting, whose track was lost after the auction. It was only in 2005 that it suddenly appeared in public, again at an auction. The Münchner Auktionshaus Hampel offered the work for an estimate of 225,000 euros. The former owner of the Hertie department store chain and art collector Hans-Georg Karg, who had died in 2003, had acquired the Liebermann painting in the 1980s. Whether he knew at the time that it was a Nazi robbery we don’t know. When the controversial provenance of the painting became known in the same year, the Liebermann painting was withdrawn from the auction. The picture disappeared again.

The painting was seen the picture in the museum on Föhr a few years ago, she wrote, and the film on the museum’s website then removed all doubts.

Museum director Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen now confirms on request that the picture was a private loan that was not owned by the museum. Whoever had lent it to the museum at the time, she does not want to say. “However, the private owner, who has acquired the Liebermann painting was informed about the facts you have described and is already working with his legal representative in a fair and fair procedure,” Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen said.

Although Mitchell Ostwald has not received any news from the current owner of the picture, the announcement by the museum owner gives him hope. “I am very happy that after all the years of silence, there is finally a trace to the painting,” says Ostwald. “Now I’m looking forward to finding a just solution with the owner.”

More about Max Liebermann HERE.

Original article in German HERE.

. I apologize if you find some errors in the translation. My English will never be perfect.

THE GURLITT EXHIBITIONS

Hundreds of artworks that were hidden for decades by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi-era art dealer, will at last go on view beginning in November, in exhibitions in Bern and Bonn.

The collection was amassed by Mr. Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, and was concealed until the autumn of 2013, when the weekly magazine Focus reported that the authorities had stumbled on it during a tax investigation.

View full article HERE.