Frederick Mont (1894-1994) was an art dealer who sold artworks to dozens of major art museums and art collectors.
Mont, originally named Fritz Mondschein, owned the Sanct Lucas Gallery.
Mont is known to have worked with the Austrian Nazi SS art dealer and looter Bernhard Witke and was involved in selling at least two artworks looted from the Jewish collector Julius Priester, including the El Greco, Portrait of a Gentleman.
Mont also sold a forgery to Sherman Lee at the Cleveland Museum of Art as a Grunewald, but, according to the NYT, pigment tests conducted by the museum's conservator, Ross Merrill, proved conclusively that the painting was a 20th‐century forgery.
The provenances of those artworks were falsified, with fake owners and entirely fake histories inserted into the texts.
Art historians, provenance researchers and scholars of the Holocaust should keep this context in mind when evaluating the ownership histories that have been published for artworks that passed through Mont's hands.
Mont was not an honest man. Everything Frederick Mont or his Galerie Sanct Lucas claimed about an artwork should be considered questionable unless it is proven to be true.
DATASETS
Frederick Mont Sanct Lucas in Provenance Texts of Artworks at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 25 AUG 2020
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NEPIP NGA Frederick Mont and Sanct Lucas in Provenance Texts of Artworks listed on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal by the NGA
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RKD: Frederick Mont mentioned in artworks at the RKD
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Kress Collection: Frederick Mont and Galerie Sanct Lucas K-codes and provenance (in Color)
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Frederick Mont at Sotheby's and Christie's- PUBLIC
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Linked Data References for Frederick Mont or Galerie Sanct Lucas
Wikidata: Q33315010
Viaf: 139936107
Union List of Artist Names ID: 500437571
WorldCat Identities ID: lccn-no2007138555
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RKDartists ID: 431910
Interesting account of Fritz Mont in Goering’s Man in Paris
ReplyDeleteFritz Mont (1894–1994) was a well-established dealer in New York and could have been one of the “cut-outs” used by the tainted Lohse. Fritz Mont sold to many U.S. museums, and was also selected as the agent for the prince of Liechtenstein when the sovereign, Franz Joseph II, deaccessioned certain masterpieces in the 1960s.36 Lohse’s “friends” Fritz and Betty Mont, with their very fashionable address, would have counted as formidable social allies. They were not unlike Theodore Rousseau, who actually surpassed them in terms of social “mountaineering,” but who continued to interact with Bruno Lohse.