Das Soldatenbad by Kirchner is one of the many paintings Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim lost due to Nazi persecution which targeted him and forced the Aryanization of his art gallery in 1933.For more see Nordic News Weekly
and the press release by the SMK museum
which states :
The painting was unlawfully sold to Kurt Feldhäusser, a member of the Nazi party.
Upon Feldhäusser’s death in 1945, ownership of his collection passed to his mother, who brought the work to the United States. Via donation, it arrived first at The Museum of Modern Art and then The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Following extensive studies of its provenance, the picture was restituted to the Flechtheim heirs in 2018. In the autumn of 2018 the painting came up for auction, where it was sold to the Norwegian fund Sparebankstiftelsen DNB.
29 March 2019
Sweden’s Moderna Museet returned a painting by Oskar Kokoschka to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim. The portrait of Marquis Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac was sold by Flechtheim’s former employee, Alex Vömel, a Nazi who profited from his employer’s plight as a Jew in the Third Reich.
“He lost the painting because he was Jewish,” the Moderna Museet said in a statement. “It is of utter importance to the Swedish government as well as for us in the museum that there are no works that have a problematic provenance,” says the museum’s director, Daniel Birnbaum. “We are happy and relieved the Kokoschka painting now returns to its true owner.”
- Sweden's Moderna Museet returns Kokoschka work to Jewish dealer's heirs
The Art Newspaper
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