Nazi seized "degenerate" art in collection of Oberlin Allen Memorial Art Museum

The Allen Memorial Art Museum makes no secret of the fact that a Kirchner in its collection, Self Portrait as a Solder, once hung in a German museum.

 https://allenartcollection.oberlin.edu/objects/3758/selfportrait-as-a-soldier

The same painting can be found in the "Entartete Kunst" database published by the Free University of Berlin.

http://emuseum.campus.fu-berlin.de/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=117555&viewType=detailView

American museums have relatively little issue with recounting the history of artworks that the Nazi government seized from its own (Nazi-run) museums. 

Of Kirchner's Self Portrait of a Solder above, the Allen Memorial Art Museum writes: 

This work, with its raw and garish colors, was included in the 1937 Entartete Kunst-Degenerate Art-exhibition put on by the Nazi authorities in Munich, after which it traveled to other cities in Germany in 1937-38. In Munich, the painting was exhibited in room 3, with other Kirchners, as "Soldier with Whore," under the texts "Deliberate sabotage of national defense" and "An insult to the German heroes of the Great War," 

This text is in a descriptive essay, under the title, "More information".  The online entree for the artwork does not include a provenance tab.* Thus, while one learns that the Kirchner was "Degenerate Art", one does not learn how this art came to reside in an American museum, or that the artwork passed through a Nazi named Kurt Feldhäusser.*

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Kurt Feldhäusser is a name that Nazi-looted art provenance researchers should be familiar with. In the above provenance for a Kirchner painting at the Oberlin Allen Memorial Art Museum, his name appears after the arttwork was seized from a German museum by the Nazi government in order to be sold to raise cash for the Third Reich.

This same Feldhäusser appears in numerous provenances of artworks looted from Jews that made their way to American museums.

Some restitution cases for artworks that passed through Kurt Feldhäusser include:

• Artillerymen in the Shower (Kirchner) which had been owned by Alfred Flechtheim and which had been given a false provenance, restituted after litigation by the Guggenheim which had acquired it from the MoMA
• Over Vitebsk (Chagall) which (also) had been owned by Alfred Flechtheim and which also had been given a false provenance, restituted secretly by the MoMa to the Matthiesen heirs in exchange for a $4 million payment, after initially refusing restitution on the grounds that repayment of a debt and not Nazis had been involved ("MoMA, in its records on its website, said the gallery had turned over the Chagall painting to a major German bank in 1934 “in exchange for debt"- NYT)
• Sand Hills (Kirchner) which had been owned by Max Fischer and which had been given (sigh) a false provenance, restituted by the MoMa after the museum had initially refused mistakenly confusing the painting with another that had been seized from a German museum due to a sequence of errors

One notes in passing that all three of these artworks passed through both Feldhäusser and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and that all three had false provenances. 

Feldhäusser is a name that is hard to confuse with any other. Feldhäusser was a Nazi Party member. Feldhäusser is linked to both art seized from museums in the Nazi  "Degenerate Art" campaign of 1937-8 and looted from German Jews starting in 1933.

It would be interesting to compare and contrast, for the same artists, the historical treatment of the ownership history depending on whether the artwork was part of the "Degenerate Art" inventory of art seized from German museums or simply looted from Jews.

*The Allen Memorial Art Museum does not publish Nazi-era provenance for the artworks in its online collection with the exception of 30 artworks that were published in a slide show under "Provenance Research Nazi Era". One can find the Kirchner there. (see internet archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210813054133/https://amam.oberlin.edu/art/provenance-research/nazi-era

For more on Kurt Feldhäusser see:

Kurt Feldhäusser or Weyhe in provenance of artworks in American museums

Alfred Flechtheim: Das Soldatenbad by Kirchner

Curt Valentin in provenances at the Harvard Art Museums

- The Persistent Crime of Nazi-Looted Art, by Sophie Gilbert, in The AtlanticLooted Art

The director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr Jr. used art dealer Curt Valentin as an intermediary to secretly purchase artworks confiscated by Nazis from German museums. What else did Barr and other American museums directors purchase through Valentin?

In this next series of posts, we will look at the provenances of artworks that mention Curt Valentin. 

An interesting exercise for young art historians and provenances researchers is to examine each provenance with the questions: 

1) Who owned this artwork before Curt Valentin? 

2) Are there provenance gaps for the years 1933-1945?

3) What share of artworks that mention Curt Valentin in the provenance lack information about sellers, dates and places for the Nazi years? (0-25%; 26-50%; 51%-75%; 76%-100%).

4) What possible explanations might there be for the observations in 3)?

5) What actions does this suggest?

1. Mentions of Curt Valentin in the provenances of artworks at the Harvard Art Museums

See  Valentin Harvard Art Museums Provenance



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for more information on Curt Valentin's role in bringing European art into American museums, see:

MoMA’s Problematic Provenances by William D. Cohan published November 17, 2011 by Artnews