Nazi looted art: deception by provenance authors

The scale of deceptive practices by art market professionals concerning Holocaust-related looted art is under-appreciated.

The web of complicity is tough to break through, and it is rather depressing to even try. 

However, inspired by recent events, we will in this next series of posts, attempt to highlight of few of the tricks used by various art market actors to disguise what they clearly suspect to be illicit origins.

In this first post, we revisit the El Greco, Portrait of a Gentleman, that was part of the Julius Priester collection before the Holocaust. 

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Pinakos, Heinemann, de Hauke in GPI Public Collections

The Getty Provenance Index maintains a database of artworks from public collections, some of which have provenances.

Additional Databases PUBLIC COLLECTION

Otto Wertheimer Galerie Les Tourettes

Otto Wertheimer was an art dealer who owned Galerie Les Tourettes.

(photo: Hercules and the Lion, Boston Museum of Fine Arts)

The (always informative) RKD says Otto Wertheimer was born about 1878 in Germany and died in 1972 or 73 in Paris. It lists 41 artworks (see below) that belonged to Wertheimer.

Zinckgraf (or Zinkgraf) as a Nazi Era Red Flag

The Zinckgraf name appears 55 times in the Linz (Hitler) collection database, usually with little or no information about the former  owner,  This portrait of a man ((Linz no 0408) by Moritz vonSchwind, was delivered to the notorious Maria Almas-Dietrich.

Friedrich Heinrich Zinckgraf ( 1878-1954), played an important role in the Aryanization of the Jewish-owned Galerie Heinemann and the transfer of Jewish art collections to Nazi officials and other collectors