Showing posts with label Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods. Show all posts

Jun 28, 2025

Heinemann and Mondschein (Frederick Mont) in provenances of artworks in American museums

El Greco - Portrait of a Gentleman, Julius Priester The El Greco looted in 1944 by the Nazi Gestapo from Julius Priester passed through Rudolf J. Heinemann, (1901 – February 7, 1975) and the business he owned, Pinakos, and Frederick Mont (aka Fritz Mondschein) and the gallery he owned, Galerie Sanct Lukas, before being identified. The provenance of the looted artwork was falsified, and it took more than seventy years to find it, claim it and obtain restitution (in 2015). 

The obvious question for museums to ask themselves is: which artworks in our collections passed through these individuals or their businesses and are there any provenance gaps or discrepancies that require further verification. 

 The number of questions marks "?" (49) and "probably" (41) and "possibly" (30) and "might have" or "may have" (12) suggests the presence of guesswork and speculation.

Below are a few of the artworks known to have passed through Heinemann or Mont. 

Jun 21, 2021

Let's run 1000 NEPIP provenances that contain Munich through the Looted Art Detector


In the previous post we gathered one thousand provenances of artworks listed (for the most part) by American museums on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal that contain the word "Munich" or "München" in the provenance text.

In this post, using the Looted Art Detector developed at the Swiss Glamhack2020 and Glamhack2021, we rank artworks that contain a mention of Munich according to the criteria of "Uncertainty".