Showing posts with label Mont. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mont. Show all posts

Aug 20, 2020

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. 

ARCHIVED LINK

May 15, 2018

Fritz Mont, Frederick Mondschein and Galerie Sanct Lucas

What does it mean to find the names Fritz Mont, Fritz Mondschein, Frederick Mondschein or Frederick Mont in the provenance of an artwork?

The Getty has a record for MONT Inc

biography

Born in Vienna in 1894, Frederick Mont, also known as A. F.  Mondschein or Frederick Mondschein or Adolf Fritz Mondschein, emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. Mont aka Mondschein owned the Galerie Sanct Lucas and counted among his clients many US museums. He had close relationships with American dealer Victor Spark (1898-1991) and the Newhouse Galleries. Mont played an important role in the transatlantic art trade. The names Mont, Mondschein, and Sanct Lucas appear in several artworks listed on NEPIP, the Nazi Era Provenance Research Portal.

(source: Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America)
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see also:
Galerie Sanct Lucas
Newhouse Galleries
Spark, Victor David, 1898-1991