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-soldierThe 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:
