Showing posts with label Over Vitebsk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Over Vitebsk. Show all posts

Sep 19, 2026

Kurt Feldhäusser and false provenances at the MoMa

Some restitution cases for artworks that passed through the Nazi Kurt Feldhäusser on their way to the Museum of Modern Art in New York 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

Kurt Feldhäusser was a Nazi Party member linked to art looted from German Jews starting in 1933 or seized from museums in the Nazi  "Degenerate Art" campaign of 1937-8.