Loebl, Kleinberger and Sperling in NEPIP provenances in American Museums

Harry Sperling, the grandson of art dealer Franz Kleinberger, became head of the firm F. Kleinberger Galleries. His cousin, Allan Loebl, an Art Looting Investigation Unit Red Flag Name, was in charge of the Paris office during WWII.

Below are the provenances of some of the artworks that transited via Kleinberger on their way to US museums.

The Paris art dealer who sold the looted work to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum was François Heim

1. How did Jacopo Zucchi's  “The Bath of Bathsheba” get from Italy to Connecticut where it hung at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford from 1965, until it was "restituted" to the Italians?*

Who was the "Paris dealer" who sold the looted painting to the Wadsworth museum?

Plundered art: a perspective from the Holocaust Art Restitution Project tells the story - and the story of the story.

see: 

21 August 2011 Jacopo Zucchi, “The Bath of Bathsheba”: or how pieces of a story build a new story about the same story ex post facto

2. What other artworks were sold to museums by François Heim?

Triptych of Madonna and Child with Angels, LACMA M.69.54

According to the Getty Provenance Index records, Triptych with the Madonna and Child with Saints (Los Angeles County Museum of Art M.69.54) was acquired by LACMA from François Heim in 1969.

Provenance cases for students of art history

"...the Grünbaum heirs contend that Mr. Kornfeld’s account is a fiction and that the documents are forgeries. They say it is suspicious that he did not identify Ms. Lukacs-Herzl as his supplier until nearly two decades after her death, and they contest the validity of the signatures on the records, pointing to places where Ms. Lukacs-Herzl’s name is misspelled or written in pencil...."

 

- William D. Cohan, Jewish Heirs Take on an Art Foundation That Rights Nazi Wrongs, NYT, Aug. 26, 2018

 

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READING GUIDE

Questions for students of art history

1) Why is it important to establish an accurate account of the ownership history of an artwork?

2) How to verify whether an art dealer is telling the truth or lying about the provenance an artwork he or she sold?

3) What elements in this story help to clarify an accurate sequence of events? 

4) What historical knowledge is needed to make sense of these different accounts?

5) What additional information can you find from other sources that make it possible to see more clearly what really happened?

6) This NYT news story was published in 2018. What has happened since then? Do recent events shed light on who was telling the truth and who was lying? If so, how?

read more at: http://archive.is/mNym6#selection-825.517-825.541

Jewish Heirs Take on an Art Foundation That Rights Nazi Wrongs by By William D. Cohan, Aug. 26, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/arts/design/nazi-art-egon-schiele-fritz-grunbaum.html