Hanover Museum To Return Watercolor to Holocaust Victim’s Heirs
Image by wikimedia commons
By Talya Zax January 10, 2017
Following a ruling by the German commission devoted to restitution of Nazi-looted art, Hanover’s Sprengel Museum will return a German Expressionist watercolor to the heirs of its former owner, Max Rüdenberg.
As ArtForum reported, the painting — Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s “Marsh Landscape with Red Windmill,” completed in 1922 — was donated to the museum by German chocolatier Bernhard Sprengel. The city of Hanover argued that, as no proof of Rüdenberg’s purchase of the painting has been found, there was insufficient evidence that the arts benefactor had owned the work prior to World War II.
The Sprengel collection, however, contains both a catalogue entry and inventory card listing Rüdenberg as a onetime owner of the work. Under National Socialism, the city of Hanover compelled Rüdenberg to sell much of his collection in the late 1930s.
Rüdenberg and his wife, Margarethe, remained in Hanover at the start of World War II, but made sure that their grandchildren escaped to England. Both perished at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they were sent in July of 1942.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
