Kirchner Painting Stolen by Nazis Returned to Jewish Family
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BERLIN — A 1913 painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner depicting a Berlin street scene will be returned to heirs of the Jewish family forced to hand it over to the Nazis before World War II, the state government said yesterday.
Kirchner’s “Berliner Strassenszene,” with an estimated value of $12.59 million, has hung in the Bruecke Museum in the German capital since 1980. It will remain until Sunday then be returned to heirs of the family that originally owned the work, Berlin’s state Ministry for Culture said in a statement.
No details of the restitution, including the identity of the original owners, or the heirs, were released.
A modern art expert for the Berlin-based auction house Villa Grisebach, Bernd Schultz, said he considers the painting one of the most outstanding in Kirchner’s series of street scenes.
Kirchner, born in 1880 in the western German town of Aschaffenburg, was one of the most creative artists of “Die Bruecke,” or “The Bridge,” a group of German painters that he co-founded in 1905. After the Nazis seized power, they confiscated 639 of Kirchner’s paintings from museums and, in despair, he took his own life in 1938.
In 1933, the painting was taken to Switzerland, where it was exhibited in Basel and Zurich. Three years later, the owners sent it to the Art Association of Cologne. An art collector then bought the paintings, but it is uncertain whether the Jewish owners ever saw any of this money, the ministry said.
After World War II, the new owners donated the painting to the Staedel museum in Frankfurt. It was then acquired by the state of Berlin in “in good faith,” the ministry said.
