Collection Max and Fanny Steinthal
The Max and Fanny Steinthal Collection was a collection of works of art and miniatures that the banker Max Steinthal (1850–1940) and his wife, the pianist Fanny Steinthal (1869–1941), at the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th Th century. During the National Socialist era , the couple and their seven children were persecuted because of their Jewish origin, and the Nazi state confiscated the family's property. Large parts of the collection were lost and have been considered lost ever since. In 2003, a bundle of 60 works from the Steinthal Collection was found in a depot of the State Art Collections in Dresden , which was restituted to the heirs in 2004 .
The collection
The collection comprised over 600 exhibits, in particular by Dutch and Flemish old masters , including paintings by Bartholomeus van der Helst , Willem van Mieris and Nicolaes Maes , as well as works of impressionism and contemporary art of the time. One of the heart of the collection was the painting Las tres velas (The Three Sails) by the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida , which Max Steinthal acquired in 1904. The pictures were mainly used to furnish the family villa in Berlin-Charlottenburg and their estate on Maxsee near Müncheberg .
After the Steinthal couple were forced to sell their property in 1939, both of them stored a large part of the works of art alongside their household items at a shipping company. After Steinthals' death, Richard Vollmann, the non-Jewish son-in-law of the Steinthals, was able to hide a bundle of around 60 works, consisting of 13 oil paintings as well as drawings and lithographs, in his house in Dresden. Vollmann fled to West Germany in the early 1950s and left the pictures behind. As property of foreigners it came under the fiduciary administration of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and was stored.
The restitution
After the Washington Declaration of 1998, the heirs commissioned the historian Monika Tatzkow and the lawyer Jost von Trott zu Solz to search for the lost collection. In spring 2002 she finally received information about their whereabouts in the holdings of the Dresden art collections. The bundle was found after the Elbe flood in 2002 , when the art collections in Pillnitz Castle had to be sorted. With proof that the 60 works found were part of the collection that Richard Vollmann had hidden in his house, the heirs obtained restitution in 2004. These included the paintings The Three Sails by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, The Pumpkin Harvest by Giovanni Segantini , Roses in a Bowl by Lovis Corinth and Twilight by Dora Hitz, and graphics by Max Liebermann , Édouard Manet , Edvard Munch , Pablo Picasso and Camille Pissarro .
The Jewish Museum in Berlin exhibited the collection in September 2004 and at the same time documented the fate of the Steinthal family. Most of the exhibits were then auctioned through the Sotheby’s auction house.
literature
- Melissa Müller, Monika Tatzkow: lost pictures, lost lives. Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-938045-30-5 , pp. 131–141
Web links
- Jewish Museum Berlin: Max Steinthal. A banker and his pictures
- Lostart Register Magdeburg: Steinthal, Max
Individual evidence
- ↑ Melissa Müller, Monika Tatzkow : Lost Pictures, Lost Lives. Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art, Munich 2009, p. 141