Dead City III
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| Dead City III |
|---|
| Egon Schiele , 1911 |
| oil on wood |
| 37.3 x 29.8 cm |
| Leopold Museum Vienna |
Dead City III is an expressionist painting by Egon Schiele from the year 1911. It had until his death owned by the Viennese cabaret artist Fritz Grünbaum found and came after the turmoil of the Nazi era finally exchange with the New York art dealer Otto Kallir to the art collector Rudolf Leopold . Suspected of being Nazi-looted art , it was confiscated at an exhibition in New York City in 1998 , but returned to the Leopold Collection of the Leopold Museum Private Foundation the following year .
description
The painting is a small work on wood with the dimensions 37.3 × 29.8 centimeters and a variation of the multiple motif of a view of the Bohemian town of Český Krumlov , known as Krumlov , seen from the castle hill. It is the birthplace of Schiele's mother, to which the painter repeatedly withdrew from Viennese city life. The picture shows a group of houses, enclosed on three sides by a deep blue ring, which symbolizes the Vltava , so that the village seems isolated and seems to float in an indefinable, abstract space. The painting shows the artist's development, using representations of nature not only as an expression of moods and feelings, but as a carrier of profound and profound content. The city is in the best sense of nature morte to still life , "mysterious and visionary emerging from the darkness."
Provenance
Tote Stadt III was bought directly from the artist by the art historian Arthur Roessler (1877–1955), resold by him to the lawyer Alfred Spitzer (1861–1923) and finally acquired between 1925 and 1928 by the Viennese cabaret artist Fritz Grünbaum (1880–1941) . When Grünbaums died in the Dachau concentration camp and his wife Lilly Grünbaum (1898–1942) was deported to the Maly Trostinez extermination camp , the picture was already in the possession of Mathilde Lukacs, Lilly Grünbaum's sister. During her flight from the National Socialists in 1938 she was able to take parts of Grünbaum's art collection to Belgium. On May 22, 1956, Mathilde Lukacs sold the Tote Stadt III to the art dealer Klipstein & Kornfeld in Bern , from where it was resold on September 24, 1956 to Otto Kallir, owner of the St. Etienne Gallery in New York. In 1958, Rudolf Leopold again acquired the painting from the St. Etienne Gallery.
At a Schiele retrospective in New York at the end of 1997, the painting was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art along with numerous other works by Schiele from the Leopold Collection . On January 1, 1998, living in the US relatives Fritz and Lilly Green tree erwirkten due to a publication request for the seizure of the picture by the New York Attorney General, as well as ensuring the Portrait of Wally , at the request of the heirs of Lea Bondi-Jaray. In May 1998 the court order regarding Toten Stadt III was overturned because the right to inherit could not be proven in this case, the picture was returned to the Leopold Collection in Vienna, where it has been on display since the Leopold Museum opened in September 2001. The legal dispute over the portrait of Wally lasted until July 2010.
literature
- Gunnar Schnabel, Monika Tatzkow: Nazi Looted Art. Handbook Art Restitution Worldwide . Proprietas-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-019368-2 , p. 392 (case 66)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Schiele Art Centrum: Schiele and Krumau , accessed on December 28, 2011
- ^ Erwin Mitsch: Egon Schiele 1890–1918 , Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-423-01064-9 , p. 35
- ↑ Sonja Niederacher: Dossier Fitz Grünbaum. Provenance research June 30, 2010 (PDF file; 541 kB), accessed December 28, 2011
- ↑ A question of origin, article Die Welt of October 31, 2001 , accessed on December 28, 2011