The Bavarian State Paintings Collections has said it will restitute a painting by Lesser Ury to the heirs of Curt Goldschmidt, a Jewish banker and art collector who fled Nazi Germany after losing his home and his business in Berlin.
The 1883 painting, Interior with Children (the Siblings), is an early work by Ury, a Jewish artist who depicted the streets and cafés of the German capital while also producing landscapes and portraits. It is known to have been in Goldschmidt’s possession by 1921 at the latest, according to a statement from the Bavarian State Paintings Collections.
A leading figure in Berlin business circles, Goldschmidt also maintained extensive contacts in the city’s Weimar-era art scene—his portrait, for example, was painted by the artist Max Liebermann. From the early 1930s, Goldschmidt came under increasing economic and political pressure. After the Nazis came to power, he was forced to give up his company and his apartment, the contents of which were auctioned in 1935. He fled to Paris in 1937 and lived in hiding during the German occupation. He died there in 1947.
The Ury painting was among his possessions offered at the 1935 auction, though it is not clear whether it sold. It surfaced at auction again at Lempertz in Cologne in 1940, marked with a star to signify it coming “from a non-Aryan collection”.
Goldschmidt’s heirs are his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who live mainly in France, the UK and the US.
“Curt Goldschmidt’s fate is shared with many Jewish collectors and patrons,” Markus Blume, the Bavarian culture minister, said in the statement. “With this restitution, we honour Jewish collectors and remember victims of Nazi persecution.”
Last year, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the Bavarian State Paintings Collections had hidden research showing works in its possession were looted by the Nazis. While Blume rejected these accusations, he conceded at the time that “more transparency, accountability and consistency” were needed.
In the wake of the scandal, Bernhard Maaz, the director of the Bavarian State Paintings Collections, resigned to make way for “a new beginning,” as Blume put it. Interior with Children (the Siblings) is the tenth painting the institution has said it plans to restitute to the heirs of Jewish collectors in the past year.
