The Bavarian State Painting Collections may hold nearly 200 works that were taken from a Jewish art dealer by Germany’s Nazi regime – with leaked documents suggesting that the institution knew this and hid the fact from heirs and the public.
An internal document from 2020, seen by Süddeutsche Zeitung, details how some works in its holdings had been property of figures of Alfred Flechtheim, a gallerist whose inventory was looted by the Nazis in 1933 and his business confiscated and ‘aryanised’. A further 800 works have provenance that needs investigating.
Among the works Flechtheim’s heirs are now demanding back is Max Beckmann’s painting Chinese Fireworks (1927).
Claudia Roth, the German culture minister, condemned the collection for not coming forward with the information, telling the press agency dpa, as per Monopol, ‘It is about a lack of transparency, possibly about deliberate concealment and prevention of fair and just solutions… It would be a scandal if findings about Nazi-looted art were and are being deliberately withheld.’
