Cases Pending

Each object tells a story. Some are still missing, some are restituted or resolved, and some have cases still pending. The circumstances of looting and the efforts for recovery are just as fascinating as the famous works of art themselves.

Emil Nolde , Blumengarten (Utenwarf), 1917

Emil Nolde’s Blumengarten (Utenwarf), painted in 1917, depicts a richly coloured garden in full-bloom. The garden represented in these thick layers of paint was part of the artist’s farm near in Utenwarf, a town near the German-Danish border, where Nolde retreated to during the First World War. The exuberant brushwork and intensity of colour in the piece are hallmarks of Nolde’s work from this time onward, and would make him a major proponent of German Expressionism in the years that followed.

Nolde grew up near Utenwarf and returned to live there from 1916-1918. The area had a profound importance for him; he even changed his name from Emil Hassen to Nolde, after the nearby village of his birth and training. Nolde was a controversial figure; he was an outspoken member of the North Schleswig branch of the Nazi party. However, his art (along with other Expressionists) was deemed ‘degenerate’ by Hitler’s regime from 1934 when Hitler gave a speech on the subject at Nuremberg. He was banned from painting in 1941, despite pleading with leading officials like Goebbels who had once admired his work. A number of his paintings were destroyed thus increasing the importance of surviving works.

The painting in question belonged to a businessman from Frankfurt, Otto Nathan Deutsch, who shipped his art collection and personal belongings to Amsterdam when he fled Germany in 1939. His shipment never arrived and the shipping company told him that his belongings had been destroyed in a bombing raid. Deutsch’s heirs received a small amount in compensation in 1962 from the German government after filing a claim for the lost possessions.

The painting is currently housed in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm having been purchased in 1967 from the Ketterer auction house in Lugano, Switzerland. It is one of 35 works by Nolde currently in the museum’s collection. The painting was sold with no provenance attached to it.

In 2003 Otto Deutsch’s heirs located the painting in Sweden and filed a claim for its return. The Museum stated that it was a government decision as to whether to give the painting back and that nothing could be removed from the collection without being approved by the Ministry of Culture. The Swedish government decided in July 2007 that the museum had to resolve the claim with the family. The current value of the piece is unknown.

Lawyers on both sides are currently trying to reach a settlement. But the musuem has said that the family will get the painting back, in line with the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets. The emergence of this claim has brought with it the possiblity that other works owned by Deutsch, and supposedly destroyed, are intact and in other collections.