| | Restituted
Objects 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.
Edvard Munch, Summer Night on the Beach, 1902
 Alma
Mahler was a talented composer who gave up her career when she married her
famous husband Gustav Mahler. She went on to marry Walter Gropius, founder of
the Bauhaus movement, and novelist Franz Werfel. She also had a passionate affair
with Oskar Kokoshchka.
She was always surrounded by art
and artists, and her second husband Walter Gropius gave her a painting by Edvard
Munch entitled Summer Night on the Beach in 1916 to commemorate the birth
of their daughter Manon. Unfortunately, Manon died of polio at the age of 18,
and this painting always reminded her of her daughter. Alma said that "no
painting touched her in the way that this has." Alma
later fell in love with Jewish writer Franz Werfel and divorced Gropius. She and
Werfel married in 1929. In 1937, Alma loaned the painting to the Austrian Gallery
for safekeeping and 1938, during Anschluss, Alma and her husband fled the country.
However, Alma’s step-family, including her step-father
Carl Moll, a member of the Viennese Secessionist movement and a Nazi sympathiser,
and her half-sister Marie Eberstaller, removed took the painting from the Gallery
and then sold it back to the museum without Alma’s knowledge. Her step-family
later entered into a suicide pact. Alma argued that this
was never theirs to sell and filed a restitution claim with the Austrian government
in 1953, and although the claim was upheld, it was overturned on a technicality.
Alma died in 1964 and her granddaughter Marina Mahler took up her battle. In 1998
Austria passed a new restitution law, and Marina re-filed the claim. The Austrian
government did not accept her claim citing that the matter had been dealt with
in 1953. In the ensuing years, new laws were enacted that
were more sympathetic to claimants. Marina the claim again in early 2006, and
in November of that year, the Austrian government agreed to restitute Summer
Night on the Beach to her. The painting was officially returned to Marina
in May 2007. | |
Gustav
Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, Street Scene, Berlin Henri
Matisse, Odalisque Edvard
Munch, Summer Night on the Beach Nicholas
de Nuefchatel, Portrait of Jan van Eversdyck Egon
Schiele, Autumn Sun (Herbstonne)
|
