With an aim to tell human stories about some Jewish art restitution cases, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Bavarian State Painting Collections have joined hands for a new project.
According to director general of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Bernhard Maaz told DW, “We have been doing provenance research for 20 years helping with restitutions or initiating them”. He added, however, the emotional impact of their efforts has not been made yet.
According to a DW report, 1,500 art works were found at properties belonging to the son of a Nazi art dealer in the 2012 Gurlitt case. Notably, very little information is out there on people who were behind these sketches, paintings and drawings.
In a bid to familiarise people with the intriguing tales related to these art works and their Jewish owners, thirty stories will be told through films in a 3-year project. In the project, the owners of the artwork will be traced back through collaborators and every story will end with the restitution of the artwork.
Very little is known about the Jewish art collectors but the paintings associated with them are still quite famous. “The Eye of the Law (Justitia)” by Carl Spitzweg, “Berlin Street Scene” by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt are among some of the stolen artworks that tell stories of murder, persecution and expropriation.
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