German Lost Art Foundation approves approx. €2.87 million for 25 provenance research projects on Nazi-confiscated property in first funding round of 2020

He fled Berlin in 1933 as a rich man and died in 1950 in mod­est cir­cum­stances: Jew­ish banker Hugo Si­mon sur­vived the Holo­caust in Brazil, but was not able to save his sub­stan­tial art col­lec­tion. He did man­age to get some of the works out of Ger­many, but had to sell most of them, and oth­ers were sub­se­quent­ly seized by the Nazis. Hugo Si­mon’s de­scen­dants are now work­ing to­geth­er with the Art His­to­ry de­part­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ham­burg to re­con­struct ex­act­ly what hap­pened to his art col­lec­tion. This is one of a to­tal of 25 re­search projects be­ing fund­ed in 2020 by the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion in Magde­burg.

The Ex­ec­u­tive Board of the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion has act­ed on the rec­om­men­da­tions of its Nazi-Con­fis­cat­ed Art Fund­ing Com­mit­tee and ap­proved ap­prox. €2.87 mil­lion for prove­nance re­search ac­tiv­i­ties at mu­se­ums, li­braries and aca­dem­ic in­sti­tu­tions, and al­so for four pri­vate in­di­vid­u­als in the first ap­pli­ca­tion round of 2020 (dead­line: Jan­uary 1).

Sys­tem­at­ic re­search in­to col­lec­tions con­tin­ues to have high pri­or­i­ty: a to­tal of 17 projects in­volve mu­se­ums and li­braries ex­am­in­ing their col­lec­tions for Nazi-con­fis­cat­ed prop­er­ty. Art ob­jects and books are not the on­ly items un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion. For in­stance, the Musikin­stru­menten­mu­se­um at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leipzig is re­search­ing the ori­gin of his­tor­i­cal mu­sic in­stru­ments in the pri­vate Kaiser-Re­ka col­lec­tion. The mu­si­cians Paul Kaiser-Re­ka and his son Berol had amassed many un­usu­al in­stru­ments from all over the world and per­formed in vaudeville shows.

It is par­tic­u­lar­ly en­cour­ag­ing that four pri­vate­ly run in­sti­tu­tions have al­so suc­cess­ful­ly ap­plied for fund­ing. In ad­di­tion to the hold­ings at the Jew­ish Mu­se­um of West­phalia in Dorsten, the Kun­sthalle Em­den, and the li­brary in the so­cial democ­ra­cy archive at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, in­ves­ti­ga­tions will be car­ried out in­to the prove­nance of the hold­ings of Mu­se­um Syn­a­goge Gröbzig for the first time. In 1934, the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty was com­pelled to hand over the syn­a­gogue com­plex to the town of Gröbzig, who set up a mu­se­um of lo­cal his­to­ry on the premis­es.

The Fed­er­al and state gov­ern­ments have been sup­port­ing prove­nance re­search projects fo­cus­ing on Nazi-con­fis­cat­ed prop­er­ty since 2008, and have pro­vid­ed a to­tal of €34.7 mil­lion to date. This fund­ing has been used to car­ry out 358 projects so far. Na­tion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion in Magde­burg is the cen­tral point of con­tact for all mat­ters per­tain­ing to un­law­ful­ly seized cul­tur­al prop­er­ty. Ap­pli­ca­tions for longer-term projects may be sub­mit­ted by Jan­uary 1 and June 1 each year. The Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion not on­ly funds re­search projects, but al­so doc­u­ments lost cul­tur­al prop­er­ty as search re­quests and found-ob­ject re­ports in its pub­licly ac­ces­si­ble Lost Art Database.