Antiquities return
Press release from 07/15/2019
Dresden and Berlin antiquities collections discover pieces from each other's collections - foreign property exchanged
In recent years, the clarification of war losses and objects held in the collections as foreign property has been the subject of research projects at the antiquities collections in Berlin and Dresden. As a result, 14 objects were identified in Berlin that turned out to be the property of the Dresden Collection of Classical Antiquities of the Dresden State Art Collections. Conversely, 12 objects were found in the Dresden collection that were listed as losses in the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Today, more than 70 years after the end of the war, these stray artefacts have been returned to their original collections.
The antique objects were transported to the Soviet Union towards the end of the Second World War. In the course of the return of around 1.5 million objects to the GDR in 1958, they were assigned to the wrong collections - initially as their old property - and later stored as their foreign property. This term refers to cultural assets that are not owned by the institution in which they are kept and whose rightful owners are not known or cannot be located.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK: "The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation endeavours to clarify who owns the foreign property in its collections. This is only possible with provenance research. This case once again shows how important this type of research is. I am delighted that we have a tangible result here and that the objects have been returned to where they belong."
Marion Ackermann, Director General of the Dresden State Art Collections: "The first task of provenance research is to identify works in the museums that were taken or looted from their former owners. This primarily concerns Jewish property, but also the post-war period in the GDR or - a very topical subject recently - human remains, for example. However, provenance research is also still busy clarifying the consequences of art transfers during the Second World War and immediately afterwards. This case is a good example of this - and also of how fruitful cooperation between museums can be."
The Berlin works returning from Dresden include several small bronze statuettes as well as utensils made of bone (including three spoons), a steatite seal and an earthenware jug. The pieces returned from the Berlin collection to the Dresden collection include two bronze statuettes, several bronze vessels and utensils as well as a marble relief fragment depicting a bearded man's head. As part of the collection of the entrepreneur Ernst von Sieglin, which was created in Egypt around 1900, the latter is probably the most important piece in this exchange.