2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The handover took place in San Francisco. The father of the previous owner, who has since died and was a US citizen, received the collection a few years ago from an acquaintance who used to live in Berlin, where he had found it in the rubble of a house and taken it. He had already approached the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 2002 with the intention of returning it unconditionally. His son has now handed over the items. The objects, including a pair of Schinkel's spectacles, toys, household items, New Year's cards and similar items, still bear the inventory numbers of the Schinkel Museum, a former thematic collection of the National Gallery. Documents from the Central Archive of the National Museums in Berlin show that the then director of the Nationalgalerie, Paul Ortwin Rave, bought the objects from the heiress Frieda Schinkel in 1938. The Schinkel Collection, created shortly after the artist's death at the instigation of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to honour his artistic legacy, was later assigned to the Nationalgalerie. Today, the Schinkel Museum's holdings - insofar as they were not lost in the war - are distributed among various collections of the National Museums in Berlin. The Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings), with its holdings of drawings and prints by Schinkel that are unique in the world in terms of quality and scope, should be mentioned first and foremost, but also the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery), which has a large number of his paintings on permanent display.

It is intended to exhibit the recovered collection in the Friedrichswerder Church, which was built according to Schinkel's plans and in the immediate vicinity of which the Bauakademie, the architect's place of work and residence, was erected. Today it serves the National Gallery as an exhibition venue for the 19th century sculptures.