Return of a painting by Guiseppe Crespi
Press release from 07/17/2007
The Foundation recently returned the oil painting by the Bolognese painter Guiseppe Maria Crespi "The Train of Silen" from the former collection of Dr Fritz Haussmann to Fritz Haussmann's heiress. She had asserted her claim for restitution to the Foundation. The work was in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie and was exhibited there.
The Berlin art collector Fritz Haussmann was persecuted as a Jew during the National Socialist era, which also led to the loss of the painting. The work, which ended up in the Gemäldegalerie, was confiscated by the Red Army in 1945, taken to the Soviet Union and then returned to East Berlin in 1958. As a result, it was not included in the restitution and compensation proceedings of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s. It was only with the reunification of the Berlin collections in 1991 that, in addition to cultural artefacts, a wide range of archive material came into the care of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. New contexts can now be explored and provenances made visible. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation restitutes collection items on a case-by-case basis, in particular if a persecution-related loss without compensation can be established.
Guiseppe Maria Crespi (1665 - 1747) is an outstanding representative of the Italian Baroque. The Berlin lawyer and art collector acquired important works in this field.