2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The pieces, which were confiscated due to persecution, were exhibited in the Kunstgewerbemuseum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin until recently. They are animal figures, two hoopoes from 1736 and 1741 (each 31 cm high) and a jay with squirrel and stag beetle (55 cm high, 1739). All three pieces are painted in naturalistic colours; their modeller was Johann Joachim Kändler, who was influential not only for the Meissen manufactory's figurative sculpture, but for European porcelain art as a whole. These are the only Kändler animal figurines to have survived the war in the Kunstgewerbemuseum. They were returned to the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues in Berlin in response to a recent request from the legal successor and against repayment of the compensation paid to the Arnhold family for the porcelains in the reparation proceedings in the late 1950s.

The pieces came from the estate of Adolf Arnhold, one of the owners of the banking houses Gebr. Arnhold Dresden and Berlin and Bleichroeder Berlin. They were seized from him along with several other works of art in 1940 due to persecution. Their return was a condition for the Jewish Arnhold family, who left Germany and moved to New York and Brazil, to be allowed to export other works of art. Seventeen pieces from the Arnhold collection were inventoried in 1941 in the Schlossmuseum Berlin (now the Kunstgewerbemuseum). During the war, the works were stored in the basement of the Schlossmuseum. In 1949, four silver chandeliers from this collection, which had survived the war in Berlin, were returned to the Arnhold family's claimants on the basis of a restitution procedure via the Collecting Point in Wiesbaden. The three restituted porcelains were considered a war loss in the West. However, they had in fact been preserved - albeit severely damaged - in the Museum of Decorative Arts of the National Museums in Berlin (East). They were restored in Dresden in 1968/1970 and then inventoried as a separate collection in Köpenick Palace in Berlin. The loss of these works due to persecution was only discovered by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation following the family's enquiry in February 2007. All other artefacts from the former Arnhold Collection, which were seized in 1940 and remained in Berlin, are still recorded as "war-related losses" and are not in the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation's institutions.