Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation restitutes work from the Haussmann Collection / Repurchase secures its place in the Kupferstichkabinett
Press release from 01/06/2016
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation recently returned a work from the Kupferstichkabinett to the heiress of art collector Dr Fritz Haussmann. However, the allegorical drawing of the 18th century architect Jean Baptiste Broebes will remain in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, which acquired it from the heiress.
The Berlin art collector Dr Fritz Haussmann (1885 - 1956) was a lawyer at the Court of Appeal and a successful businessman. In the summer of 1938, he emigrated to Switzerland due to the increasing reprisals against Jews. He left his small but impressive art collection of Italian paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries behind in his Berlin flat, where his mother continued to live. She also decided to emigrate in 1938 and applied to the relevant foreign exchange office for authorisation to export the furnishings and works of art. As she did not have the necessary financial means to pay the duties, she had to hand over the most valuable works from the art collection to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
As early as 2007, the SPK restituted one of these works from Fritz Haussmann's collection that had been lost due to persecution. It was "Zug des Silen" by the Baroque painter Guiseppe Crespi, which had been in the Gemäldegalerie. In the course of their research, the museums had already discovered that two further works from the Haussmann Collection had been transferred to the collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in 1939 by the customs authorities "on the occasion of emigration". At that time, however, the works could not be traced in the collection. Thanks to the progress made since then in analysing the collection's holdings, one of the two works has now been identified.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, says: "This example shows us once again how important it is to process our collections, a process that has still not been completed 15 years after reunification. It is gratifying that we have been able to identify another work from Fritz Haussmann's collection and thus contribute to redressing the injustice that was done. I would like to thank the heiress of Dr Fritz Haussmann for enabling us to acquire the work for the Kupferstichkabinett."
Lawyer Imke Gielen from the Berlin law firm von Trott zu Solz Lammek said on behalf of the heirs: "We welcome the ongoing provenance research by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and hope that the third work from the Haussmann art collection can also be found in the course of this research."
The allegorical depiction "Athena Recommends the Arts to the King" (c. 1700/20; pen and brown and grey, grey wash, 20.7 x 40.2 cm) is the highest quality of the few known drawings by the French-born architect Jean Baptiste Broebes. It depicts a subject related to the history of art and architecture in Berlin: The goddess Athena presents the Prussian king with personifications of various arts, a popular allegory in times of feudal commissions and aristocratic patronage, modified to suit the respective purposes. The room with its fictitious decorations is reminiscent of the throne room in the Prussian king's city palace.
There are six other works by Jean Baptiste Broebes (around 1660 in Paris - after 1720 in Barby) in the Kupferstichkabinett. The French engraver and architect of fortifications and civil architecture had to leave his homeland as a Huguenot in 1685. From 1692, he entered the service of Brandenburg. After his appointment to Berlin in 1699, he taught for two decades at the Academy of Arts as a professor of military and civil architecture. Broebes' main work is considered to be the commissioned collection of views of all the city palaces, pleasure palaces and royal palaces that existed in Berlin, Potsdam and the surrounding area at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. These 52-sheet "Vues des Palais et Maisons de Plaisance de S. M. le Roy de Prusse" were published posthumously in 1733 by the art dealer Johann Georg Merz in Augsburg.
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