Bronze statuette of a satyr from the Berlin Collection of Classical Antiquities is handed over to the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel
Press release from 02/28/2020
The statuette of a satyr had long been kept in the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin as a foreign possession. In 2019, it was finally clarified that it came from Kassel.
We cordially invite you to the handover (with photo opportunity)
on 3 March 2020, at 1 p.m.
at the Hessian State Representation
In den Ministergärten 5, 10117 Berlin
with Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Martin Eberle, Director of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Martin Maischberger, Deputy Director of the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Rüdiger Splitter, Director of the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the MHK, Laura Puritani, Provenance Researcher at the Central Archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Bernadette Droste, Head of Office of the Representation of the State of Hesse.
With a request for accreditation at: pressestelle@hv.spk-berlin.de
On 19 January 1945, the approximately 20 cm high Hellenistic bronze statuette of a satyr was transferred from the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Kassel (today: Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel) to the Berlin Antikensammlung for safekeeping, presumably for restoration. It was given the number DV I 76 and in the same year, together with numerous other objects from the Collection of Classical Antiquities, was moved to Schönebeck for protection. At the end of the 1950s, it was returned to Berlin via Braunschweig and Celle, where it was handed over to the Antikenmuseum West Berlin.
As part of the reappraisal of the foreign holdings of the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, only this route of the statuette from Berlin could initially be definitively proven on the basis of the archival records. Despite strong evidence and the support of colleagues in Kassel, there was no proof that the object with the number DV I 76 held in Berlin was actually from Kassel. Among other things, there were doubts due to the ambiguous labelling in the catalogue. The object was initially listed in the catalogue of the Antikensammlung's foreign holdings published in 2017 and is also depicted on its title page.
Around a year after the catalogue was published, Günther Kuss, provenance researcher at the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, was able to clarify on the basis of an invoice he found, a list of acquisitions and the inventory of acquisitions that the satyr was in fact a statuette acquired for the Hessisches Landesmuseum Kassel in 1941 from the Brimo de Laroussilhe Gallery in Paris. The provenance of the work will now be clarified by the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the SPK, says: "The good and collegial co-operation between the provenance researchers in Berlin and Kassel has led to the clarification of this case. This example shows once again that reliable results are often only available after intensive research."
The Director of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Prof. Dr Martin Eberle, explains: "The statuette will be part of a cabinet exhibition in Kassel from the autumn, which will focus on works of art whose provenance has not yet been clarified. We will continue our research into the provenance of the satyr."
Foreign ownership in the antiquities collection
"Third-party property" refers to cultural artefacts that are not owned by the institution in which they are kept and whose rightful owners are not known or cannot be traced. These may be, for example, items that were handed over to museums for safekeeping during wartime and never collected, objects from the large-scale restitution from the Soviet Union to the GDR in 1958/59 that were delivered to the "wrong" museum, or items on loan where contact with the actual owner has been lost and no written documentation has been preserved. The aim of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is to clarify who owns the foreign property in its collections. The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin are therefore successively compiling and publishing catalogues of third-party ownership for their collections. In several cases, it has already been possible to correctly reassign an object on the basis of the catalogues.
In 2017, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin's Collection of Classical Antiquities published its documentation of third-party ownership. Provenance researcher Laura Puritani had initially identified several groups of objects that could contain foreign ownership. One of these was the objects that were given to the Collection of Classical Antiquities for safekeeping before or during the Second World War and recorded in the "Durchgangsverzeichnis". This was introduced in 1939 by the then director Carl Weickert for "artefacts of any kind that are not museum property". The bronze statuette of the Kassel satyr was also listed in this catalogue.