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Two works from the Kupferstichkabinett restituted
Press release from 10/08/2014
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation has today restituted two drawings from the holdings of the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The provenance of the sheets had been examined as part of a systematic provenance research project. They turned out to have formerly belonged to the Dr Schmidl Collection, Vienna. Further research revealed that the artworks had been confiscated as a result of persecution. The SPK then contacted the heirs.
The work in question is
- a pencil drawing by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, "Friedrich Olivier at the age of 25", 1816
- a drawing (pencil, ink, heightened with white) by Friedrich or Ferdinand Olivier, "Two withered leaves (1817. Den 10ten Januar)", 1817
The two works were acquired in April 1939 and May 1941 respectively at auctions organised by the C.G. Boerner auction house in Leipzig and included in the inventory of drawings in the Nationalgalerie's collection of drawings (from 1990 as part of the reorganisation following German reunification in the Kupferstichkabinett).
The Dessau-born brothers Ferdinand and Friedrich Olivier were among the most important artists of German Romanticism and belonged to the Nazarene group. Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld joined them in Vienna in 1814. The three were close friends for decades and engaged in lively artistic dialogue.
The works that have now been restituted come from the collection of Friedrich von Olivier's great-granddaughter, which also included numerous other works by the artists. Dr Marianne Schmidl was born in Berchtesgarden in 1890 and grew up in Vienna. After becoming the first woman to gain a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Vienna, she initially worked in ethnological museums, including the Berlin Museum of Ethnology. From 1921, she worked as a librarian at the Austrian National Library until she took early retirement on 1 October 1938. She was persecuted due to her father's Jewish ancestry. After the persecution and the special levies for Jews introduced by the National Socialists had largely deprived her of her financial livelihood, she was forced to sell the works she had inherited from her family. In April 1942, she was deported to the Polish ghetto Izbica, Krasnystaw, Lublin. The circumstances and exact date of her death are not known. However, the Isbiza camp was considered a transit ghetto to the Bełzek and Sobibór extermination camps; none of the approximately 4,000 Austrian Jews deported to Isbiza survived.
