0294 A Goddess of the Night, a Roman Gem, and the Bachstitz Gallery

Two Roman objects in the J. Paul Getty Museum, a bronze statuette of the moon goddess Luna and a cornelian gem, were among the handful of classical antiquities acquired for Adolf Hitler’s unrealized "Führermuseum" in Linz. This study presents new provenance research that tracks their itinerary from European private collections to the gallery of Kurt Walter Bachstitz, a prominent Jewish art dealer active in The Hague between the 1920s and the 1940s. His precarious personal and business relationships with German art agents expose how ordinary commerce was entangled with coerced sales in the Nazi... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Claire L. Lyons
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Reihe/Periodikum: RIHA Journal (2023)
Verlag/Hrsg.: International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA)
Schlagwörter: roman sculpture / roman gem / luna / nyx / kurt walter bachstitz / walter andreas hofer / hans posse / nazi art collecting / dutch restitution committee / Fine Arts / N
Sprache: Deutsch
Englisch
Spanish
Französisch
Italian
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27021382
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2022.2.92750

Two Roman objects in the J. Paul Getty Museum, a bronze statuette of the moon goddess Luna and a cornelian gem, were among the handful of classical antiquities acquired for Adolf Hitler’s unrealized "Führermuseum" in Linz. This study presents new provenance research that tracks their itinerary from European private collections to the gallery of Kurt Walter Bachstitz, a prominent Jewish art dealer active in The Hague between the 1920s and the 1940s. His precarious personal and business relationships with German art agents expose how ordinary commerce was entangled with coerced sales in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. In 2015, the ownership of works that changed hands on wartime art markets informed the Dutch Restitution Committee’s recommendation to return the gem to Bachstitz’s heirs but to reject their claim on the statuette. Having passed through several collections following their restitution after World War II, the two objects were reunited at the Getty in 2017.