The organisation that runs museums in the city of Weimar is trying to track down a painting by Cranach which once decorated Hitler’s breakfast room and was then looted by a US soldier at the end of the Second World War.
A photograph of Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief (1530) is currently on display alongside a label calling for its return in an exhibition on Cranach at the Schiller Museum in Weimar (until 14 June). The label reveals that the painting’s most recent known location was in the collection of a Zurich banker whose family may still own it.
On loan to Hitler
Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief was acquired by the grand dukes of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach before the mid-19th century. In 1918, it passed into Weimar’s state art collection (now part of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar or Classics Foundation Weimar). In 1938, when the city’s most important hotel, the Elephant, was renovated, Hitler was given his own permanent personal suite. For his breakfast room, the state art collection lent him Venus and Cupid the Honey Thief.
In 1943 the Cranach, along with other Weimar state paintings, was taken for safekeeping to Schloss Schwarzburg, 40km south of the city. Schwarzburg was liberated by US troops in May 1945 and the Cranach then disappeared. Karin Kolb, the curator of the exhibition on Cranach, assumes it must have been taken by a soldier to the US.
After the war
The first identified post-war owner was Louis Mayer Rabinowitz, a Lithuanian-born Jewish entrepreneur and collector living in New York. He may have acquired the painting in good faith, since at that time few questions were asked about provenance. On his death in 1957 it probably passed to his wife, Hannah.
It next surfaced in 1970 at Sotheby’s in London as the “property of a lady”, when it sold for £6,800. As was usual at the time, the painting was not illustrated in the sale catalogue and no provenance was given. However, considering that Cranach was among the Nazis’ favourite artists, it is surprising that Sotheby’s failed to consult the publication Verlorene Werke der Malerei (Lost Works of Painting)—the standard book listing art losses from German museums which had been published, in German, five years earlier. It is illustrated there among the 225 most important war-time losses. The Cranach was apparently bought at Sotheby’s by the New York dealer Frederick Mont. He too might have asked questions about the provenance, since he was an Old Master specialist who had fled Austria when the Nazis came to power.
According to the Cranach specialist Dieter Koepplin, the Weimar painting was then acquired by an unidentified Zurich banker. Kolb says the picture does not appear to have gone to auction since then, which “might indicate it has not left the family of the banker”. The curator admits that it would be difficult to make a legal claim because of the statute of limitations, but says that “no leading auction house would market the Cranach without contacting us first”.