Bavaria restitutes Lesser Ury painting to the heirs of a Jewish banker

The Bavarian State Paintings Collections announced it will restitute Lesser Ury’s 1883 painting "Interior with Children (the Siblings)" to the heirs of Curt Goldschmidt, a Jewish banker and art collector in Berlin. The institution said the work was in Goldschmidt’s possession by at least 1921; after the Nazis came to power he was forced to give up his company and apartment, and his household contents were auctioned in 1935. The painting appeared in that 1935 auction and resurfaced at Lempertz in Cologne in 1940 marked with a star indicating it came “from a non-Aryan collection”; Goldschmidt fled to Paris in 1937 and died there in 1947. Bavaria’s culture minister Markus Blume said the restitution honors Jewish collectors and victims of Nazi persecution, and the museum said this is the tenth painting it has planned to restitute to heirs of Jewish collectors in the past year.

Read the full article at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events