"Uncertainties have arisen due to irritating press releases," reads the statement from the auction house Lempertz, which informs that Max Pechstein's painting "Self-Portrait, Lying" will be withdrawn for the time being a few days before its announced auction in Cologne. The artwork, valued at 1.5 to two million euros, was one of the highlights of the offer of modern and contemporary art that is to go under the hammer on June 6: the self-confident testimony of a young expressionist of museum quality, captured by Pechstein in oil on canvas in 1909. The catalogue states that the provenance is a "Rhenish private collection in the third generation".
Ursula Scheer
Editor in the feuilleton.
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But the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" reported on the "problematic provenance" of the painting, which had been sold under the pressure of Nazi persecution by its Jewish previous owner. The doctor Walter Blank, who was threatened as a Jew, is said to have sold it in 1936 for 10,000 Reichsmarks to a collector from Cologne; In 1937, Blank died exhausted while fleeing in Spain. According to the report, his sons, survivors of concentration camps, were compensated in lump sum after the end of the war for the loss of their inheritance and lost education.
In contrast to museums and public collections, private collectors in Germany are not subject to the voluntary commitment of the Washington Principles, according to which cultural assets confiscated as a result of persecution or sold under pressure must be identified and restituted, which repeatedly leads to controversy. Nevertheless, there were always returns from private hands.
The time that has elapsed since the sale in the thirties, in which no claims were filed, the high purchase price at that time (for which, however, no receipt is to be available) and the compensation due to the heirs speak against classifying the artwork in question "Self-Portrait, Lying" as a restitution case. Nevertheless, Lempertz mediated between the consignors and Blank's descendants and, according to his own statements, was able to reach an "amicable agreement", which, however, "could no longer be adequately communicated in view of the imminent auction". The painting is now to be offered in the autumn auction of 2023 – and teaches how semi-transparency and poor communication in matters of sensitive origin can fall on the feet of an auction house.