On the second floor of the Wiesbaden Museum in Hessen hangs a piece of art from Hans von Marées but it can't be seen.
The painting called "The Refreshment" has been hung to face the wall
as part of a public donation campaign to buy the painting for a fair
price from its last legal owner.
In 1934, Max Silberberg, a
Jewish industrialist in Breslau, was forced to sell the painting to the
local Nazi regime, after which it landed in Wiesbaden. Silberberg and
his wife were both murdered in Auschwitz.
"The painting has
been in storage and has not been seen since the 1980s," a spokesperson
for the Wiesbaden Museum told The Local on Monday, adding that it will
remain unseen when or if the museum can raise the money to buy it.
"We agreed on a price, but it doesn't yet belong to us, and so we
won't show it until it legally does," the spokesperson added.
"The Refreshment" is in the middle of the museum's permanent
collection and the only painting in the "Wiesbaden creates the Turn"
campaign in which €93,000 has to be raised. That amount covers the cost
of the campaign and a third of the buying price. The rest will be paid
out by the "Friends of Museum Weisbaden" organisation and the culture
ministries from the state.
"We want to right not only the
image, but also a wrong," said Thilo von Debschnitz of the creative
agency Q who came up with the concept of the exhibition. The idea behind
the campaign was not just to acquire the painting for the Wiesbaden
Museum, but also to highlight the work being done by art institutions to
correct some of the wrongs done by the Nazi regime.
Wiesbaden
Museum was once headed by Herman Voss, who was given the duty by Adolf
Hitler to collect artworks for the planned Führermuseum in Linz.
Two other paintings have been returned to or bought from rightful heirs out of the gallery's archives
thelocal.de
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How do We know there is a Painting?
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