Max Slevogt, Rotes Haus an der Landauer Straße (Red House in Landauer Strasse), 1910
In 1953, the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen acquired the painting by Max Slevogt, Rotes Haus an der Landauer Straße, 1910, from the Aenne Abels Gallery. Research into the provenance of works from the Abels Galleries revealed a gap in the painting’s provenance from 1928 to 1948. At the same time, in February 2019, an inquiry was received from the heirs of the original owner’s family.
The work was first purchased directly from the artist by the Jewish entrepreneurial family Czapski. In 1928 it was documented in the catalogue on the occasion of Slevogt’s sixtieth birthday in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (Akademie der Künste, Max Slevogt: Paintings, watercolours, drawings, Berlin 1928). Eugenie Czapski was named as the owner. In 1948 the painting resurfaced in the art trade.
The aim of the research project was to fill the provenance gap between 1928 and 1948. What above all needed to be clarified was whether the painting was part of the batch of works the Czapski family was forced to sell in 1935.
There was insufficient documentary material to fully account for the missing years. But the tight chain of circumstantial evidence allows us to conclude that the painting had already been sold by the Czapski family during the Great Depression.
The activities of the Hermann and Aenne Abels Galleries in the context of museum acquisitions in the Rhine-Ruhr region, 1933–1968. A collaborative research project of the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen and the Museum Folkwang in Essen.
The Cologne galleries run by the siblings Hermann Abels (1892–1956, Kunstsalon Hermann Abels, formerly Gemäldegalerie Abels) and Aenne Abels (1900–1975, Aenne Abels Gallery) dominated the art market in the Rhineland until the late 1960s. They largely sold nineteenth-century, Impressionist and Classical Modernist art to a number of museums particularly in the Rhineland, the Ruhr region and Westphalia. The Abels family was able to carry on its transactions during the Third Reich and continued to do so without interruption after 1945. Brother and sister were both actively involved in the “Special Commission Linz”.
In the period between 1933 and 1968, the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen and Museum Folkwang in Essen acquired numerous works from the Abels family of art dealers. For this reason, in 2017 the two museums teamed up to launch a research project with the aim of thoroughly investigating the works in their collections that had been purchased from the Abels in view of their possible confiscation resulting from Nazi persecution. This scrutiny began with an inquiry into a group of 37 works in both collections, which in the course of the project grew to encompass 43 objects. The research focused both on object-related as well as context-related aspects of the economic structures and trading networks of the Abels’s galleries. In the case of four works in the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen’s collection, it was ruled out that they had been taken from their rightful owners as a result of persecution under Nazi jurisdiction. To ascertain the provenance of all the other pieces, the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen will continue to devote the required effort within the framework of its on-going provenance research.