The Federal Arts Administration has restituted the oil painting “Neapel" by the painter Rudolf von Alt

Fol­low­ing the Nazi in­va­sion of Aus­tria, she dereg­is­tered with the po­lice there in Au­gust 1938 and lived in Hun­gary from then on. She sub­mit­ted an “ap­pli­ca­tion for an ex­port per­mit” for her art col­lec­tion to the Cen­tral Of­fice for the Pro­tec­tion of Mon­u­ments in Vi­en­na. How­ev­er, the oil paint­ing by Rudolf von Alt was “post­poned” from ex­port to Hun­gary by the au­thor­i­ties. The ar­bi­trary pro­tec­tion of works of art un­der the leg­is­la­tion for the pro­tec­tion of “na­tion­al­ly valu­able cul­tur­al prop­er­ty” in Aus­tria had been used since 1938 to wrest valu­able works of art from those per­se­cut­ed by the Nazi regime dur­ing forced em­i­gra­tion. The paint­ing lat­er be­came part of the col­lec­tion for the “Son­der­auf­trag Linz” – an un­re­al­ized project com­mis­sioned by Hitler dur­ing the Na­tion­al So­cial­ist tyran­ny. The Art’s Ad­min­is­tra­tion was, there­fore, con­vinced that there was suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence for an un­jus­ti­fied seizure of the paint­ing.

The art hold­ings of the Fed­er­al Re­pub­lic of Ger­many in­clude cul­tur­al as­sets that have been trans­ferred from for­mer Re­ich own­er­ship to fed­er­al own­er­ship (so-called resid­u­al hold­ings of the Cen­tral Col­lect­ing Point in Mu­nich). The Fed­er­al Arts Ad­min­is­tra­tion is re­search­ing the prove­nance of these ob­jects. If a loss of own­er­ship due to Nazi per­se­cu­tion is iden­ti­fi­able, these are re­turned to the le­gal suc­ces­sors of those per­se­cut­ed un­der the Nazi regime.
Fed­er­al Arts Ad­min­is­tra­tion’s  de­tailed prove­nance re­sults are pub­lished in the Prove­nance database “Prove­nien­z­daten­bankBund” at www.kun­stver­wal­tung.bund.de