Klassik Stiftung Weimar restitutes three art objects to the heiress of collector Heinrich Schwarz

The ob­jects were dis­cov­ered as a re­sult of sys­tem­at­ic prove­nance re­search car­ried out in the col­lec­tion hold­ings of the present-day cul­tur­al foun­da­tion Klas­sik Stiftung Weimar. They pre­vi­ous­ly be­longed to a col­lec­tion owned by Hein­rich Schwarz, who suf­fered per­se­cu­tion at the hands of the Nazi regime be­cause of his Jew­ish ori­gins.
The ob­jects are a draw­ing by Hein­rich Rein­hold (1788-1825), ac­quired in 1941 by what was for­mer­ly the Staatliche Kun­st­samm­lun­gen zu Weimar, and two prints dat­ing back to the first half of the 19th cen­tu­ry which were pur­chased by the Goethe Na­tion­al Mu­se­um in 1942.

Dr. Hein­rich Schwarz (1894-1974) was cu­ra­tor of the Aus­tri­an Gallery Belvedere in Vi­en­na. When Aus­tria was an­nexed by the Third Re­ich in 1938 (the so-called An­schluss), he lost his em­ploy­ment and em­i­grat­ed abroad, there­by los­ing his pri­vate col­lec­tion. He first moved to Swe­den in 1939 and then to the USA in 1940.

De­ter­min­ing the le­gal suc­ces­sors was a lengthy and com­pli­cat­ed pro­cess, since Hein­rich Schwarz and his wife Elis­a­beth had no chil­dren to­geth­er. Elis­a­beth Schwarz was her hus­band’s sole heir and lived in New York un­til 2003.

It was pos­si­ble to lo­cate a niece of Schwarz with the help of the Holo­caust Claims Pro­cess­ing Of­fice (HCPO) in New York, a gov­ern­ment in­sti­tu­tion that me­di­ates be­tween claimants and the cur­rent own­ers of Nazi-con­fis­cat­ed cul­tur­al prop­er­ty. The three prints have now been hand­ed over to her as the on­ly sur­viv­ing rel­a­tive.

To the blog post: Die Spur zu dem Kun­st­samm­ler Hein­rich Schwarz