The Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum has restituted Emil Nolde’s painting entitled “Buchsbaumgarten”

The city of Duis­burg had ac­quired this par­tic­u­lar oil paint­ing, cre­at­ed by Emil Nolde in 1909, in 1956 for the col­lec­tion of the mu­nic­i­pal art mu­se­um. In 1999, the heirs of Is­mar Littmann, a lawyer and art col­lec­tor from Wro­claw who died in 1934, first sub­mit­ted a re­quest for the work’s re­turn to the Lehm­bruck Mu­se­um in Duis­burg, to whose col­lec­tion the work had since passed. In De­cem­ber 2019, the Board of Trustees of the Wil­helm Lehm­bruck Mu­se­um Foun­da­tion de­cid­ed to grant the re­quest. This is the sec­ond time in its his­to­ry that the mu­se­um has resti­tut­ed a work of art from its col­lec­tion.

One de­ci­sive fac­tor for the resti­tu­tion is the re­al­iza­tion that Is­mar Littmann, his wid­ow and his four chil­dren were per­se­cut­ed un­der Na­tion­al So­cial­ist Ger­many af­ter Jan­uary 30, 1933 due to their Jew­ish de­scent and, there­fore, had to sell their art col­lec­tion, in­clud­ing the paint­ing “Buchs­baum­garten”. Af­ter Is­mar Littmann’s death on Septem­ber 23, 1934, the paint­ing was put up for auc­tion at the Max Perl auc­tion house in Febru­ary 1935, along with a num­ber of oth­er works of art. While a num­ber of the con­signed works were re­moved from the auc­tion as “de­gen­er­ate art” by the Gestapo, the paint­ing “Buchs­baum­garten” was sold for 350 RM – a val­ue be­low the agreed min­i­mum price. The buy­er sold the paint­ing to the city of Duis­burg in 1956 through the art trade act­ing as an in­ter­me­di­ary.