Website on Karl and Emilie Adler launched

A website on the research being done into Karl and Emilie Adler’s stolen art collection has gone online.

Together with his wife, Munich-based manufacturer Karl Adler collected works of the contemporary avant-garde. He was murdered at Dachau concentration camp in 1938; his wife Emilie managed to escape to Palestine to be with their children. Many artworks from the Adlers' possession have since been lost, including modern graphic works by artists such as Alfred Kubin, Max Slevogt, Käthe Kollwitz and Max Beckmann, but also paintings, decorative art, furniture and books.

The German Lost Art Foundation funded provenance research on The Emilie & Karl Adler Collection Project from June 2021 to March 2024. The recently launched website www.karlandemilieadler.com provides a summary of the results in German, English and Hebrew.

“More than anything, I am proud to be able to tell the story of Karl and Emilie, two courageous individuals who were full of love for art, artists and people in general, whose unconventional taste produced a collection that was extraordinary in type and scope, and whose story ends with a large family in Israel,” says Hagar Lev, a great-granddaughter of the Adlers. She represented her family, the descendants of the Adlers, for the duration of the project.

In September 2021, Hagar Lev talked about her family history in the Foundation’s digital discussion series involving descendants of Jewish art collectors in connection with the festival year #2021JLID - Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland [#2021JLID – Jewish Life in Germany]. The recording is available in our event documentation.