Berlin Art Patronage. The Art Collections Of The Mosse / Lachmann / Lachmann-Mosse Families. Formation – Significance – Loss

The Mosse Art Research Initiative (MARI) was established in March 2017 as a pilot project for the reconstruction of Nazi-liquidated private art collections in cooperation with the descendants of victims of racial persecution on the recommendation of Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen (then Secretary General of the Kulturstiftung der Länder) and Hermann Parzinger (President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) at the Department of Art History at Freie Universität Berlin.

After the first three funding phases of the project focused on the reconstruction of Rudolf Mosse's art collection and the search for the whereabouts of the individual works, the current project is researching the art collections of the Berlin families Mosse, Lachmann, Lachmann-Mosse and their entanglements. The members of the above-mentioned families were racially persecuted, looted of their assets, driven into emigration or deported after 1933 because of their Jewish origins. The purpose of the project is to place the selected art collections of the family members at the center of the research. The main aim is to understand the collection movements and the loss history after 1933 in a larger family and social context, to identify unlawfully confiscated cultural assets and to clarify the cultural-political relevance of the family connections.

© Kunsthistorisches Institut der Freien Universität Berlin