Reconstruction of the Art Collection of Lotte and Georg Koch, Wiesbaden

The research project aims to reconstruct the art collection of the Wiesbaden pediatrician Georg Koch and his wife Lotte, née Seeligmann. Dr. Georg Koch was born in Mainz in 1890 as the son of the wine merchant Moritz II Koch and his wife Sophie Levy. After his participation as a soldier in World War I, Georg Koch worked as a doctor at the Municipal Maternity Clinic and Infants Care Hospital in Wiesbaden. In 1919 he married Anna Lotte Seeligmann (1896-1964), a native of Karlsruhe. She was the daughter of the lawyer Arnold Seeligmann and his wife Rosalie Mayer.

Lotte and Georg Koch acquired art works by Alexej Jawlensky, Emil Nolde and Christian Rohlfs, among others. They also owned paintings by Flemish and Dutch artists, although these are not described in detail. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Koch family were persecuted as Jews. Georg Koch died in May 1933. His children Eleonore and Herbert emigrated at the end of 1938, his widow in mid-1939 to London, where she worked as a domestic help.

In October 1940, the parents of Lotte Koch were deported to Gurs in France, among over 900 Jews from Karlsruhe. They were interned in the Gurs camp. Rosalie Seeligmann died there two months later, possibly of typhus, and her husband Arnold perished later in the camp in summer 1941.

Objects of the art collection were packed as removal goods (lift-vans) in 1939 and stored at the port of Hamburg. There, they were allegedly burned by bombing. Most likely, however, the removal goods were auctioned off by the Gestapo, because in the 1980s a work of art by Emil Nolde turned up in a private collection in northern Germany and was sold by the art dealer Salis & Vertis in Salzburg, Austria, in about 1996. Other art objects documented on the removal list included porcelain, pewter and faience, steel and copper engravings, hand-painted miniatures, and a wood-carved Madonna.

One focus of the project therefore aims at researching the whereabouts of the removal goods and the works of art. In addition, precise information on the works of art in the collection of Georg and Lotte Koch is to be researched. In particular, the collection of paintings by Flemish and Dutch painters, which are not described in detail, is to be reconstructed. It is possible that they originated from the collection of Lotte Koch's grandfather, Bernhard Albert Mayer, who owned a collection of works of art of Dutch painting of the 17th century and from whose estate works of art were auctioned in 47 lots at Paul Graupe in Berlin on June 25, 1934.

The reconstruction of the collection includes a systematic preparation and evaluation of archival documents on the various restitution and compensation proceedings of the families as well as research in estate collections of artists, art dealers and art associations. In addition, research will be conducted at the archives and image documentation of the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague.

(c) Facts & Files