Artworks Stolen From Alfred Flechtheim at the MOMA

For those who care about artworks stolen from Alfred Flechtheim, the Weimar Republic's greatest artdealer, there is a new Wikipedia page on Flechtheim in English here.   A recent article in Speigel magazine discussed Flechtheim, unfortunately the article is not in English.  Flechtheim was a Jew and the greatest dealer of contemporary art in Berlin in 1933.  He has been written out of history by those persons and institutions, particularly the MoMA, who profited from his demise.  The greatest forgery ring in German history recently ripped off the art collecting world, including comedian/art collector Steve Martin, by faking works from Flechtheim's stolen collection. Flechtheim was selected as Jewry's poster boy by the Nazis for his receding hairline and particularly prominent nose.  Harvard's Busch-Reisinger museum's modern German sculpture collection was founded in the early 1930's with a Rudolph Belling sculpture of Flechtheim's nose.

Alfred Barr borrowed much of Flechtheim's exhibition for the MoMA's first show of German art and Flechtheim gave the MoMA one of the first works to become part of its permanent collection, a sculpture of the boxer Max Schmeling, the guy who Joe Louis beat.  No one seems to know what MoMA did with the Schmeling sculpture.  History has failed to document Alfred Barr's intellectual and other debts to Alfred Flechtheim.  Barr, of course, was gleefully grabbing up art bargains that the Nazis had stolen from Jews, including the great critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin.

Many works stolen from Flechtheim are now at New York's Museum of Modern Art.  In Grosz v. MoMA the heirs of Berlin artist George Grosz sought to reclaim artworks that Grosz had left with Flechtheim when Grosz fled Hitler in January 1933 to come to New York to teach at the Art Students League.   MoMA got the case dismissed by falsely claiming to a federal judge that MoMA had refused the Grosz heirs claims and thus succeeded in applying the statute of limitations to hold onto the stolen art.  MoMA refused to provide the research files from MoMA's Provenance Research Project to the Grosz Heir and refused to provide its documents on art dealer Curt Valentin, MoMA's conduit to the Nazis.

MoMA's trafficking in artworks looted by the Nazis was the subject of William Cohan's excellent article MoMA's Problematic Provenances.

Glen Lowry, MoMA's director under whose tenure the files from the Provenance Research Project apparently disappeared, remains at its head.  Cohan won a Silurians Award (article here) for his article exposing MoMA's crimes, but MoMA's Trustees seem to have taken little note.  Hopefully German museums will start to write and publish work about Flechtheim, his Aryanization by Nazi SS  (earlier of Der Stahlhelm) member Alexander Voemel, and this research will force U.S. museums to start doing the right thing.

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Massive German Art Forgery Scandal - The Alfred Flechtheim Collection

Among those in the know, Alfred Flechtheim is considered perhaps the greatest contemporary art dealer in Germany's Weimar Republic.   He was Jewish, chased by the Nazis from his galleries in Berlin and Dusseldorf.   A Nazi named Alexander Voemel took over his galleries in 1933.  His gallery is still operating today.   An ad for Galerie Voemel brags of its legacy:

Die Galerie Vömel, mehr als ein halbes Jahrhundert in Düsseldorf ansässig, wurde von Alex Vömel - Geschäftsführer der legendären Galerie Flechtheim - gegründet und wird heute von seinem Sohn Edwin Vömel weiter geführt.

Vor einigen Jahren ist die Galerie in das alte Stadtpalais gegenüber vom Stadtmuseum in die Karlstadt umgesiedelt.
Die Galerie Vömel führt Arbeiten der klassischen Moderne, weiterhin ist sie spezialisiert auf Skulpturen und Arbeiten auf Papier des 20. Jahrhunderts.
Gezeigt werden regelmäßig Ausstellungen, welche mit Katalogen dokumentiert werden.


Shunned by his former friends, those who stole his art conveniently wrote him out of art history.   In a book called Boston Modern, art historian Judith Bookbinder credits Alfred Flechtheim with donating a Rudolph Belling sculpture of himself as being the foundation of Harvard's collection of modern German sculpture that turned into the Busch-Reisinger collection.

Flechtheim represented artists such as Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Andre Derain,  Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke and many others.

Flechtheim was featured on Nazi anti-semitic posters as the symbol of International Bolshevist Jewry - More on Flechtheim's nose here.

When in 1933 Nazis started attacking modern art in anti-Semitic museum exhibitions, Flechtheim and his sales to German museums were attacked.  When the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition took place, the Nazis had a life-sized portrait of Flechtheim.

New York's Museum of Modern Art has many works from Alfred Flechtheim's 1933 inventory, but refuses to share the provenance documentation of these artworks with researchers.

A Swiss government report on MoMA's role in the Nazi looted art trade here.

Shockingly, MoMA's current exhibition catalog German Expressionism:  The Graphic Impulse, writtten by Starr Figura and Peter Jelavich, completely omits any mention of Flechtheim.

In a bitter irony, German prosecutors just arrested a group of forgers that created fake works that they claimed were from Flechtheim's inventory.  Article from German newspaper at the link below:

 http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1641522.php/Forgers-charged-in-massive-alleged-Nazi-art-scam

Alfred Flechtheim's German-language Wikipedia page is here.  

Whether from ignorance, stupidity or venality, American museums and art historians seem to be determined to write Alfred Flechtheim out of art history.   It may be that the arrest and trial of this forgery ring in Germany will succeed in uncovering that which those Americans trafficking in and concealing Nazi-looted art would like to bury.

Not even one English-speaking Wikipedian will memorialize poor Flechtheim.

Browse my earlier posts on Alfred Flechtheim here.

A quote from Steven Litt's article  from Cleveland's Plain Dealer in 2003 below, full article here:

"Flechtheim was for the Nazi government, you can say, in art, public enemy No. 1," said Ottfried Dascher of Dortmund, a retired professor of history from the University of Bochum.

Today, Flechtheim is a hot topic in Germany, a nation trying to come to terms with its past. The art museum in Dusseldorf celebrated his life in an exhibition in 1987. His hometown of Munster renamed a street for him. And just last month, art dealers and historians, including Dascher, dedicated a plaque on the Berlin building where Flechtheim once lived.
"There is no week in which I don't get letters and e-mails from all over the world on this subject," Dascher said in a telephone interview.
One reason for the interest is that Flechtheim was part of a group of pioneering art dealers of German-Jewish heritage who were the first to champion the work of Picasso and other modern artists. Flechtheim was also part of the cultural renaissance of Weimar Germany, which brought forth the films of Fritz Lang, the music of Kurt Weill and the drama of Bertolt Brecht.


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