Selected Works

To the accompanying essay by Dr. Golo Maurer

The painting is free from restitution claims and will be offered with the explicit consent of the heirs of Edgar Jacques Moor.

Our painting by Carl Blechen was owned by the Goldschmidts, a Jewish family from Berlin, since the early 20th century. The brothers Dr Arthur Jacques (1882-1938) and Dr Eugen Carl Goldschmidt (1878-1938) had inherited the work from their father Isaac (gen. Jacques) Heymann Goldschmidt (1842-1911) in 1911. Research by the Federal Art Administration revealed that Arthur had trained as a publisher and had a doctorate in philosophy. His brother Eugen Goldschmidt was a chemist and also had a doctorate in philosophy. Both were Jewish and were subjected to anti-Semitic persecution during the Nazi era. Shortly after the Kristallnacht pogroms, they decided to end their lives by their own hand. Their estate passed to their nephew Edgar Jacques Moor (1912–1994), who emigrated to South Africa that same year. In 1942, the assets Moor had left behind in Berlin – almost certainly including Mühlental von Amalfi – were confiscated by the Gestapo secret police. In 1944, the Berlin art dealer Hans W. Lange brokered the painting to the Sonderauftrag Linz organization tasked with securing artworks for the “Führermuseum” that Adolf Hitler was planning for his hometown of Linz. Following the end of World War II, the painting resurfaced in 1946 at the Central Collecting Point (CCP) set up in Munich by the US military government and eventually passed into the possession of the German Federal Government. More than eight decades after the painting was seized, the Federal Art Administration has now restituted Mühlental von Amalfi to the heirs.