Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Has Restituted Eight Works To Heirs

Eight artworks have been restituted to the heirs of the Jewish publisher Rudolf Mosse by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, after a an inquiry into the artworks’ provenance, Monopol reports. The inquiry concluded that the Nazis looted the collection from the publisher’s daughter, who was living in Berlin at the time. The foundation has recently announced that the works, most of which are antique animal figurines, will remain on loan in the Berlin State Museums. The foundation has identified the works following a systematic review of its inventory for possible Nazi-looted art, and subsequently searched for the heirs.

The Mosse Art Restitution Project submitted a formal inquiry about two objects in 2014 -that is according to Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation who stated: “I am delighted that after ongoing research, we have been able to come to a quick, fair, and just solution to this case.”

Rudolf Mosse (1843-1920) was one of the most influential publishers of the Weimar Republic. His daughter, Felicia-Lachmann-Mosse (1888-1972), inherited her father’s art collection. In 1933, she was forced to flee from the Nazis and immigrated to the US. The family’s fortune was then confiscated by the Third Reich.

It is estimated that some 100,000 artworks and other cultural artifacts were looted or stolen by the Nazis – the majority of which have yet to be restituted – with many of these still residing in many remain in museums around the world, others are privately owned, with countless others having been lost forever or destroyed.

British actress and Dame, Helen Mirren expressed her support for the restitution of Nazi-looted art at the 65th Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin on Monday. Speaking at a press conference before the premier of the actress’s new film Woman in Gold, where the actress portrays the character, Maria Altmann, as she and her young lawyer, portrayed by Ryan Reynolds, take the Austrian Belvedere Museum to court over the restitution of a portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer, who was the wife of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy industrialist who sponsored the arts and the artist Gustav Klimt. The 69-year-old British performer told journalists “We mustn’t ever feel that we’ve come to the end of that particular human journey.”

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