Restitution at the Lenbachhaus

On June 20, 2024, the Lenbachhaus and the Munich Department of Culture restituted a painting from the former collection of Jacques Goudstikker (1879-1940). This was preceded by proactive research on the part of the museum. The painting shows a portrait of the Freising court master Achaz Busch from 1532, painted by Hans Schöpfer the Elder (around 1505-1566).

As part of proactive research into its collection, the Munich Lenbachhaus has discovered that the painting “Achaz Busch” by Hans Schöpfer the Elder originally belonged to the Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who was of Jewish faith. The work was restituted to the sole heir, Marei von Saher, in June. Anton Biebl, Head of Cultural Affairs for the City of Munich, emphasized: “An effective culture of remembrance relies on a connection between the past, present and future. Provenance research and the restitution of cultural assets contribute to the reappraisal of history and give people back a piece of their past. It is therefore absolutely right that the City of Munich has decided to return the painting “Achaz Busch” to the descendant of the Goudstikker family.”
Jacques Goudstikker came from a family of art dealers. His grandfather Jacob already dealt in art and ran an art dealership together with his brother Simon, which they founded in Amsterdam in 1845. The art shop, which was located at Herengracht 458, initially dealt mainly in furniture and decorative arts. Eduard Goudstikker, Jacob’s son and Jacques’ father, then focused the business on Dutch and Flemish 17th century paintings from 1890 onwards. Jacques studied art history in Leiden and Utrecht and took over the art dealership from his father in 1919. He also expanded the art shop’s range to include paintings from other periods. The art dealership developed extremely successfully and Goudstikker can be counted among the most important art dealers of his time in the Netherlands.
After the Nazi attack on the Netherlands and the resulting capitulation of the country on May 15, 1940, he decided to flee with his wife Désirée, known as Dési, and their one-year-old son Eduard. They boarded the SS Bodengraven, which was to take them from the Netherlands to England, using one of the last possible crossings from Amsterdam. He left his collection of around 1,400 works of art to his employees. He had recorded the majority of his collection and the works in his art shop in a notebook, the so-called “Black Notebook”. During the crossing to England, Goudstikker had a fatal accident when he fell through an open hatch on deck at night. The small black leather ring binder with a typewritten index, which his wife Dési Goudstikker took after Goudstikker’s fatal accident, served as the most important source for reconstructing and restituting the collection after 1945. The National Socialists forced the remaining employees and Jacques Goudstikker’s mother, Emily Goudstikker-Sellisberger, to sell the art dealership with around 1400 paintings and all other material assets under threat of deportation and against the will of Goudstikker’s widow. The art dealership in Amsterdam was taken over by the German Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and the banker and speculator Alois Miedl and thus “Aryanized”. The 2.55 million guilders paid was far below the actual commercial value. Hermann Göring took over some of the paintings for his collection. The main purpose of the “Aryanization” was to steal the artworks from the collection and the art dealership and sell them on.

In the “Black Notebook”, the “Mansportret” by Hans Schöpfer the Elder is listed under the number 1228. The painting from 1532 belonged to the “Munich ducal art chamber” at the beginning of the 16th century and was purchased in the 1920s in the Berlin art trade by Jacques Goudstikker. Alois Miedl, the managing director of the “aryanized” art dealership, sold it to the middleman Wilhelm Heinrich. He delivered the painting to the Heinrich Hahn auction house in Frankfurt am Main for auction in March 1941. It was then purchased there by a Frankfurt art historian on behalf of Konrad Schießl, Director of the Municipal Museums in Munich. In the same month, the painting was included in the inventory of the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus.
After the Second World War, the widow, Désirée Goudstikker, filed a lawsuit against the Netherlands. The legal dispute was settled. Many of the artworks remained unlawfully in the possession of international institutions and museums. At the beginning of the 1990s, the family’s heirs filed a claim for restitution of their property. Many years of negotiations and a corresponding recommendation by the Dutch Restitutiecommissie resulted in over 200 works being returned. Individual works were also subsequently returned.
Jacques Goudstikker’s collection has repeatedly been the subject of research and has been the subject of several projects. Most recently, a research project took place in the period from 2019 to 2022, the Goudstikker Art Research Project. The tasks of the research project were to reconstruct the inventory of the looted Goudstikker collection in May 1940 with regard to the 850 paintings that are still missing today. The second was to trace the path of the missing paintings since May 1940, with the aim of identifying and locating them.
The heiress Marei von Saher was happy to receive back a work of her ancestor: “It is encouraging to see that the Lenbachhaus is doing the right thing for the victims of the Nazis and their families. I am very grateful to the Lenbachhaus for returning the painting by Schöpfer to the family of Jacques Goudstikker.”

Read more about restitution and provenance research here.