CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

The unusual fate of Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie, one of the world’s most important collections of European paintings from the early Renaissance to the late Baroque, was decided a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War, which was started by Germany’s National Socialists. In evident knowledge of the imminent attack on Poland, the Nazi authorities issued an order to take down all works then on view in the Sempergalerie and move them to safety in cellars and secure repositories. The risk of air raids on Dresden increased during the course of the war, and at the end of 1940 a decision was taken to move all works of art out of the city. From November 1940 until the middle of 1942, hundreds of paintings were transported in numerous convoys to fortified locations along the River Elbe, chiefly Albrechtsburg Castle in Meißen, Schloß Weesenstein and Sachsenburg in the Erz Mountains. In 1941, in a parallel development, the authorities started to rent private castles, mansions and manor houses for the holdings of the State Collections of Art and Science, to which the Gemäldegalerie belonged. Some particularly valuable pieces, such as Jan van Eyck’s Dresden Triptych and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, were stored with the precious objects of the Green Vault under conditions of utmost security at Königstein Fortress.

In view of the intensification of fighting on German soil, Martin Mutschmann, the Reichsstatthalter of Saxony, ordered that the art treasures be held in safer hide-outs. More specifically, from January 1945 the repositories east of the Elbe were to be given up in favor of depots west of the river in order to secure the artworks from the attacks of the approaching Red Army. To this end, two exceptional shelters had earlier been prepared: a disused railway tunnel in Großcotta, not far from the Saxon town of Pirna (fig.1), and a former limestone quarry near the municipality of Pockau-Lengefeld in the Erz Mountains. From now until the final weeks of the war, many and hazardous shipments of artworks were organized against the background of fighting in and around Dresden, resulting in damage and significant losses. Particularly tragic was the fate of a large consignment of 174 pictures, including major works of the Gemäldegalerie, destroyed by fire in the courtyard of Dresden Castle during an overnight stop on 13–14 February 1945.

Upon the arrival of the 1^st Ukrainian Front in Dresden on 8 May 1945, the Soviet military command took a special interest in the fate of the Gemäldegalerie’s world-famous works. The Red Army deployed search teams consisting of soldiers, art historians and restorers, who were informed by those German museum staff who had remained behind about the repositories and places of safety where the Dresden art collections were being kept. The major shelters, such as the railway tunnel at Großcotta in the vicinity of Pirna and Königstein Fortress in Saxon Switzerland were handed over to the Soviet Trophy Commission in orderly fashion and by mid-May the first major works, such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, had been brought back to Dresden. It took until the summer of 1945 for all the paintings to be recovered from all the different repositories throughout the whole of Saxony. The works were gathered at the undamaged Pillnitz Palace, once the summer residence of the electors of Saxony, checked for completeness and from July 1945 transferred by rail in large consignments to Moscow and in February and March 1946 to Kyiv. Only works of the German school of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and works from the collection of the Kupferstich-Kabinett (Museum of Prints, Drawings and Photographs) remained behind.

Thus the Kulturhistorische Zentralmuseum of the state of Saxony, which opened in Pillnitz Palace on 1 July 1946, could do no more than provide an overview of more recent German art, while as a result of the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany, the world-famous collection of paintings comprising works of all other schools from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries seemed lost to Dresden forever.

The return of the Dresdner Gemäldegalerie’s works in 1955–58 (fig. 2), despite fears that the centuries-old collections would remain in the USSR for good, caught the world’s attention. Just a few years after the unexpected return of the art treasures, a catalogue of the gallery’s works lost and missing as a result of the war was compiled by the Dresden State Art Collections in 1963,¹ organized into separate categories and furnished with a photograph or description of each painting, was compiled by the Dresden State Art Collections in 1963. After Bremen’s Kunsthalle, this made the Dresden State Art Collections the second German painting collection with an extensive catalogue of lost works. As a result, international awareness of the losses suffered by the Dresden gallery during the Second World War was quick to grow – a process that has benefited the search for pictures lost and missing in the war to this day.

Investigation into the 507 paintings of the Dresden galleries (old and new masters) listed in the 1963 catalogue of lost works began in the early 1960s. Experience gained during this first phase of searching for the paintings permitted the gratifying assumption that the majority of works had survived the war and post-war years largely unscathed. Nevertheless, the paths taken by the missing paintings were still, at this time, mostly unknown. It transpired that a large number of those works that, under the National Socialists, had been forcibly lent to state departments and authorities had disappeared. At the same time, the researchers of the Dresden collections have been, and still are, confronted by cases of “private spoils of war” whose trail not seldom leads back to the territory of the former USSR.

A glance back over the 70 years of investigations reveals that the rediscovery and return of Dresden’s war losses can be divided into different phases. Immediately after the war a sequence of stolen pictures – having apparently never left the city of Dresden or the state of Saxony – was found thanks to various coincidences. As time passed since the events of the war and the post-war years, it became more common for pictures belonging to the gallery to turn up on the Western European art market. Until 1990, under the conditions of the division of Europe and Germany, wartime losses of the Gemäldegalerie found their way back to Dresden in no more than a few cases and then only after complex diplomatic efforts across the divide between political systems. Significant restitutions of paintings in the 1970s and 1980s occurred thanks to the intense efforts of the staff of both Dresden painting collections, the considerate attentiveness of colleagues in museums at home and abroad and others working in the international art market – but also pure chance.

The changes in the GDR’s political circumstances brought about by the fall of the Iron Curtain, followed by the reunification of Germany marked a clear turning point in the process of searching for paintings lost in the war. Opening up to the West now made it possible to receive immediate and direct information about works from Dresden that had resurfaced. The Dresden State Art Collections now also received tip-offs about the whereabouts of its war losses from the staff of London’s private Art Loss Register and the German Lost Art Foundation (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste), through which artworks that have been looted or displaced under wartime conditions can be registered and researched. The possibility of direct contact between art dealers or private individuals and the directors of the two Dresden collections at an early stage of an incipient restitution process has proved of enormous value in many cases, not least as it has allowed false fears or expectations or irrelevant demands from “interim owners” to be dispelled during initial conversations. In a number of cases, this strategy of quiet diplomacy for the Dresden collections has resulted in an amicable settlement. The number of paintings restituted to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister alone has now reached 63 works.

Over the recent past, a problem has become apparent during the course of efforts to return to Dresden pictures lost during the war. Since the political changes of the early 1990s, it has become evident that paintings lost from Dresden are repeatedly coming to light in countries that were once part of the USSR, above all the Baltic States and Russia. It is clear that wartime losses from Dresden are among those artworks being traded on the “grey market” on the territory of the former USSR and as a consequence subsequently turn up on the Western European or US art market – although these pathways of losses were interrupted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago. The Dresden paintings threaten to degenerate into pure financial investments and once they enter the international art market, can often only be recovered, if at all, by judicial means. One result of this development has been a number of drawn-out court cases conducted by the Free State of Saxony on behalf of the Dresden State Art Collections over past years, not all of which have been decided in the Dresdner Gemäldegalerie’s favor.²

All the more important are the latest restitution successes, which show the sense in continuing to search without let-up for the Dresden paintings. One of the most recent success stories concerns  a work by a member of the circle of the Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger, An Old Man Caresses a Kitchen Maid in a Stable, cat. no. 1087, which was recovered from Naples and returned to Dresden in 2022 (fig. 3).

Acquired by Baron Raymond Le Plat for the art collection of Elector Augustus the Strong in 1723, the work is listed in the first Dresden painting inventory of 1722–28 and formed part of the collection for more than 200 years. According to surviving files, the painting was loaned to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior in 1931 and is known to have been there still in 1945. Over the subsequent decades it was considered lost and was registered as such in the database of the German Lost Art Foundation. After 1977 the painting turned up on the international art market a number of times, and, along with ten sheets from the Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett and another of Dresden’s lost paintings from the war, was initially offered by emigrants from the USSR to a private art gallery in Aachen. The Dresden State Art Collections were informed and sent a member of staff to Aachen who indeed identified the work as having once formed part of the collection of paintings in Dresden.

In 1998, the Dresden State Art Collections received another tip-off about the whereabouts of the entire lot of drawings and two paintings, which was now in the United States along with its “interim owners”. The works had been offered to Sotheby’s New York and, in parallel, to Christie’s, and in awareness of their true origins had initially been retained by Sotheby’s following the involvement of a lawyer and the FBI. After this the paintings disappeared once more from view. It appears that they were not ultimately sold through one of the US auction houses.

In March 2003, the art historian and Teniers specialist Margret Klinge wrote to staff at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, drawing their attention of the appearance of the painting attributed to David Teniers the Younger, cat. number 1087, in Rome. The Christie’s office there had asked Margret Klinge for an expert opinion. She too pointed out that the work being offered was a wartime loss of the Dresdner Gemäldegalerie. This no doubt explains why there was no sale in this case either.

Eleven years later, Margret Klinge was once again asked to give an opinion of the painting, this time by an art dealer in Naples who kept the work in 2014. Well informed of the painting’s provenance, this dealer had attempted in vain to sell it directly to the Dresden State Art Collections. After the Dresden gallery informed the Saxon federal police, the painting was seized by the Italian carabinieri for the protection of cultural heritage on the basis of suspected receiving of stolen goods. In keeping with the usual procedures, the case was then handed to the public prosecutor’s office in Naples, which tied it up with the case it already had pending. The Dresden public prosecutor’s office issued a request for legal assistance to the responsible Italian authorities, and with the involvement of the Saxon State Ministry of Justice, in close consultation with the Dresden State Art Collections and thanks to the support of the local carabinieri, the painting was successfully repatriated to Dresden. It was eventually handed over to the Dresden State Art Collections in a ceremony on 17 March 2022.

The return of An Old Man Caresses a Kitchen Maid in a Stable, today attributed to the circle of David Teniers the Younger, has increased the completeness of the Teniers group – which was assembled for the electoral painting collection with such care three centuries ago – while enriching art-historical research by adding significantly to knowledge of the processes of the Teniers studio through the rediscovery of an important piece in the puzzle.

Uta Neidhardt is Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Dresden. She has been a member of CODART since 1998.

Translated from the German by Richard George Elliott

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[1] Hans Ebert, Kriegsverluste der Dresdener Gemäldegalerie. Vernichtete und Vermisste Werke (Dresden: 1963).

[2] For an overview of the history of the paintings lost in the war and their return to Dresden since 1939, see also Uta Neidhardt, “Die Dresdener Gemäldegalerien Alte und Neue Meister seit 1939. Auslagerung, Abtransport und Rückkehr ihrer Werke”, in  Zurück in Dresden. Eine Ausstellung ehemals vermisster Werke aus Dresdener Museen, exhibition catalogue, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, ed. Uta Neidhardt et al. (Eurasburg: 1998), pp. 128–131; Uta Neidhardt, “Kriegsverluste der Dresdener Gemäldegalerie – Geschichte mit offenem Ausgang”, in Schattengalerie – Symposium zur Beutekunst. Forschung, Recht und Praxis, ed. Heinrich Becker (Aachen: 2010), pp. 39–55; and Carina Merseburger and Claudia Maria Müller, “Kriegsverluste der Dresdener Gemäldegalerie. Eine aktuelle Bestandsaufnahme”, in Rückkehr 1958, special issue of the Dresdener Kunstblätter 4 (2018), pp. 27–37.