Lowenstein’s Lost Works
A Jewish émigré painter’s cubist works labelled worthless and marked for destruction by Nazi perpetrators. For seven decades all confiscated paintings were thought to be lost, but three pieces survived the barbaric act.
Fedor Lowenstein (1901-1946) was born in Munich. He first studied art in Berlin and after WWI in Dresden while Oskar Kokoschka taught there in the early 1920s. Lowenstein moved to Paris in 1923 and joined the “Groupe des Surindépendants” in 1936, exhibiting regularly with them until the outbreak of WWII. In 1938, when Czechoslovakia, his family’s country of origin, was dismembered by the Munich Agreement, he painted La Chute (The Fall). During the Nazi occupation he took refuge in Southern France and died there in 1946.
Stamped to be destroyed
Lowenstein sent 21 paintings to a Harbor warehouse in Bordeaux for shipment to a North American gallery. The crates never left Bordeaux owing to their requisitioning by German military authorities. A special commando affiliated with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) under the guidance of Mr. Braumuller raided the warehouse where Lowenstein’s crates were housed, seized them and had them returned to Paris where they were stored at the Jeu de Paume, seat of the ERR’s processing of looted art objects extracted from Jewish-owned collections.
Due to the abstract cubist nature of Lowenstein’s works, the ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume dismissed them as useless and stamped them for destruction—vernichtet. The Spira collection also included a work by Lowenstein and was slated for the same fate as the Lowenstein collection. All 24 paintings by Lowenstein which were forcibly brought to the Jeu de Paume were to be disposed of in some fashion or another for ideological reasons.
Reappearing after 70 years
Nearly 70 years after the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, three of the “destroyed” Lowenstein paintings miraculously resurfaced in French museum collections. French Ministry of Culture officials were able to match the resurrected paintings with the information contained in the ERR database for three works labeled by the Germans as Lowenstein 4, Lowenstein 15, Lowenstein 19. Those three paintings are listed in the official catalogue of unclaimed works and objects of art known as “Musées Nationaux Récupération” or MNR and can be consulted on the French government website. Their MNR numbers are respectively R 26 P, R 27 P and R 28 P. The three paintings were exhibited in 2014 at the Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux.
Sources:
Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux
Site Rose-Valland Musées Nationaux Récupération
Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume