(Q63074029)
Statements
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9 February 1877Gregorian
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16 March 1941
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March 1941
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On the day the Nazis entered Brno, March 15, 1939, the Gestapo confiscated Dr. Feldmann’s villa, which contained amongst other possessions his valuable collection of drawings.Dr. Feldmann and his wife had to flee the villa within a couple of hours of the occupation. Shortly afterwards, Feldmann was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned and tortured at the infamous Špilberk prison and consequently died of a heart attack in March 1941. He was 64 at the time of his death. (English)
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Since his early youth, Dr. Feldmann was always very interested in art and art history. Around 1920, he began building his impressive collection of Old Master drawings. Dr. Feldmann was "an enthusiastic collector of drawings," indicated Dr. Otto Benesch in a 1943 edition of The Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Dr. Benesch later became his advisor on the German Schools. Dr. Wilhelm Suida advised him on the Italian Schools.The Feldmann Collection included Old Master of the German, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French Schools from the 15th to the 18th Centuries. His collection was well known internationally throughout the art world. Drawings from his collection were published in the most important and renowned art periodicals and written about by important and renowned art historians both before and after the war.On the day the Nazis entered Brno, March 15, 1939, the Gestapo confiscated Dr. Feldmann’s villa, which contained amongst other possessions his valuable collection of drawings.Dr. Feldmann and his wife had to flee the villa within a couple of hours of the occupation. Shortly afterwards, Feldmann was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned and tortured at the infamous Špilberk prison and consequently died of a heart attack in March 1941. He was 64 at the time of his death. (English)
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According to numerous reports, the Nazi Gestapo confiscated roughly 750 Old Master drawings from Feldmann after they invaded Brno in the present-day Czech Republic.Arrested and tortured, Feldmann died in a Nazi prison as a result of ill treatment, according to news reports. His wife was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later Auschwitz, where she died. (English)
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All parties agree that the 1622 drawing, which depicts a woman with bare breasts seated on a stone balcony with a fallen crown at her feet and a smoldering urn on a parapet overhead, once belonged to Feldmann. At issue according to the museum is whether the Nazis confiscated the drawing, which the museum bought in good faith in 1953 from London art dealer Herbert Bier.Feldmann, according to the museum's statement, died in 1941, two years after he was arrested and tortured by the Nazis when they invaded the city of Brno in the present-day Czech Republic. Feldmann's wife, the statement said, was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later Auschwitz, where she too died. (English)
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Anne Webber, co-chairwoman of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which has lodged the claim on behalf of the family, said: "Often in these case the works of art are particularly precious when they are all that remains of a family that has been destroyed. In this case collecting the drawings was very much an act of love, by a man described as "a passionate collector" - it was very personal, and very much part of the family's treasured memories of that man."The four drawings are claimed to have belonged to a pre-war collection belonging to Arthur Feldmann a Czech lawyer. After the Nazi invasion in 1939, he was jailed and tor tured, and his wife died in a concentration camp, while some of his children and relatives fled the country.Since the war, members of his family have been searching for his collection of over 750 drawings.Three of the disputed drawings were bought on behalf of the British Museum at Sotheby's in 1946. The fourth was part of a bequest from Campbell Dodgson, a former BM curator.The claim will ring alarm bells among directors of British collections because the drawings were not identified as having a suspect provenance in the museum's audit of its holdings. (English)
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Since 1945, the museum has settled only a single claim over a Nazi-looted artwork. In May 2013, it paid an unspecified sum to the heirs of art collector Arthur Feldmann, enabling it to keep a rare and beautiful 17th-century Johann Liss drawing, “Allegory of Christian Faith.”According to numerous reports, the Nazi Gestapo confiscated roughly 750 Old Master drawings from Feldmann after they invaded Brno in the present-day Czech Republic.Arrested and tortured, Feldmann died in a Nazi prison as a result of ill treatment, according to news reports. His wife was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later Auschwitz, where she died.David Franklin, who resigned as director of the Cleveland museum in October, said in May that the institution never agreed that the Liss drawing was actually confiscated from Feldmann, but that enough circumstantial evidence existed to create a reasonable belief that it had been."We were willing to give them [the Feldmann heirs] fair market value to keep the drawing in the collection," Franklin said, "and they were happy to have the drawing remain in a public collection and to honor the fact that we looked after it so well for so long." (English)
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