We are independent historians and art provenance researchers based in Germany and the United Kingdom whose collaborations were set in motion by the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI). Our specialty is the Nazi era and its lasting ramifications. Since 2014 we have tenaciously traced people and works of art through twenty-five countries. We call upon the press when reviewing art exhibitions anywhere to report routinely on the percentage of works on display without provenances.
Gregory Hahn, Ph.D., Karolina Hyży, M.A., and Project Associates
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Arthur Paunzen. Portrait of Cornelia (“Nelly”) Paunzen (Westreich). (Vienna-Unterdöbling), 1931. Pastel on paper, 63 x 45.5 cm. Unrestored. Private collection Berlin. Photo: provenance.international
The latest addition to the Arthur Paunzen collection is this portrait of Paunzen’s wife “Nelly” signed and dated 1931. Since it does not carry an export tag or number on its verso, we assume that it is one of the works that somehow remained behind in 1938 when the couple fled to England. It was acquired at auction in Germany. The portrait’s conventionality, a matter of intimacy and genre that obscures the scope of artistic imagination shown in his graphic works, is a feature that is also common to Paunzen’s later portraits of those whose lives impacted his and Nelly’s while refugees in London and East Sussex.
Strauss Archive from Wuppertal to Leo Baeck Institute, N.Y.
New York. In collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute, accessioning and digitizing the Artur and Lucy Strauss archive will begin this fall in New York. Strauss, a physician and cousin of Else-Lasker Schüler, was a member of the Jung Wuppertal group of poets and a naturally gifted artist. Although he made the practical decision to study medicine rather than art as a young man, the muses never abandoned him. As members of the assimilated Jewish middle class, he and his wife (née Hertz) were avid collectors and patrons of the arts in Barmen — once a vibrant modernist center and today a part of Wuppertal. Unable to obtain immigrant visas and join their son Arnold, also a physician, who had emigrated to the USA two weeks after the photograph below was taken, Artur and Lucy committed suicide in The Hague in September of 1940. This large and historically important collection, which consists largely of correspondence from 1919 to 1948, represents an inexhaustible source of political, cultural and psychological commentary from the Weimar Republic through the Nazi Era.
On 25 July 1935, Artur and Lucy Strauss arranged to be photographed one last time at home in Barmen before packing everything they owned, including the art collection, library and family archive for shipment into an unknown future. “In the room in Hütt’s factory our things look like so much rummage from the junk man. It was impossible to imagine that it all came from a cultivated household and that it might be put back together into one someday. I lacked the courage to go back into the room after the movers left. Artur likened it the next day to standing on the ruins of Carthage. But, alas, we’re free and hope that the moths will not develop an appetite for our carpets and upholstery and that, with happy hearts, we’ll see many beautiful things in the world before we once again make our Strauss’s nest. Yes, if only one could travel as one pleased, as was possible in my younger years! Let’s hope for the best, dear reader.” (Lucy Strauss). © 2024 the estate of Artur and Lucy Strauss, USA.