Museum to sell piece after bid for restitution
A Pennsylvania museum has agreed to sell a 16th-century portrait that once belonged to a Jewish family that was forced to part with it while fleeing Nazi Germany before the Second World War.
The Allentown Art Museum will auction Portrait of George the Bearded, Duke of Saxony, settling a restitution claim by the heirs of the former owner, museum officials announced Monday. The museum had bought the painting, attributed to German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder and Workshop, from a New York gallery in 1961 and had displayed it ever since.
The portrait was owned by Henry Bromberg, a judge of the magistrate court in Hamburg, Germany, who had inherited a large collection of Old Master paintings from his businessman father. Bromberg and his wife, Hertha, fled Germany in 1938 and emigrated to the United States.
“While being persecuted and on the run from Nazi Germany, Henry and Hertha Bromberg had to part with their artworks by selling them through various art dealers, including the Cranach,” said their lawyer, Imke Gielen.
The Brombergs settled in New Jersey and later moved to Yardley, Pa.
Two years ago, their descendants approached the museum about the painting, and museum officials entered into settlement talks. Museum officials called the sale a fair and just resolution given the “ethical dimensions of the painting’s history in the Bromberg family.”
“This work of art entered the market and eventually found its way to the Museum only because Henry Bromberg had to flee persecution from Nazi Germany. That moral imperative compelled us to act,” Max Weintraub, the museum’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.
The work, an oil on panel painted around 1534, will be sold in January at Christie’s Old Master sale in New York. The museum and the family will split the proceeds under a settlement agreement. Exact terms were confidential.
One issue that arose during the talks is when and where the painting was sold. The family believed the painting was sold under duress while the Brombergs were still in Germany. The museum said its research was inconclusive, and that it might have been sold after they left.