Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T18:07:28.882Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Saving St Christopher: The History of a Looted Painting

In memory of David Scrase (1949–2020)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2022

Ines Schlenker*
Affiliation:
Independent scholar, London, United Kingdom

Abstract

When, the day after the Anschluss, the Viennese aristocrat Henriette von Motesiczky and her daughter, the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, fled Vienna, they left behind an “old German” painting known as Knight and Devil. In 2016, by now identified as part of an early sixteenth-century altarpiece by the Master of St Christopher with the Devil and entitled St Christopher Meeting the Devil, the painting entered the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It was donated by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust in memory of its former owner Karl von Motesiczky, Marie-Louise’s brother, who had perished in Auschwitz. This article, based on detailed archival research, traces the history of St Christopher Meeting the Devil after 1938. The painting, forcefully taken from its owner, made its way through the National Socialist art-looting operation, encountering some of its main protagonists in the process. Sold at auction in 1943, it ended up at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich from where, in 1950, it was restituted to the surviving members of the Motesiczky family, now living in England. In an exemplary way, the fate of St Christopher Meeting the Devil throws a light on the workings of the National Socialist looting system and the steps that the Allied Forces undertook after the war to rectify the crimes they uncovered. It also highlights the problems that gaps in the knowledge of an artwork’s provenance can cause in the attempt to reconstruct cases of expropriation and emphasizes the role goodwill plays in reaching fair solutions.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderl, Gabriele, and Caruso, Alexandra, eds. 2005. NS-Kunstraub in Österreich und die Folgen. Innsbruck: Studienverlag.Google Scholar
Baldass, Ludwig von. 1943. Albrecht Altdorfer. 2nd ed. Vienna: Gallus Verlag.Google Scholar
Buchner, Ernst. 1938. Albrecht Altdorfer und sein Kreis: Gedächtnisausstellung zum 400. Todesjahr Altdorfers. Munich: Staatsgalerie.Google Scholar
Buchner, Ernst. 1948. “Der Meister des Christophorus mit dem Teufel.” Zeitschrift für Kunstwissenschaft 2: 1925.Google Scholar
Feldman, Gerald D. 2015. Austrian Banks in the Period of National Socialism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lang, Helmut W., ed. 2003. Österreichische Retrospektive Bibliographie . Series 2. Munich: Saur.Google Scholar
Lauterbach, Iris. 2015. Der Central Collecting Point in München: Kunstschutz, Restitution, Neubeginn. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag.Google Scholar
Lillie, Sophie. 2003. Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens. Vienna: Czernin.Google Scholar
Rothländer, Christiane. 2010. Karl Motesiczky 1904–1943: Eine biografische Rekonstruktion. Vienna and Berlin: Turia and Kant.Google Scholar
Schawe, Martin. 2010. “1947: Die Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen.” In Kunstgeschichte in München 1947: Institutionen und Personen im Wiederaufbau, edited by Iris Lauterbach, 90104. Munich: Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte.Google Scholar
Schlenker, Ines. 2009. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky 1906–1996: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings. Manchester, VT, and New York: Hudson Hills Press.Google Scholar
Schwarz, Birgit. 2014. Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub. Darmstadt, Germany: Theiss.Google Scholar