The Met Just Returned a Prized Silver Cup, Stolen By a Nazi Art Dealer, to Its Rightful Heirs After Almost 80 Years

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
has restituted a 16th-century silver stem cup that was taken
//CAN WE SAY STOLEN?// by a Nazi-affiliated art
dealer in 1941. 

According to the New York State
Department of Financial Services’ Holocaust Claims Processing
Office (HCPO), who assisted in evaluating the object, it has been
returned to the family of Eugen Gutmann, a German-Jewish banker who
amassed a prized trove of silver before his death in 1925.
Gutmann’s collection was bequeathed to his son, Fritz Gutmann, who
was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration
camp. 

“The [Met] is committed to
ensuring that works of art wrongfully appropriated during the Nazi
era are restituted to their rightful owners,” Max Hollein, director
of the museum, said in a
statement. “It is
important that this work is returned to the heirs of Eugen Gutmann,
and in doing so, we hope to play a small part in honoring the
family and the heroic efforts of Fritz Gutmann in safeguarding his
father’s collection.”

The three-and-a-half-inch-tall
stem cup was made in Munich in the 16th century. Though it’s
unknown when or how the elder Gutmann acquired it, the cup was
included in a 1912 catalog of his collection published by art
historian Otto von Falke. (Von Falke called the collection
“worthy to rank
beside the treasure-chambers of princes.”)

Fritz Gutmann, a banker like his
father, stored the inherited collection of silver at his home in
the Netherlands. In 1941, the cup was one of many objects seized by
the Paris-based Nazi art dealer Karl Haberstock through forced
sale. Two years later, Nazi officers escorted Gutmann and his wife
from their house, telling them they were being transferred to
Berlin. Instead, Gutmann was taken to Theresienstadt while his wife
went to Auschwitz.

Following 1941, the cup was
absent from all subsequent inventories of the Eugen Gutmann
collection, and the family was never compensated for it after the
war. The object entered the
Met’s collection as a bequest in 1974. The museum did not respond
to Artnet’s request for comment.

“The Gutmann heirs opened an art
claim with the HCPO in 2000, and we have been working together with
them on restitution matters since then,” a representative from the
HCPO explained in an email.

In 2017, the organization filed
a restitution claim to the Met on behalf of Simon Goodman, the
grandson of Fritz Gutmann and great-grandson of Eugen Gutmann,
after he discovered the cup in the museum’s
collection. 

The post The Met Just Returned a Prized Silver Cup, Stolen
By a Nazi Art Dealer, to Its Rightful Heirs After Almost 80
Years appeared first on artnet News.