Blick von den Dünen aufs Meer

inscr. b. r.: Jacob vRuisdael [vR ligatured]

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Slive 2001.446.634

1949

C – The provenance from 1933 to 1945 has not been conclusively clarified; gaps in the ownership history remain. According to current research, there is no evidence of Nazi-looted art. There are, however, implications of Nazi-looted art and / or conspicuous circumstances.

This painting by Jacob van Ruisdael was donated to the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2005 from the collection of the art collector Leopold Ruzicka. It has an eventful but also problematic history. More than 13 changes of ownership are documented between 1777 and 1924 alone. During that time, it travelled from the Netherlands to Paris, on to London and back to Paris, turning up in Frankfurt am Main before returning to the French capital after a brief detour to New York. It has not been possible to ascertain when it found its way to Kurt Walter Bachstitz (1882–1949) in The Hague. Bachstitz was an art dealer of Jewish origin who waived his Austrian citizenship after he settled in the Netherlands in 1938. In the early years of the war, the Bachstitz gallery had sold a large number of paintings to German art dealers, in some cases probably under duress and without receiving payment in return. However, the Matisse was back on the Berlin and Munich art market in 1936, in other words before Bachstitz was subject to repressive measures. Nevertheless, the uncertainty as to whether Bachstitz already owned the work before 1933 means that there is a gap in its provenance from then until 1936. Accordingly, the possibility that it constitutes cultural property confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution during this period cannot be ruled out. Between May and June 1936, the painting was then acquired as part of a swap by the Berlin-based art dealer Grete S. Ring (1887–1952), who at the time was general manager of the Paul Cassirer Berlin art salon. That same year, however, Ring, who was Jewish, was banned from working as an art dealer by the Nazis. She departed Germany in 1938, but left a number of works from the gallery with a Berlin forwarding company for safekeeping, one of which was the Ruisdael painting. There, it was seized by the Nazi finance authority in 1942 as an ‘enemy asset’, and sold in 1943 to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (now the Bode-Museum) in Berlin. The work was recovered after the war ended and returned to the Netherlands in 1946 under the terms of a ‘country restitution’. In around 1947, it was then handed back to the Paul Cassirer & Co. gallery in Amsterdam, which was still in existence. State of research 30.06.2023 Do you have questions, criticism, suggestions, and further information? Please send us a message to provenienzforschung(at)kunsthaus.ch.

- Kunsthaus Zürich. Gesamtkatalog der Gemälde und Skulpturen, hrsg. von Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft et al., Sammlungskatalog, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007, S. 107. - Wolfgang Stechow: Dutch Landscape Painting of the 17th Century (National Gallery of Art Kress Foundation Studies in the History of European Art), London: Phaidon Press, 1966, S. 105. - Jakob Rosenberg: Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin: Cassirer, 1928, No. 573, S. 108. - Jacob van Ruisdael, hrsg. von Seymour Slive, Ausst.-Kat. Mauritshuis and The Fogg Art Museum, New York: Abbeville Press, 1981, No. 26, S. 86-87. - Gemälde der Ruzicka-Stiftung (Text: L. Ruzicka), Ausst.-Kat. Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1949, No. 31. - Landschaften. Orte der Malerei, hrsg. von Philippe Büttner, Ausst.-Kat. Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, 2020, No. 36.