Akt am Strand / Abend

inscr. u. r.: Albert Keller 1874; b. l.: Bonicella B.

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2007

In 2009, the Kunsthaus staged an exhibition on the work of Albert von Keller to mark a major gift of his paintings from the estate of the Zurich art collector Oskar A. Müller in 2007. On the basis of the catalogue compiled for the exhibition, external experts established that two of the paintings in the gift, the work ‘Madame la Suire’ (AvK 238) and the work discussed here, ‘Nude on the Beach / Evening,’ could be looted art. The Kunsthaus reviewed the evidence and, when the suspicions were confirmed, offered to return the works to the original owners’ heirs or purchase it from them. Alfred von Keller’s ‘Nude on a Beach / Evening’ had been in the collection of the Berlin commercial judge and merchant Jean Baer since 1919. When he died in 1930, his widow Ida Bear inherited the art collection. After the National Socialists came to power, Ida Baer was collectively persecuted as a Jew. Between 1939 and her deportation in August 1942 to the concentration camp Theresienstadt, the trace of the art collection is lost. Ida Baer was murdered in Theresienstadt in 1942. In 2012, with the help of Hannelore Müller's donation, the work was legally acquired on the basis of an agreement with the heirs. The second work, ‘Madame la Suire,’ was once owned by the Jewish art collector Alfred Sommerguth. The work turned out to have been compulsorily auctioned by the Nazi authorities in Berlin a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War. However, the heirs of Alfred Sommerguth generously decided to donate the oil painting to the Kunsthaus, merely requesting that a notice to this effect be placed by the work when it is exhibited. State of research 21.12.2021 Do you have questions, criticism, suggestions, and further information? Please send us a message to provenienzforschung(at)kunsthaus.ch.

- Albert von Keller. Salon, Séancen, Secession, hrsg. von Gian Casper Bott, Ausst.-Kat. Kunsthaus Zürich, München: Hirmer, 2009, No. 23, S. 35.