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  • LIEBERMANN FROM GURLITT’S APARTMENT AT SOTHEBY’S

    PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF DAVID FRIEDMANN OF BRESLAU Max Liebermann  (1847-1935) ZWEI REITER AM STRAND NACH LINKS (TWO RIDERS ON THE BEACH TO THE LEFT)

    PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF DAVID FRIEDMANN OF BRESLAU
    Max Liebermann (1847-1935)
    ZWEI REITER AM STRAND NACH LINKS
    (TWO RIDERS ON THE BEACH TO THE LEFT)  UPDATE: IT MADE £1.865 MILLION

    A work by Max Liebermann – discovered among the trove of art secreted away for decades by Cornelius Gurlitt – comes up at Sotheby’s in London on June 24.  Zwei Reiter am Strand nach links (Two Riders on a Beach), 1901 will be sold following its successful restitution. One of Max Liebermann’s first large-scale oils of horses and riders, it is estimated at £350,000–550,000.   After being shown in 1901 it was acquired by David Friedmann (1857-1942) of Breslau, a passionate art collector. Friedmann is known to have owned at least two works by Max Liebermann, in addition to works by Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro and Jean-François Raffaëlli, Jozef Israëls and Walter Leistikow.

    Over the course of the 1930s David Friedmann was subject to increasing persecution by the Nazis. Forced to hand over his properties to the Nazis one by one, in 1938 he prepared to sign over his country estate to a high-ranking Nazi official. David Friedmann’s great nephew David Toren, the only living heir to have seen the painting  in the collection recalls: It was the day after Kristallnacht, 9th November 1938. I was aged thirteen and my father had been arrested that morning by the Gestapo. We learned that he would be released briefly because my father was my great uncle’s lawyer, and his presence was required before my great uncle could sign over his estate to the Nazi General, Ewald von Kleist, who wished to acquire it. Arrangements were made with the Gestapo headquarters where my father was held for him to be escorted to my great uncle’s villa and then returned immediately after.

    David Friedmann died in 1942 of natural causes. His only child Charlotte perished in Auschwitz in October 1942. The following year David Toren’s father and mother were deported to the same camp where they too died. He managed to escape on a Kindertransport leaving Germany and grew up in Sweden before moving to New York where he lives now. David Toren said: “I am ninety years old now and blind, so while the return of the painting after so many years is of huge personal significance, I can no longer appreciate the painting as I did all those years ago in my great uncle’s home. Though I am the only living heir to have seen the painting in my great uncle’s home, I am one of a number of heirs and we have decided to sell. The painting can now pass into a new phase of its story.”

    Last week it emerged that a 1921 Matisse painting – Seated Woman – found in Gurlitt’s Munich apartment is to be returned to the heirs of Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg.  Among them is Anne Sinclair, the ex-wife of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  Mr. Rosenberg was her maternal grandfather.  The work is estimated to be worth £60 million.

    (See post on antiquesandartireland.com for November 18, 2013).

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