A landscape at Liechtensteinstraße 45 in Vienna

In cooperation with the Commission for Provenance Research, the House of Austrian History currently displays a painting with unidentified owners. The only information about the picture comes from family stories, which tell that it originally hung in an apartment at Liechtensteinstrasse 45 in Vienna’s Alsergrund district. It is said that the caretaker took it from the apartment after the inhabitants had either been forced to leave the country or deported because they were persecuted as Jews. The owner survived the Holocaust but was not given back the painting. There is much that remains open in this narrative, an eminent obstacle is the absence of any names.

The provenance researchers in the Austrian Bureau of the Commission for Provenance Research are often asked to investigate the provenance chains of collection items in national and international museums and related institutions so as to clear up the suspicion of persecution-related Nazi expropriation.

Requests by private persons are frequently based on persecution histories and the loss of assets within the family, in the hope of recovering or at least of discovering the whereabouts of items lost during the Nazi regime. There are also occasional inquiries, however, in which the current owners of art objects or furniture are either unclear about the provenance or even fear that the provenance could be related to the Nazi period. Most times, unfortunately, these cases remain unsolved for lack of information that would enable the objects to be clearly traced to former owners persecuted by the Nazis. Occasionally, however, it is possible to establish contact between the current owners and the families of the original ones. The Commission for Provenance Research, which according to the Austrian Restitution Act has jurisdiction just for state-owned collection items and not for those owned privately, can only act as a mediator in these cases.

One interesting case involves a Viennese family who in 2020 consulted the Bureau of the Commission for Provenance Research to identify the former owners of a painting in its possession with a view to restituting it privately. They were motivated to do so because the expropriation of the picture in 1938 or 1939 was not merely suspected but based on concrete information. The painting, a landscape by Friedrich Treuer (1872–1942), had hung in an apartment owned by a Jewish family at Liechtensteinstraße 45 in the 9th district of Vienna. It had been removed by the janitor and given to an acquaintance. The remaining furnishings were destroyed. The aggrieved party, who returned to Vienna after 1945, did not have an inventory of the apartment and the request for evidence was refused.

The provenance research discovered that the majority of the persons registered in the building in 1938 had been persecuted by the Nazis on account of their Jewish origins and that not all of them had survived the Holocaust. Of those who managed to flee, none were registered in Vienna after the war.

Research into the restitution files in the archive of the Federal Monuments Authority, the Austrian State Archives and the Vienna City Archives based on the names of the former occupants of the building and their spouses and children has not produced any further information about Treuer’s landscape and its former owners.

As the research to date has not revealed the provenance of the painting, any information would be gratefully received at provenienzforschung@bda.gv.at, Tel. Nr. +43 1 534 15 850 271.

This article is based on a text first published in the Network of European Restitution Committees on Nazi-Looted Art, Juni 2021, Nr. 10