A triptych by the German Impressionist painter Max Slevogt is to be auctioned in Munich after it was restituted to the heirs of Eduard Fuchs, a collector, Communist and writer who fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife.
The 1899 painting, Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son), will be offered at Ketterer Kunst’s evening sale on 6 December with an estimate of €150,000-€250,000. The work was bequeathed to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 1956.
Fuchs was a founding member of the Communist Party in 1918 and a fervent advocate of free speech. Weeks after the Nazis came to power, his villa was plundered by the Gestapo and his art collection was seized. His books were among those burned on 10 May 1933 in Berlin by Nazi students and their professors. Fuchs and his second wife, Margarete Fuchs, fled to Paris, where his health rapidly deteriorated.
He asked his daughter to sell his property that remained in Berlin to support the family.
The Prodigal Son was sold for a low price at auction in Berlin in 1938. It is known to have been in the collection of the industrialist Otto Stäbler in 1949; he left it to the Staatsgalerie when he died, according to a press release from the state of Baden-Württemberg.
“Persecution by the Nazis led to Eduard Fuchs’s involuntary exile in Paris,” Christiane Lange, the director of the Staatsgalerie, said in the release. “There can be no doubt about his precarious circumstances at the time he felt forced to sell parts of his collection. For us it’s a matter of course to bring about a ‘fair and just solution’ on the basis of the Washington Principles and in agreement with the heirs.”
The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart said it had been aware of the painting’s troubled history for several years, but when it approached Fuchs’s heir, he relinquished all claim to the work. It later became clear that the heir who was approached did not speak for all Fuchs’s heirs, the museum said.
The museum is planning an exhibition devoted to Fuchs and his collection next year.
