October 2001 - Nr. 10
Three Paintings returned to Dresden
TWIG - Russia returned three paintings to a Dresden museum Thursday (September 27), taking the city a step further in its search for works that have been missing since World War II. In a brief ceremony attended by Kurt Biedenkopf (CDU), prime minister of Saxony, and Russian president Vladimir Putin, the works were handed over by Timur Timerbulatow, the owner of a construction firm, who had discovered them in a Moscow flea market and turned them over to Russian authorities. Timerbulatow said he considered it his duty to bring the paintings back to their rightful owners.
One of the works, Lecture in a Cairo Mosque, from an Egyptian series by Max Slevogt (1868-1932), will be displayed in the museum’s New Masters wing. The two older paintings, Ein Maedchen auf den Knien eines Mannes, by Flemish artist Gerrit Lundens (1622-1683), and Am Seestrand, by Pieter Mulier the Elder (1615-1670), will return to Galerie der Alten Meister. How the paintings made their way to Moscow is still unknown.
The State Art Collection of Dresden is one of Europe’s most important repositories of Italian Renaissance and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Some 450 works that disappeared from the museum during the Second World War are still missing. All works confiscated by the Russian military as war booty were returned in 1955.
Earlier this week, German art authorities were dismayed to learn that an important ally in the search for looted art, the stolen art archive of the U.S. Customs Agency, was destroyed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Its offices had been located in World Trade Center 7, which collapsed after the Twin Towers fell. As recently as December 2000, the archive had helped direct a stolen Renaissance painting back to its home in Weimar.
