A project funded by the German Center for Cultural Heritage Losses examined the painting acquisitions of the State Art Collections between 1933 and 1945 from January 2015 to March 2017 to identify possible Nazi-looted art and, if necessary, locate rightful heirs. In these cases, Hessen Kassel Heritage aims to pursue an active restitution policy.

Contact under provenance research@heritage-kassel.de

Provenance stories

In recent years, the investigation of the origin of a work has become a widely known and discussed field of art historical research under the term "provenance research". Since the "Gurlitt case", the word is on everyone's lips and represents an aspect of Germany's darkest history: looted art.

However, researching the provenance of a work can reveal much more, as stories are inscribed into the artwork as it travels from one collection to another, from one context to another. Today, we often speak of a biography of the object. Traces of this object's journey are usually found on the back of paintings in the form of numbers, stickers, or inscriptions. Equipped with detective-like intuition, these sober traces of provenance research sometimes lead to unexpected stories.

The Kassel Picture Gallery offers rich material on this. Some works can be traced back to their time of creation. Others were in many collections, in many places, in different contexts before they arrived in Kassel. Some previous owners were famous personalities like the Dutch King Willem II. Others were infamous like Hermann Göring, who amassed a huge amount. Some paintings are associated with touching love stories but also tragic events. Therefore, paintings not only have their own destinies, but destinies are also connected to paintings.

This and much more is shown in the publication that guides through the three floors of the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Wilhelmshöhe Castle and is available in the museum shop at Wilhelmshöhe Castle.

Provenance Stories. Old Masters Picture Gallery. Wilhelmshöhe Palace, Kassel, edited by Justus Lange, Günther Kuss, and Stefanie Rehm, published by the Museum Landscape Hessen Kassel, Kassel 2017.