German museum returns Slevogt painting to Fuchs’s heirs

The Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, Germany, has returned Max Slevogt’s Paradiesvögel (Birds of Paradise, 1900) to the heirs of collector Eduard Fuchs. The heirs consigned the painting after the restitution was completed, Ketterer Kunst told The Art Newspaper.

Fuchs, a Communist and writer who fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, was forced to sell works from his collection to pay a punitive emigration tax imposed by the Nazi authorities. Paradiesvögel was auctioned in Berlin in June 1937. The Nazis had confiscated his collection before later releasing it.

Wuppertal’s city council approved the return on 13 July 2026, after an investigation into the painting’s provenance, or ownership history.

From forced sale to museum purchase

Art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt bought the painting at the Berlin auction, and it passed to Fritz Slevogt in 1939. It went unsold at Kunsthaus Lempertz in December 2004. Museum press officer Marion Meyer said it stayed with the auction house and was exhibited at the museum in 2005, before the museum bought it through Lempertz in 2006 for €120,000 (about $130,000).

Meyer said the heirs contacted the museum in 2020, prompting the provenance investigation. The work drew on a project supported by the German Lost Art Foundation to reconstruct Eduard and Margarete Fuchs’s collection.

The painting’s provenance appeared in the 2004 auction catalog, but Meyer said the museum can no longer establish whether it checked that history before buying the work or how thoroughly it assessed it. She said the museum is not considering legal action against Kunsthaus Lempertz over its checks on the painting.

Museum director Roland Mönig said returning the painting meant losing a work but, more importantly, gave the museum certainty that it had acted responsibly toward history. He described provenance research as an essential part of the museum’s work.