Bavaria Restitutes Lesser Ury Painting To The Heirs Of A Jewish Banker The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A painting by German artist Lesser Ury is set to leave the Bavarian State Paintings Collections as Bavaria moves to restitute the work to the heirs of Curt Goldschmidt, a Jewish banker whose life and collection were upended under Nazi persecution.

The painting, titled“Interior with Children (the Siblings)”, is linked to the forced dispersal of Goldschmidt's property after the Nazis came to power. From the early 1930s, Goldschmidt faced mounting economic and political pressure. After 1933, he was compelled to surrender both his company and his apartment; the contents of that home were auctioned in 1935. He fled to Paris in 1937, lived in hiding during the German occupation, and died there in 1947.

According to the provenance trail cited by Bavarian authorities, the Ury painting was among the possessions listed for the 1935 auction, though it remains unclear whether it found a buyer at that time. The work later resurfaced at Lempertz in Cologne in 1940, where it was marked with a star indicating it came“from a non-Aryan collection” - a chilling bureaucratic tag that signaled the racialized dispossession underpinning the market.

Goldschmidt's heirs are his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who live mainly in France, the UK, and the US.

In a statement accompanying the decision, Bavaria's culture minister Markus Blume framed the restitution as both a corrective act and a public acknowledgment of a broader history.“Curt Goldschmidt's fate is shared with many Jewish collectors and patrons,” Blume said.“With this restitution, we honour Jewish collectors and remember victims of Nazi persecution.”

The announcement arrives amid heightened scrutiny of the Bavarian State Paintings Collections' handling of Nazi-era provenance research. Last year, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the institution had withheld research indicating that works in its holdings were looted by the Nazis. Blume rejected the accusations at the time, but conceded that“more transparency, accountability and consistency” were needed.

In the wake of the controversy, Bernhard Maaz, the director of the Bavarian State Paintings Collections, resigned, with Blume describing the leadership change as a chance for“a new beginning.”

“Interior with Children (the Siblings)” is the tenth painting the institution has said it plans to restitute to the heirs of Jewish collectors in the past year - a pace that signals both the scale of unresolved cases and the growing expectation that major public collections confront the gaps, silences, and compromises embedded in their own histories.

As Germany continues to debate how restitution should function across federal and state lines, Bavaria's latest decision underscores a central reality of provenance work: it is not only about objects moving from one owner to another, but about restoring names, biographies, and accountability to the record.

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