Munich’s Pinakotheken to Return Lesser Ury Painting Sold Under Nazi-Era Duress
A quiet domestic scene painted in early 20th-century Germany has become the latest test of how museums confront the economic violence of the Nazi period. The Pinakotheken in Munich said it will return “Interior with Children (The Siblings)” by German painter Lesser Ury (1861–1931), concluding that the work was auctioned under duress in Bavaria during the National Socialist era.
The painting was originally owned by Curt Goldschmidt, a Berlin banker whose family’s financial life was upended as the National Socialists reshaped Germany’s economy. According to the museum, the collapse of the Goldschmidt family bank forced the sale of assets, including the Ury. The work is believed to have brought around 800 Reichsmarks at the time, a sum estimated at roughly $4,000 today. In the contemporary market, Ury’s Berlin Impressionist views have more recently achieved $40,000–$100,000 at auction.
Goldschmidt’s biography underscores the stakes of such provenance decisions. The museum said he fled to Paris in 1937 and survived the German occupation in hiding, dying there in 1947.
Key gaps remain in the painting’s ownership trail. The institution said it is still unclear who acquired the work at the forced sale in the 1930s. What is documented is its reappearance at a Cologne auction house in 1940, where it was accompanied by a note indicating it came from “non-Aryan ownership,” a blunt marker of the racialized dispossession that shaped the art trade under the Nazis.
The Bavarian State Painting Collections acquired “Interior with Children (The Siblings)” in 1972. In a statement, director Anton Biebl described the painting as an important example of Ury’s practice and as a lens onto “the history of Jewish collectors and patrons in early modern Berlin.” He added that the restitution recognizes the work’s “dual Jewish provenance” — from its German-Jewish creator to its Jewish collector — and the circumstances of its loss through persecution.
Bavaria’s minister of art Markus Blume, also speaking in a statement, positioned Goldschmidt’s story as emblematic: “Curt Goldschmidt’s fate is representative of that of many Jewish collectors and patrons. Persecution by the National Socialists robbed him of his fortune and his art collection; he could only save his life by fleeing.”
The decision arrives amid renewed attention on restitution practices in Bavaria’s museum sector, which has faced scrutiny for slow progress on Nazi-looted art. In this case, the museum’s findings hinge not on a dramatic wartime theft, but on the more pervasive mechanism of coerced sale — a reminder that the Nazi project of dispossession often worked through markets as much as through force.
With the return of Ury’s “Interior with Children (The Siblings)”, the Pinakotheken signal a sharper institutional willingness to treat provenance research not as an internal exercise, but as a public reckoning with how collections were built — and at whose expense.
