Projects

Raubkunst at the Ringling: The Story Continues

Its genesis in 2016 was the glimpse of a fin becoming a feather that ignited a strong intuition at ”Raubkunst als Erinnerungsort,” a research fellowship sponsored by the Zentrum für Historische Forschung der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaftenin Berlin that same December. Eventually, and with the help of many people, “Raubkunst at the Ringling” ran in the Modernism journal Lapsus Lima on 9 January 2019 and was picked up in the news all the way to the Antipodes that week with the story “Otago Link to Identifying Art Looted by Nazis.” 

On 13 February 2019 I presented this research about Franz Marc’s woodcuts Schöpfungsgeschicte II (1914) and Geburt der Pferde (1913) amid colleagues at the College Art Association conference in New York City. The very next day I learned “Raubkunst at the Ringling” had been formally recognised as a “solved” case of Nazi looted art with the recognition of my findings by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe in the annals of The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945.

My hope all along has been that the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida operated by Florida State University, would acknowledge the illicit acquisition of the prints by the American UPI reporter Robert Beattie from the notorious “Kunsthändler to the Third Reich” Bernhard A. Böhmer in 1940 prior to Beattie’s donation of them to the Ringling in 1956 where they have been hidden since, and allow these works to be shared with the public.

To more fully bring this story to light, I have created a collaborative book project half catalogue, half detective story, about these works. Here is the first Call for Authors: Piazzetta Provenance Project CFA: Raubkunst at the Ringling: The Catalogue in Absentia.

Write me at jeanmarie.carey@germanmodernism.org if you are interested in working together on this project.