The city of Dusseldorf has been asked to return ‘Foxes‘ (1913), a painting by Franz Marc. Germany’s advisory panel has asked to return the painting to the heirs of a Jewish banker who sold it to fund his escape to Chile after he was imprisoned in a concentration camp.
The painting is estimated between €15m-€30m and have been hung on the walls of the Dusseldorf Kunstpalast. Markus Stoetzel, the lawyer representing the heirs of Kurt Grawi, a Jewish investment banker who was forced to flee Berlin under the Nazis said his clients are “happy that the advisory commission has recognized his suffering under the Nazis and the context of pressure and necessity in which he sold this work”.
He purchased Foxes in 1928. The banker and entrepreneur’s businesses and properties were forcibly dissolved or handed to non-Jewish owners after 1935. He was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for several weeks in 1938. At the end of 1939, he escaped via Belgium to Santiago de Chile. He was by this time destitute and reliant on friends to fund his journey from Brussels, the advisory panel reports.
In New York, Foxes sold in 1940 for an unknown price to the German-American film director Willam Dieterle. Grawi had previously offered it to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, but is presumed to have declined the museum’s offer.
Foxes was acquired in 1961 by Helmut Horten, who donated it to the Dusseldorf city art collections. Dusseldorf had argued that Grawi received a fair purchase price in New York and was free to dispose of it as he wished, so the sale could not be deemed “due to Nazi persecution”. Grawi’s heirs said he sold the painting purely because of his need to finance the family’s escape.