Note: Following the restitution of Fédor Löwenstein’s three surviving Nazi-confiscated paintings to me, the Centre Pompidou’s Musee National d’Art Moderne (MNAM) sent me a dossier with documents about their history. In this post, I highlight some of the findings about the paintings’ dramatic and involved past and explain how an archivist and curator discovered they were looted art.
Related Posts:
POST 105: FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN’S NAZI-CONFISCATED ART: RESTITUTION DENIED
POST 137: MY FATHER’S FIRST COUSIN HEINZ LÖWENSTEIN: DISCOVERING HIS WHEREABOUTS DURING WORLD WAR II
POST 162: FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN’S CORRESPONDENCE WITH MARCELLE RIVIER, HIS ONETIME GIRLFRIEND
POST 163: THE WARTIME ESCAPADES OF HEINZ LÖWENSTEIN, FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN’S BROTHER
POST 181: JOE POWELL, ESCAPEE FROM A GERMAN STALAG WITH MY FATHER’S FIRST COUSIN HEINZ LÖWENSTEIN
Inasmuch as great art should ever belong to a single individual, the three paintings confiscated by the Nazis at the Port of Bordeaux on December 5, 1940, from my father’s first cousin Fédor Löwenstein that survived their destructive onslaught are now mine. In Post 189, I discussed the Restitution Ceremony that took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on September 16, 2025, where the formal turnover of the paintings took place, an event eleven years in the making. (Figure 1)
Following the handover, Dr. Camille Morando, the person at the Centre Pompidou responsible for the documentation of the museum’s collections, sent me a digital file with documents detailing the history of the three paintings. Being a nerd for this type of information, I spent some time reviewing and making sense of it. Most of it is written in French, a language I’m reasonably fluent in. I thought I would share with readers insights and findings from the portfolio.
First, let me review some of what is known about Fédor Löwenstein. (Figure 2) Readers are referred to earlier posts for more detail. Though born in 1901 in Munich, Germany, he is typically referred as a Czechoslovakian artist because his father’s family hailed from there and he held Czechoslovak nationality. Since his two younger siblings were born in Danzig, Germany (today: Gdańsk, Poland), respectively, in 1902 and 1905, Fédor likely never lived in Czechoslovakia. Regardless, there is no question he felt an affinity for his father’s homeland.
The Munich Agreement of 1938, a pact between Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia, was intended to prevent a war. It failed. Following the pact, Fédor painted “La Chute,” The Fall (Figure 3), in the style of Picasso’s Guernica. This iconic work reflected his anguish at the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.
Fédor studied at “L’ecole des arts decoratif de Berlin” (School of Decorative Arts in Berlin) then at “l’Academie des Beaux-Arts de Dresde” (Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden). In 1923 he moved to France where he spent the remainder of his life. Fédor Löwenstein was one of many Czechoslovak artists who lived and worked in Paris during what was known as the First Czechoslovak Republic that existed from 1918 to 1938.
Following his arrival in Paris, Fédor started exhibiting at the Autumn Salon in the mid-1920s, first under the name of Fédor Lovest, of Czech nationality, then later as Fédor Loevenstein of Czechoslovakia. He mostly exhibited still lifes, though in 1927 and 1933, he added paintings of nudes.
The fact that Fédor painted nudes is personally intriguing. Let me explain. Between the 1950s and 1980s, my parents would regularly visit Nice, France, where Fédor Löwenstein died in 1946, but where Fédor’s younger sister, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff, née Löwenstein, lived until her death in 1986. (Figure 4) During one of those visits, Hansi gave my father a pastel of a nude that to this day hangs in my mother’s bedroom. The work is framed so the signature is concealed, but it is logical to consider it might have been drawn by Fédor. One day, I intend to find out.
With his closest friends among the Czechoslovak artists, he regularly displayed his paintings between 1936-1938 with this group. His French friends included Robert and Sonia Delaunay, as well as students from the circle of his mentor André Lhote. Lhote ran a summer art academy in the medieval hilltop village of Mirmande in the Drôme department of southeastern France, where Fedor spent time in 1935 and 1938, then again later as discussed below.
The Nazis captured France in about six weeks (10 May- 25 June 1940) during the Battle of France, starting with the invasion on May 10, 1940, and culminating with the fall of Paris on June 14. This was followed by the signing of an armistice on June 22, 1940, which effectively divided and occupied the country. This resulted in the establishment in the south of the so-called “Free Zone,” the collaborationist Vichy French government led by Marshal Philippe Petain.
Shortly before the occupation of Paris, on the advice of Marcelle Rivier, one of Lhote’s students since 1928 and later Fédor’s lover (Figure 5), he relocated to Mirmande in the Free Zone. However, before leaving, Fédor made a final attempt to ship twenty-five of his canvases by boat from the Port of Bordeaux. They were destined for an exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. They never made it there as I’ll explain.
Fédor’s works are characterized as a blend of Cubism and abstract art. A 2014 catalog accompanying an exhibition in Bordeaux of three of his surviving works ponders the question whether the ongoing war was responsible for the evolution of Fédor’s painting style or whether the war accelerated a development already in process. Regardless, two of Löwenstein’s supporters from the Paris art scene, Robert Delaunay and André Lhote, are quoted in “Ce Soir” in 1937 characterizing him as “one of the most inspiring abstract painters.” (Pravdova 2016: p. 60, footnote 6)
In Mirmande Fédor continued working in difficult conditions. Then, on November 11, 1942, German troops occupied Vichy France in Operation Case Anton. No longer safe in Mirmande, in early 1943, disguised as a peasant woman and with the help of Marcelle Rivier and other members of the French Resistance, he was taken to Notre-Dame d’Aiguebelle Abbey, a Trappist monastery located 50km south of Mirmande. Concealed Jews were put to work there on various maintenance tasks related to upkeep of the monastery. In Löwenstein’s case, he painted tiles, a task for which he had no enthusiasm and was ill-suited. He eventually escaped from a work party he’d been assigned to and returned to Mirmande in Spring 1943, obviously feeling it was safe again.
By Fall 1943, Fédor was sick with an unknown ailment. He secretly traveled to Paris to consult a renowned hematologist at the Curie Institute using the pseudonym “Lauriston.” His condition remained undiagnosed and he continued to deteriorate. He seemed largely unconcerned with being arrested while in Paris because of his fluency in French and the fact that he was discrete about his Jewish background. In truth, he appears to have traveled to Paris several times during the Nazi occupation.
An article included in the dossier given to me by Dr. Morando is the catalog mentioned above that was written for an exposition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (Figure 6) in 2014 in which Löwenstein’s three martyred works were featured. It includes an intriguing footnote (number 24) suggesting Fédor used the pseudonym “Lauriston” as a cynical poke at the Gestapo since they had their Paris headquarters at “93 de la rue Lauriston.”
Family pictures I obtained in 2014 from the archives of the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, located outside Berlin, where the personal papers of two of Fédor’s aunts are archived, were taken in Nice. Given his declining health, it is clear he’d decided to spend his final days with his family there. The pictures were taken after the war ended because his youngest brother Heinz, who spent the entire war imprisoned or escaping from German stalags and was liberated sometime between March and May 1945, appears alongside Fédor in the postwar images. (Figures 7-8) Regular followers will recall the multiple posts I’ve written about Fédor’s brother Heinz. (Post 137; Post 137, Postscript; Post 163; Post 163, Postscript; Post 181; Post 194)
Fédor died in Nice on August 4, 1946, of Hodgkin lymphoma and was buried in the Cimetière Caucade. His mother passed away in 1949 and was entombed alongside her son. While their graves were eventually “evacuated” after the family stopped making payments required to keep them interred, their respective headstones survive as reminders of their existence. (Figure 9)
Included in the dossier that Dr. Morando sent me is the first page of a letter that was written to Mme. Sonia Delaunay on August 21, 1946, following Fedor’s death. Recall the Delaunays were friends and supporters of his from his days in Paris. Written by someone named “Ullmann,” the person told Mme. Delaunay that Fédor had passed away and wrote that “Je perds un ami et le monde un artiste dont la valeur sera peut-etre un jour reconnue.” Translated, “I lose a friend and the world an artist whose importance may one day be recognized.” This day has finally arrived.
With the above as background, having woven in historical events with findings from the file sent by Dr. Morando, let me briefly chronicle the paintings’ journey as documented in the dossier.
The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the “Special Task Force” headed by Adolf Hitler’s leading ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, was one of the main Nazi agencies engaged in the plunder of cultural valuables in Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War. A particularly notorious operation by the ERR was the seizure of art from French Jewish and a number of Belgian collections from 1940 to 1944. The plunder was brought to the Jeu de Paume building in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris for processing by the ERR’s “Special Staff for Pictorial Art,” the so-called the Sonderstab Bildende Kunst.
The twenty-five pieces of art Fédor Löwenstein tried to ship to New York on the eve of Germany’s capture of Paris are recorded as having been seized by the ERR at Hanger H at the Port of Bordeaux on December 5, 1940. Fedor had a premonition they would never arrive, a concern he expressed in writing to his girlfriend Marcelle Rivier. Following their seizure Fédor’s artworks were sent to the Jeu de Paume. (Figure 10)
At the Jeu de Paume, the paintings were relegated to the so-called “salle des martyrs,” a space where works rejected by Nazi esthetics of the time, “degenerate art” as they were referred to, were stored pending destruction. The fact that this fate awaited the three paintings I recovered in September 2025 is evidenced by the large red crosses chalked across their surfaces. They were slated to be “vernichtet,” destroyed. And yet, by some miracle, three of Löwenstein’s paintings confiscated in 1940 survived.
The documentation on the three Löwenstein paintings suggests that after being shuttled back and forth between the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume during the Nazi era, they wound up at the Louvre where they languished for many years. The many moves between the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume occurred for various reasons including the obsession by the Nazis to remove or destroy the degenerate art before a planned visit to the Jeu de Paume by Nazi dignitaries. It is well known that the space of the Jeu de Paume was rehung to highlight artworks for high-ranking Nazis who would regularly visit to “shop.” Hermann Göring, for example, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, is known to have visited the Jeu de Paume twenty times between November 1940 and November 1942 to select paintings for his personal collection. (Figure 11)
Some paintings considered to be degenerate were not destroyed because they could be traded to dealers or collectors for works more in line with the Nazi aesthetic. As Prévet & Thierry note, “These works, whose style was disapproved of by Nazi aesthetics, were often preserved only because of their market value and the possibilities they offered for exchange with older works that conformed more closely to official aesthetics.” (2012:34)
In any case, this is likely how many works of unknown provenance wound up in the Louvre.
The status of Löwenstein’s paintings was not “legally” resolved until 1973. Through administrative machinations, they were officially added to the modern art collections of the National Museum of Modern Art (Musee National d’Art Moderne) as an “anonymous donation.” Shortly before the museum’s relocation in 1977, the paintings were moved to the reserves of the Centre Pompidou where my wife and I first saw them in 2024. (Figure 12)
The identification of the three paintings, now mine, Les Arbres, Composition, and Les Peupliers, as looted art did not take place until December 2010. This was thanks to the work of archivists and curators, namely, Alain Prévet, head of the Archives of the National Museums, and Thierry Bajou, chief curator of artifacts of the French Museums. It is worth briefly relating how these two men were able to recognize Löwenstein’s paintings as looted art.
As Didier Schulmann, former Director of the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou (Figure 13), wrote in 2012, it was a case of the “purloined letter syndrome,” based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name, where the answer was right in front of people. (Schulmann 2012: 29).
Preserved in the Archives of the National Museum are thirteen negatives showing views of the rooms at the Jeu de Paume taken during the Nazi occupation exhibiting numerous pieces of art seized by the ERR; these include two negatives specifically showing the “salle des martyrs” (Figures 14-15) where the works deemed degenerate were hung. Using these negatives, Prévet & Bajou describe the process they followed:
“This work initially involved a detailed digitization of the negatives, work by work. Each operation was accompanied by specific brightness adjustments to optimize the legibility of each artwork. Next, we performed an anamorphosis (Figure 16) to correct the distortions related to perspective. From this stage, it was then possible to identify a number of works and confirm attributions suggested elsewhere.”
Next, they referred to a list that the noted art historian Rose Valland recorded in her notebook on March 10, 1942 (Figure 17), of modern art displayed in the Jeu de Paume on this date. It was the translation of a list drawn up by the German authorities that provided a brief description of the pieces of art with dimensions and the name of the owners from whom the artworks had been confiscated. Ironically, while this list was known to historians, astonishingly no one had ever cross referenced it with the photographs of the Jeu de Paume. Ergo, Didier Schulmann’s remark cited above of the “purloined letter syndrome.”
Prévet & Bajou continue:
“We also used a website recently launched by a team of American researchers led by Marc Masurovski, which reproduces all the records compiled by the ERR during the looting. This website provides a directory of the looted individuals and the works that passed through the Jeu de Paume, enriched with photographs of the seized works, when available, taken by ERR agents. We found most of the works visible on the negatives there, but some of them, now identified, remain known only through these negatives when they were not specifically photographed by the Germans.
This is how we were able to identify works by Fédor Löwenstein, whose works were looted in December 1940 in Bordeaux. In a list from March 1942, Rose Valland enumerates eleven of the twenty-five works looted from the artist (six watercolors being grouped together as one lot) (see Figure 17), and she mentions two others, around 1944, not explicitly in the ‘Aulnay train,’ but at least remaining in Paris. At least two canvases are visible in one of the photographs, but had never been linked to this artist, particularly because the Germans intended to destroy them. [EDITOR’S NOTE: These paintings correspond to “La Ville Moderne” and an untitled work (see discussion and figures below)]
The connection between visible works and those of a little-known artist, believed to have been destroyed according to the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) records, was made possible in part by a preliminary study of Löwenstein ‘s style, some of whose works appear similar to those of Paul Klee, but also by comparing the works still to be identified with those of Löwenstein listed in the ERR records. Comparing our hypotheses with the online catalog of the National Museum of Modern Art (MNAM) allowed us to find mention of three works by this artist (Figure 18), which were not illustrated at the time, one of which was clearly visible in one of the two photographs of the ‘room of martyrs.’” (2012: 34-35) [EDITOR’S NOTE: The visible painting was Fédor Löwenstein’s Composition] (Figure 19)
Let me make a few observations related to the above.
The address of the website which reproduces all the records compiled by the ERR during the looting is: http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume
The so-called “Aulnay train” was a train loaded with looted art the Germans had designated for urgent shipment on August 2, 1944, from Paris as the city was about to fall to Allied troops (i.e., the Allies liberated Paris on August 25, 1944). It was supposed to be the last shipment, but alerted by Rose Valland, the Societe nationale des chemins de fer francais (SNCF), the National Company of the French Railways, blocked the train on August 27 at the train station of Aulnay-sous-Bois; as a result many of the artworks the train contained were restored to their rightful owners. None of Löwenstein’s works, however, were aboard this train since the Germans had already decided to destroy them. As a related aside, none of Löwenstein’s artworks was individually photographed by the Germans, likely for the same reason that the Germans intended to destroy his works.
Based on a comment in Rose Valland’s notebook, footnote number 40 in the catalog accompanying the 2014 Löwenstein exhibit in Bordeaux implies Rose Valland didn’t realize Löwenstein was a painter but rather thought he was a collector. (see Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946), trois œuvres martyres (exh. cat))
Two of the Löwenstein’s paintings show “signs of laceration along the edges, where they were torn from their stretchers.” (Ministère de la Culture 2025) Documentation in the MNAM dossier sent by Dr. Morando indicates these edges have been repaired. However, since the red crosses bear witness to the “dramatic marks of history,” their “stigmata” remain. (Ministère de la Culture 2025) (Figure 20)
The Löwenstein painting Prévet & Bajou refer to as clearly visible in one of the ERR photos of the “salle des martyrs” is the one titled “Composition (Paysage).” Fascinatingly, it is tucked in a corner alongside works by Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse. Clearly, lofty company to be grouped with! (see Figure 15)
To remind readers, I filed my claim with the French Minister of Culture for compensation and restitution of Löwenstein’s artworks in 2014 with Florence Saragoza’s assistance; Florence was the curator of the 2014 exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux where the martyred works were first shown. The claim mentioned 25 art pieces but over the years I never got a clear answer where this figure came from. A footnote in the French original of the paragraphs quoted above finally provided the answer. The web address to the database developed by Marc Masurovski, cited above, includes the two original pages of the list developed by the ERR listing the names, dates, art medium, and dimensions of the 25 artworks seized from Fédor Löwenstein. (Figures 21a-c) The paintings are catalogued under ERR record numbers Löwenstein 4 (Composition), 15 (Les Peupliers), and 19 (Les Arbres). These correspond to the three paintings I retrieved in September 2025. As readers can see, all 25 of Löwenstein’s listed works were crossed out, and marked “Vernichtet” (“destroyed”), even the three that survived.
The online catalog of the National Museum of Modern Art cited by Prévet & Bajou (http://collection.centrepompidou.fr.artworks) no longer includes the three Löwenstein paintings in their inventory.
One last observation about Prévet & Bajou’s discoveries. In the second picture taken by the ERR in the “salle des martyrs,” the curators discovered two other canvases in Löwenstein’s style, the first corresponds to the painting entitled “La Ville Moderne,” the Modern City (Figure 22), the second is untitled because too little of it is visible. (Figure 23)
Alain Prévet recounts the astonishing discovery: “No one had recognized the Löwensteins before. It was through studying the negatives of these two images, preserved in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that we were able to identify them.”
Once Löwenstein’s three paintings were positively identified as looted works, they were removed from the inventory of the MNAM (Musee National d’Art Moderne) in 2011 and transferred to the register of artworks confiscated by the Nazis, called the MNR (Musée Nationaux Recuperation) pending their return to heirs. Since their restitution in September 2025, they have now been removed from the MNR database. (Figures 24a-b)
Briefly, some history on the MNR. At the end of the Second World War, roughly 61,000 artworks looted from French territory were recovered in Germany and returned to France. About three-quarters of them were restored to their rightful owners, 13,000 were sold by the French state, and roughly 2,200 were placed under the care of national museums, often regional institutions. Legally, the French state is only a temporary custodian of these works. As such, they are not considered part of the permanent public collections of France’s national museums. This latter group, made up of approximately 2,200 artworks as just stated, are referred to by the acronym MNR, Musée Nationaux Recuperation. The MNR designation signals a complex history. At the MNAM, where these three surviving Löwenstein paintings resided until Prévet & Bajou came along were labeled as R26P (Les Peupliers), R27P (Les Arbres), and R28P (Composition), not by MNR numbers since they were only recognized as looted works in 2010.
It is pointless to imagine how well-known Fédor Löwenstein might have become during his life if circumstances had been different. However, in an article written in 2016 by Anna Pravdova, entitled “Vernichtet! Three rescued paintings by Fédor Löwenstein,” published in the “Bulletin of the National Gallery in Prague,” she notes an intriguing fact. Following his death, the property of the Nierendorf Gallery in New York, where Fédor had intended his consignment of 25 paintings to be shipped, was purchased in its entirety by the Guggenheim Museum. It’s enormously satisfying that by dint of owning Fédor’s surviving paintings, I am playing a role in helping my ancestor gain the recognition he never obtained in life, even though his artworks may never hang in the Guggenheim.
REFERENCES
Löwenstein, Fédor. Fédor Löwenstein (exh. cat.), 1962, Gallerie Blumenthal, Paris. (includes André Lhote quote from Ce Soir, Nov. 27, 1937)
Löwenstein, Fédor. Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946), trois œuvres martyres (exh. cat), 15 Mai-24 Août 2014, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.
Ministère de la Culture. (2025, September 16). Tracking the ghost paintings of Fédor Löwenstein, lost to Nazi looting. [Press release].
Pravdová, A. (2016). Vernichtet! Three rescued paintings by Fédor Löwenstein. Bulletin of the National Gallery in Prague, XXVI, 55-60.
Prévet, A, Bajou, T. La récente identification de tableaux spoliés à l’artiste Fédor Löwenstein, in Florence Saragoza (ed.), L’Art victime de la guerre. Destin des œuvres d’art en Aquitaine pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Bordeaux, 2012, p. 33-35.
Saragoza, F. (ed.) (2012). L’Art victime de la guerre. Destin des œuvres d’art en Aquitaine pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Bordeaux.
Schulmann, Didier. (2012). Fédor Löwenstein, le pillage et la liquidation des ateliers des artistas juifs pendant l’occupation, in Saragoza (ed.), in Florence Saragoza (ed.), L’Art victime de la guerre. Destin des œuvres d’art en Aquitaine pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Bordeaux, 2012, p. 29-32.
