Otto Mueller, “Busts of Two Naked Women”

Art connoisseur Ismar Littmann was friends with the painter Otto Mueller, so it is very likely that the collector acquired the painting “Busts of Two Nude Women” directly from the artist. As Ruth Haller, the youngest of Littmann’s daughters, recalls: “The entire apartment was covered with paintings; there was no empty space anywhere (…). In the dining room, all the walls were adorned with Corinths, and my oldest brother had paintings by Otto Mueller in his room.”

We know that the painter was a guest in the spacious Littmann apartment located in the building at Eichbornstrasse 4 (today’s ul. Ksawerego Druckiego-Lubeckiego) in Breslau.

After the collector’s suicide, the composition was scheduled to be auctioned at the Max Perl salon in Berlin. Two days before the planned auction, the painting was confiscated by the Gestapo along with works by other contemporary masters recognized as representatives of “degenerate art.” The paintings were handed over to the Berlin National Gallery to determine whether they had any value from the perspective of Nazi propaganda. The then director of this institution, Eberhard Hanfstengel, selected 18 works from this group, including Mueller’s described painting, which survived. In July 1937, a Nazi propaganda exhibition titled “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) opened in Munich, aiming to condemn contemporary art that did not conform to the Nazi aesthetic canon. The exhibition was visited by over two million viewers. Among the 600 works of art, four paintings from Littmann’s collection, including the composition “Busts of Two Nude Women,” were on display.

In 1942, the composition was purchased by the well-known German collector Josef Haubrich, who in 1946 donated his collections to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. In 1976, the contemporary art collections from this institution were transferred to the newly established Ludwig Museum in Cologne. In 1999, the painting was returned to the heirs of the Breslau collector and then reacquired from them for museum collections.

Image Information:

glue paint on canvas, dimensions: 87.4 x 70.6 cm, current owner: Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Literature: Evelyn Weiss, Zwei Restitutionsfälle, [w:] Beiträge öffentlicher Einrichtungen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zum Umgang mit Kulturgütern aus ehemaligen jüdischen Besitz, red. Ulf Häder, Magdeburg 2001, s. 79-87.