Lovis Corinth, the National Gallery and the "Degenerate Art" campaign
To mark the 100th anniversary of Lovis Corinth's death, the Alte Nationalgalerie is holding a concentrated exhibition that examines the fate of the works of the artist and his wife, the painter Charlotte Berend-Corinth, in the Nationalgalerie's collection.
Image gallery
Lovis Corinth, Selbstbildnis vor der Staffelei, Detail, 1919, Öl auf Leinwand
Lovis Corinth, Frau mit Rosenhut, 1912, Detail, Öl auf Leinwand
Lovis Corinth, Das Trojanische Pferd, 1924, Detail, Öl auf Leinwand
The exhibition focuses on the different provenances of the paintings: The Nationalgalerie's holdings are supplemented by paintings that ended up in other museums as a result of the National Socialist "Degenerate Art" campaign and are now temporarily returning especially for the exhibition.
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) is considered, alongside Max Liebermann and Max Slevogt, to be the most important representative of German Impressionism. With over twenty oil paintings, some of them large-format, the Nationalgalerie has an extensive and significant collection of the painter's works.
However, the paths of these objects to the National Gallery's collection are often marked by loss and partial return:
Some paintings were confiscated in 1937 as "degenerate" but were surprisingly returned in 1939, others could only be reacquired much later; some were not confiscated, while others were sold at the time and are now in Germany and abroad.
To compensate for these losses, further paintings by Corinth and his wife Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1880-1967) were acquired after 1945 in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. The artist, who was born in East Prussia, moved from Munich to Berlin in 1901. After a stroke in 1911, his brushwork became much more expressive. When he died of pneumonia on July 17, 1925, he was on a trip to Amsterdam, where he wanted to look at the paintings by Frans Hals and Rembrandt again.
Curatorial team
The exhibition is curated by Dieter Scholz, research associate at the Alte Nationalgalerie, and Andreas Schalhorn, research associate at the Kupferstichkabinett, in cooperation with Sven Haase, research associate for provenance research in the Central Archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
The exhibition is made possible by the Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The exhibition is sponsored by the Lovis Corinth Society e.V.
A special exhibition by the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in cooperation with the Kupferstichkabinett and the Central Archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
