The old year ended for us with an absolute highlight. Just before Christmas, we traveled to Paris to pick up one of Joachim Weingart’s rare oil paintings, which we had discovered on a gallery’s website. A fantastic work, remarkable both in its subject and in its quality. Measuring 81 × 65 cm, it unquestionably ranks among Weingart’s major works.

The second work we are presenting today is an oil painting by Josef Kowner, which we found on eBay. We picked it up in a village in the Palatinate, not far from Karlsruhe, where it had been stored in a barn alongside around 7,000 other paintings. If we hadn’t seen it ourselves, we wouldn’t have believed it. The seller needed some time to locate it…

was born in 1895 in Kiev and lived in Łódź. After the Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he was interned in February 1940 in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, the renamed city of Łódź. Following the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz and, as the Red Army advanced transferred westward to the Wöbbelin camp, a subcamp of Neuengamme concentration camp.

By the time of his arrival, he was already physically severely weakened and was liberated by US troops in May 1945. Kowner survived the horrors of five years in the ghettos and concentration camps and was granted asylum in Sweden in 1946, where he passed away as a Swedish citizen in Kalmar on May 8, 1967.

was born in 1895 in Drohobych, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine. He studied in Weimar, Vienna, and Berlin. In 1923, he moved to Paris and is today considered one of the most renowned painters of the École de Paris.

After the German occupation of France in June 1940, Weingart, as a Jewish artist, was stripped of his rights and economically isolated. In March 1942, he was arrested by the Gestapo in his Paris studio and initially sent to the Pithiviers internment camp. On July 17, 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Transport No. 6, where he was murdered.

The exhibition “State Art in Baden 1918–1933” was the he unfortunate culmination of a cultural struggle in Karlsruhe that had already begun shortly after Hans Thoma was appointed director of the Badische Kunsthalle in 1919. It was Thoma’s pupil, Hans Adolf Bühler, from near Lörrach, who, as a professor at the art academy, fueled the fight against modern art for many years.

As an avowed anti-Semite and member of the NSDAP already appointed in 1932 as director of the art academy, he was also named director of the Badische Kunsthalle on March 11, 1933. His predecessor, Lilli Fischel, was “placed on leave” the same day. In April 1933, Bühler organized one of the very first exhibitions in which modern artists were defamed as “degenerate.”