Provenance research Kunstmuseum Basel compensates the heirs of collector Julius Freund
The Kunstmuseum Basel is compensating the heirs of the collector Julius Freund for eight works. Both parties have agreed that the community of heirs will receive a compensation payment and that works of art will remain in Basel, as the museum announced on Tuesday.
02.12.2025, 11:06
SDA
The parties have agreed not to disclose the amount paid. The Kunstmuseum approached the legal representative of the heirs on its own initiative and the decision was reached by mutual agreement, according to the press release.
The majority of the artworks are drawings and a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz. Also included are drawings by Carl Blechen, Max Liebermann, Hans von Marées and Adolph von Menzel.
Julius Freund (1869-1941), a German-Jewish textile manufacturer from Berlin, collected more than 700 works from German Romanticism, Realism and the 20th century. During the Nazi regime, he fled to England with his wife Clara. The art collector died there in 1941 in a hospital for the poor.
Auction due to economic hardship in exile
His daughter Gisèle Freund had works of art from her father's collection, which he had been able to place in Switzerland years earlier, auctioned off in Lucerne in 1942. She took this decision in order to ensure her destitute mother's livelihood, as the communiqué explains.
The Kunstmuseum Basel acquired five drawings and a lithograph from this auction for the Kupferstichkabinett. Two further works by the Freund family were also donated.
In 2005, the Federal Republic of Germany restituted four works that a special representative of Adolf Hitler had acquired at that auction. The restitution was justified on the grounds that Clara Freund's economic hardship in exile was a consequence of her Nazi persecution, according to the statement.
