[Lifestyle] Almost safe, she returned to Munich and lost her painting and her life

[-_-Moltres-_-]

 

Late in the summer of 1938, as the Nazis escalated their persecution of German Jews, Ilse Hesselberger and her daughter, Trudy, traveled from Munich to Milan to visit relatives.

From there the daughter went on to the United States, and safety. The mother, who was a Protestant by faith but Jewish by ethnicity, made her way back to Germany, where she had been known for years as a socialite who gave lavish parties.

But upon her return, Hesselberger found little to celebrate in Munich, a city that played a key role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Identified as a Jew under the Nazi race laws, she soon was forced to sell her country estate. She also lost an art collection that included a painting, “Portrait of a Young Man with a Quill and Sheet of Paper,” that she had bought in 1927 and is now viewed as a master work.

 

Historians said that Hesselberger was assured that she would be spared resettlement if she paid, but that promise was a lie. In November 1941, just weeks after turning over 100,000 reichsmarks to help finance the camp, she was placed on the first train from there, which went to German-occupied Lithuania, where she and many other Jews were murdered by the Nazis five days later.

Now the portrait that Hesselberger bought in 1927 is to be sold at auction to benefit one charity that aids Holocaust survivors, among others, and a second that helps the visually impaired. After acquiring the painting at some point, the German government returned it earlier this year to Hesselberger’s estate, which has consigned the work to Sotheby’s.

 

Experts there have concluded that the painting, which has been attributed over the years to a number of Italian painters, is actually a portrait by Agnolo Bronzino, a leading artist of the Florentine Renaissance who is thought to have created it in roughly 1527.

The work shows a figure holding a quill in one hand and seeming to point with the other to a few lines of words inscribed in Latin on a creased sheet of paper.

Sotheby’s estimates that the work, which will be included in a January sale of old masters in New York, will sell for $3 million to $5 million. Works by Bronzino are not often on the open market, according to Sotheby’s, which said the last offered at auction, a painting called “Portrait of a Young Man with a Book,” sold in 2015 for more than $9 million.

Link:-https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/almost-safe-she-returned-to-munich-and-lost-her-painting-and-her-life-jews-war-crime-genocide-8287916/