1918 (ca.), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Sand Hills near Grünau -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
According to Rosy Fischer's records, this painting's original German title was Sandberge in Grünau, and it was dated 1913. Left behind when her son Max fled Nazi Germany in 1935, its title was changed several times, leading to the work's misidentification for seventy years.
Initially, Kurt Feldhäusser, a private collector in Germany, retitled it Dunes at Fehmarn in 1938, assuming it portrayed Fehmarn, an island off the northern coast of Germany, which was one of Kirchner's most popular landscape subjects in 1912 and 1913. After Feldhäusser's death, it was sold in 1949 through a New York gallery to New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1967, a scholar of Kirchner's work, Donald Gordon, recognized that the painting's setting was not Fehmarn. He suggested that MoMA change the title to Sand Hills in Engadine and date it 1917-18, thinking that it resembled the landscape Kirchner painted after he moved to Davos, Switzerland, at the end of World War I. When the Fischer family renewed the search for Max's work in 2004, a MoMA researcher found a postcard picturing the hills near Grünau that almost exactly matches the composition of this painting. This discovery confirmed that it is indeed the painting titled Sandberge in Grünau that Rosy Fischer recorded on her original list, which led MoMA to return the painting to the Fischer family.
1918 (ca.), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Sand Hills near Grünau -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
According to Rosy Fischer's records, this painting's original German title was Sandberge in Grünau, and it was dated 1913. Left behind when her son Max fled Nazi Germany in 1935, its title was changed several times, leading to the work's misidentification for seventy years.
Initially, Kurt Feldhäusser, a private collector in Germany, retitled it Dunes at Fehmarn in 1938, assuming it portrayed Fehmarn, an island off the northern coast of Germany, which was one of Kirchner's most popular landscape subjects in 1912 and 1913. After Feldhäusser's death, it was sold in 1949 through a New York gallery to New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1967, a scholar of Kirchner's work, Donald Gordon, recognized that the painting's setting was not Fehmarn. He suggested that MoMA change the title to Sand Hills in Engadine and date it 1917-18, thinking that it resembled the landscape Kirchner painted after he moved to Davos, Switzerland, at the end of World War I. When the Fischer family renewed the search for Max's work in 2004, a MoMA researcher found a postcard picturing the hills near Grünau that almost exactly matches the composition of this painting. This discovery confirmed that it is indeed the painting titled Sandberge in Grünau that Rosy Fischer recorded on her original list, which led MoMA to return the painting to the Fischer family.