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Munich (dpa / lby) - The Bavarian State Painting Collections have returned a late medieval work of art stolen by the Nazis to the heirs of the AS Drey art dealer.
The depiction of Saint Florian from 1480, painted on wood, comes from a Bavarian painter's workshop and hung for years in the Staatsgalerie in Burghausen.
"With the restitution of the Gothic wooden plaque to the legitimate community of heirs, the great injustice that the Drey and Stern families had to experience from the National Socialists is to be publicly recognized and to some extent made good," said Minister of Education Bernd Sibler (CSU) on Monday in Munich.
The Munich art dealer AS Drey, with additional offices in London and New York, belonged to Siegfried, Franz and Paul Drey as well as Ludwig and Friedrich Stern.
In the course of the anti-Semitic policy of the National Socialists, the Jews were expelled from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in 1935 and asked to dissolve their company.
In addition, there was an extensive tax audit that was to be assessed as preparation for the Aryanization.
The result: high tax demands, which the owners could only pay off by auctioning works of art in Berlin, including the wooden panel.
Provenance researchers now rate the auction as a forced sale.
In 1936 the picture went to the State Painting Collections, which acquired it in exchange for two other works.
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© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210426-99-356033 / 2
State painting collections