Two women in long dresses, expressionistically distorted.

Bizarrely crooked walls and bright flowers in the background.

A wing seems to fall out of the picture.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's painting "Musikzimmer II" from 1920 is one of the masterpieces by the Brücke artist and one of the highlights of the modern collection in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.

But the picture is surrounded by a mystery.

Its origin is not fully understood.

It is part of the collection of art Dr.

Conrad Doebbeke.

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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After the war, Hanover's artistic landscape lay in ruins, as did the bombed-out city center of the Lower Saxony state capital.

The Provincial Museum and the Kestner Museum suffered heavy war losses.

The Leine flood of 1946 did the rest and destroyed a large part of the art objects that had been stored in a depot on the river.

After the war, the Hanoverian museums therefore wanted a new start.

The wealthy city decided to acquire prestigious works from the art trade and private hands.

A project that began in 1949 with the purchase of the Doebbeke Collection and today presents the museum management with major challenges.

A first important step

The exhibition “Forbidden – traded. The Doebbeke Collection in Twilight” takes a first look at the provenance research on the collection of the Berlin real estate agent, from which the city acquired more than 120 works of art. Using the example of sixty of them, the show illuminates the trade routes and ownership structure of stolen art and presents the fates of the often Jewish victims of art expropriation in the "Third Reich".

The city administration bought the bundle to compensate for the losses suffered during the Nazi dictatorship.

That is why it not only contains important Expressionist masterpieces by artists such as Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde or Max Pechstein, but also works of art of German Impressionism.

The paintings by Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann form the core of the collection.

They were handed over to the State Museum shortly after acquisition, where they could be seen in the adjoining Municipal Gallery until the 1970s.

When the Sprengel Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1979 with the support of the chocolate dynasty of the same name, all works from the 20th century moved to the new building on Maschsee.

After Doebbeke's death in 1954, through his widow Elsa Doebbeke, paintings from his possession repeatedly found their way onto the German art market in the years that followed.

It was not until the Washington Agreement on Restitution concluded in 1998 that the situation of the art collection changed decisively, because the City of Hanover committed itself to tracking all acquisitions by the municipal museums from 1933 onwards.

In 2008 a research center for provenance was set up.

This exhibition is now an important first step in documenting the entanglements of the art trade.