Two Riders on the Beach

Andrea Baresel-Brand, the director of the provenance investigation, revealed that ultimately out of 1,039 works being researched there were 12 in the Gurlitt Dossier that were proven or highly likely to have been looted. These included Seated Woman, Rosenberg’s missing Matisse, and a painting by Max Liebermann, Two Riders on a Beach, which had been forcibly sold to the Nazis by the Jewish art collector David Friedmann. Of the works investigated, 297 were tentatively classified as “degenerate,” seized by the Nazis from museums or from private owners. More than 100 were simply unclassifiable—they had gaps in their provenance that meant they couldn’t be cleared, but neither could they be deemed suspicious. (English)