Wuppertal museum returns Slevogt's Paradiesvögel to Nazi-persecuted collector's heirs

Max Slevogt's Paradiesvögel (Birds of Paradise, 1900) will be auctioned at Ketterer Kunst in Munich on 5 December, with an estimate of €40,000–€60,000, after the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal restituted the painting to the heirs of Eduard Fuchs, a collector, Communist and writer who fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife.

The Wuppertal city council approved the restitution on 13 July 2026, following a provenance investigation that began in 2020 after Fuchs's heirs contacted the museum. The museum had acquired the painting in 2006 for €120,000, purchasing it through Kunsthaus Lempertz after exhibiting it in 2005.

Why is the painting going to auction?

Given the large number of heirs, a sale was the only option, Ketterer Kunst's head of communications Anja Häse tells The Art Newspaper. The heirs consigned the painting once the restitution was completed, she adds.

A second Slevogt work from Fuchs's collection, Don Quichotte und die Schafherde (Don Quixote and the Flock of Sheep, 1907), carries an estimate of €20,000–€30,000 in the same sale. According to Ketterer Kunst's provenance information, the current private owners reached a settlement with Fuchs's heirs in 2026 that allows the work to be auctioned free of restitution claims. The terms of what the house calls an "amicable restitution" remain undisclosed.

What happened to Fuchs's collection?

Nazi authorities confiscated the collection, then released it. In 1937, Fuchs was forced to sell works to pay a punitive emigration tax. Paradiesvögel went under the hammer in Berlin in June 1937, was acquired by the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt and passed to Fritz Slevogt in 1939.

The painting later surfaced at Kunsthaus Lempertz in December 2004, estimated at €100,000–€120,000, but went unsold. The museum's press officer, Marion Meyer, tells The Art Newspaper the work stayed in the auction house's custody and was then exhibited at the Von der Heydt-Museum in 2005.

The provenance was documented in the 2004 auction catalogue, Meyer says, but the museum can no longer establish whether a provenance check took place before the 2006 acquisition, or how thoroughly it was assessed. She confirms the museum is not considering legal action against Kunsthaus Lempertz over due diligence.

The 2020 investigation drew on a wider project, supported by the German Lost Art Foundation, to reconstruct Eduard and Margarete Fuchs's collection.

"Restituting Max Slevogt's Paradiesvögel means losing a painting, but we gain something far more important: the certainty that we have acted responsibly towards history," the museum's director, Roland Mönig, says in a press statement. He calls provenance research "an essential part of our work".

This is the second Slevogt restitution to Fuchs's heirs in two years: in 2024 the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart returned Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son, 1899), a triptych later sold at Ketterer Kunst. The Fuchs estate's reconstruction project suggests further claims against public collections may follow — though how many works remain unaccounted for is a question no source has yet answered.