In this artwork, how is the Provenance discussed?
None of the people who agreed to sit for Kokoschka during his Switzerland trip decided to purchase the resulting portraits, including the Duchess and her husband. Instead, the portraits were exhibited in June 1910 at Galerie Paul Cassirer in Berlin in a show organized by Herwarth Walden at Loos's urging. At one point the painting was temporarily misplaced in transit to Berlin; Kokoschka desperately wrote Walden asking to be informed as soon as it was found, stating "it is my most valuable picture." The Duchess's portrait was shown under the title A Precious Woman; her husband's A Brutal Egoist.The Berlin exhibition proved successful, and the portrait of the Duchess was purchased by Karl Ernst Osthaus for the Folkwang Museum in Hagen. It was Kokoschka's first artwork to be acquired by a museum; an important step in the 24-year-old artist's career. After Osthaus's death in 1921 his museum's collection was purchased by the City of Essen and merged with the Essener Kunstmuseum, forming the Museum Folkwang in 1922.In 1937 the painting was confiscated by the Nazi regime as part of a coordinated effort to purge so-called "degenerate art" from the Reich. It was pilloried in the Munich Degenerate Art exhibition, where it hung on the south wall of room four opposite Kokoschka's The Bride of the Wind, then held in storage at Schönhausen Palace until 1939, when it was sold at the Degenerate Art auction at Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland. It was lot number 65 in the auction and sold for 3,000 Swiss francs.The buyer, through the intermediary Fritz Steinmeyer, was the diplomat and art collector Paul E. Geier, who also purchased Franz Marc's Grazing Horses IV at the auction. Upon Geier's death in 1983 the painting became a part of the Cincinnati Art Museum, where it still resides.The portrait of the Duchess's husband, Marquis Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac, which had also been looted by the Nazis and auctioned off, ended up in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In 2018 it was restituted to the heirs of the original owner Alfred Flechtheim, who then sold it for $20 million.However, the Museum Folkwang and other state-owned German museums affected by Nazi looting have generally not tried to reclaim works such as the Duchess because at the time, the works of art were the property of the German government, and their removal and sale was legal under German law.
Swiss franc The Bride of the Wind Essen Alfred Flechtheim restituted Schönhausen Palace Paul Cassirer Franz Marc Museum Folkwang Paul E. Geier Cincinnati Art Museum Moderna Museet Fritz Steinmeyer degenerate art Cincinnati Hagen Degenerate Art auction Karl Ernst Osthaus Galerie Fischer Nazi portrait Grazing Horses IV Degenerate Art exhibition Swiss francs Herwarth Walden