How does this artwork elucidate its Provenance and exhibition history?
Despite being the painting's subject, Place de la Concorde was never owned by Ludovic Lepic and Edgar Degas did not paint it for him. The painting remained in the possession of Degas, who never exhibited it on his own, until it was sold to Paul Durand-Ruel. In 1911, the German art collector Otto Gerstenberg purchased the painting from Durand-Ruel for 120,000 franks. The painting, along with the rest of Gerstenberg's collection, was left to his daughter Margarete Scharf after his death in 1935. In 1943, during World War II, most of Gerstenberg's art collection was stored in the bunker of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The rest of the collection was stored elsewhere in the Victoria firm and was destroyed in an air raid. After the war, the surviving paintings of Gerstenberg's collection were looted by the Soviet Union.Place de la Concorde had been assumed to have been destroyed for almost five decades following World War II. In 1994, the Hermitage Museum publicly announced that it was in possession of more than 70 French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that had been looted from private German collections by the Soviet Union during the war. Along with Edgar Degas's Place de la Concorde, the Hermitage Museum announced it was in possession of paintings by other artists including Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh. The paintings had been locked in small storage room on the second floor of the museum, and had only been known to a handful of museum personnel. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Hermitage Museum's director, had only seen the paintings for the first time in 1991.In 1995, the Hermitage Museum held an exhibition titled Hidden Treasures Revealed which displayed 74 looted paintings, including Edgar Degas's Place de la Concorde. Many of these artworks had never been exhibited before. Of the 74 paintings, 73 had been taken from private collections. Only one painging by Claude Monet had been taken from a public museum collection. Five of these paintings, including Place de la Concorde, had been taken from the collection of Otto Gerstenberg. Nearly 600,000 people attended the exhibition in the first few months of the show.The exhibition Hidden Treasures Revealed proved to be controversial due to its displaying looted artworks. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Hermitage Museum sought to become more open with the rest of the world by displaying these previously hidden artworks. Despite previous agreements between Russian and Germany in 1990 and 1992 to return unlawfully looted artworks, Russian officials argued that only artworks stolen by individual soldiers could be considered unlawfully taken, and that artworks taken under official orders did not need to be returned to their previous owners. To this day, Place de la Concorde remains in the collection of the Hermitage Museum.
Edgar Degas Gerstenberg's collection Mikhail Piotrovsky Hermitage Museum Otto Gerstenberg Paul Durand-Ruel Camille Pissarro Honoré Daumier Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Pierre-Auguste Renoir Place de la Concorde Nationalgalerie fall of the Soviet Union Claude Monet Vincent van Gogh Post-Impressionist World War II Paul Cézanne