Where should he best put the picture? That is a question that Felix Bloch asks before the official handover. In a dark place in his apartment, the advice he received from Dr. Andreas Strobl from the State Graphic Collection Munich in their study room on Katharina-von-Bora-Straße. And how should the only surviving grandson and heir of the Viennese collector Richard Stein, who lives in America, know how to keep a watercolor properly. Until three years ago he did not even know about the existence of the 11.5 by 17 centimeter picture “Houses in Teplitz” by the Austrian painter Rudolf von Alt, and that it once belonged to his grandfather.
In 1938 Richard Stein sold the watercolor and other works verifiably to the Munich art dealer Almas-Dietrich. Significantly below value after she had told him that the German troops would otherwise confiscate it. A predicament that was only faked. Instead, Almas-Dietrich acquired the watercolor for the then NSDAP Reichsleiter Martin Bormann. In 1946 it landed at the Central Collecting Point. In 1959 the State Collection of Graphic Art received it as a transfer from state property. There it was last seen in 2015 in the exhibition “Rudolf von Alt. … ingenious, lively, natural and true. The Munich holdings and their provenance”, but without its origin being clearly clarified.
The fact that Felix Bloch, who traveled with his wife and two daughters, received the picture as restitution is thanks to a research project funded by the Office for Provenance Research in Berlin, which was carried out together with the Central Institute for Art History was put on. And that Bloch received it in the former administration headquarters of the NSDAP, where the study room is today, also had a “special irony”, as the art minister Bernd Sibler put it. When provenance researcher Angelika Enderlein called him from Berlin in 2018, it came out of the blue, said Felix Bloch. Because his grandfather had never reported about the lost works of art, and his parents had never talked about the Nazi era and the escape, when he was three years old himself. In any case, he felt no bitterness, only joy and a certain sadness. Because his grandfather doesn’t live to see that moment anymore.