Details of Resolution

In May 2011 the Philadelphia Museum of Art concluded a settlement agreement with the heirs of Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer by which the Museum was allowed to retain a seventeenth-century Italian tapestry. The tapestry panel was part of a larger series celebrating the life of Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, 1568-1644). Provenance research revealed that the tapestry was part of a forced sale in Berlin in 1935 of the inventory of the art dealership Altkunst Antiquitäten, a subsidiary of Margraf and Co., a firm owned by the Oppenheimers. Founded in Berlin in 1912, by 1926 Margraf and Co. had become an umbrella company incorporating four prominent art dealerships. Eight of the Barberini tapestry panels belonged to Margraf and Co. by 1928. The success of the Jewish-owned firm attracted the attention of Nazi officials, who denounced the Oppenheimers as “Jewish capitalists” and promoted an anti-Semitic boycott of the company. The Oppenheimers fled Germany for France on April 1, 1933, shortly before they were to be arrested by the Gestapo. Soon after, the Nazi regime ousted Jakob Oppenheimer from the company management and the authorities appointed an Aryan administrator who was a close associate of Hermann Göring. In 1934 the Nazi regime liquidated the various galleries making up Margraf and Co. and sold off the stock in a series of sales in 1935. The eight Barberini tapestry panels were included in a sale held at Paul Graupe auction house in Berlin on April 26 and 27, 1935. The Oppenheimers were unable to receive any of the proceeds, which most likely went to pay the punitive Jewish flight and property taxes. Jakob Oppenheimer died in France in 1941 following internment at Nice, and Rosa Oppenheimer was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. The tapestry was a gift to the PMA in 1960 from the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who said that he purchased it at auction in Paris in the mid-1940’s. The identity of the purchaser at the 1935 auction and the panel’s whereabouts until its acquisition by de Noailles are unknown. In 2010 the PMA was alerted to the tapestry’s World War II history by Victoria Reed, Monica S. Sadler Assistant Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which owns four other panels from the series. After the PMA’s research confirmed that the tapestry was part of the group included in the forced sale in 1935, the PMA contacted the Oppenheimer heirs to initiate discussions to resolve the tapestry’s ownership.