A work by the German Renaissance painter and printmaker Lucas Cranach the Elder once hung in Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich, as The Art Newspaper has revealed. But how did the painting end up in the Fuhrer’s hands, or rather on his walls?
Starting from the Beginning
In 1963, the National Gallery purchased Cranach’s painting “Cupid Complaining to Venus” from E. & A. Silberman Galleries in New York, believing it to be authentic. However, according to curator Susan Foister, the dealer had provided a false provenance.
Abris Silberman, an associate of the dealer, had written to the National Gallery stating that the Cranach painting had been sold at auction in 1909 and subsequently came into the possession of the person from whom they acquired it through inheritance.
As Martin Bailey reports in The Art Newspaper, however, Silberman had actually purchased the painting from a former American war correspondent.
A Special Connection to the Painting?
In 1945, Patricia Lochridge, a young journalist working for Woman’s Home Companion magazine, was appointed mayor for a day by the American forces commander in the Berchtesgaden area of Germany, in what amounted to a publicity stunt. It is worth noting that Berchtesgaden, located very close to the Austrian border, was where Hitler had established his mountain retreat.
During her 24-hour tenure as mayor, Lochridge was taken to a warehouse containing recovered artworks and told by American forces that she could choose a painting to take home. She chose the Cranach.
Her son, Jay Hartwell, explained in 2004 that the soldiers told his mother she could go into the warehouse and pick whatever she liked. She then smuggled the painting back into the United States.
Who owned “Cupid Complaining to Venus” in the 1930s, before it appeared on Hitler’s wall, remains unknown. Bailey raises a further concern in his article: whether the painting had been confiscated from a Jewish collector or had been the subject of a forced sale.
The painting appears in a slightly blurred photograph from the early 1940s showing the interior of Hitler’s apartment in Munich, at 16 Prinzregentenplatz. The photograph, taken by an unknown person, surfaced in an auction catalog for furniture, where it was reproduced to certify the authenticity of a set of Hitler’s bookshelves. This occurred at the Hermann Historica auction in Munich on November 10 and 11, 1978. At the time, nobody noticed that the Cranach was visible in the photograph.
A contemporary written reference to the Cranach hanging in Hitler’s apartment appears in a 1937 book by British journalist and fascist George Ward Price. In his book “I Know These Dictators,” he mentioned having visited Hitler’s home and noted that the Fuhrer had recently acquired a Cranach and two Bruegels for his Munich apartment.
Hitler maintained an extensive private art collection and, in the early 1940s, had access to several thousand works earmarked for his planned Fuhrer Museum in Linz. The fact that he chose to keep the Cranach in his living room suggests he felt a particular connection to “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” since this was the room where Hitler frequently entertained his mistress, Eva Braun.
The Cranach painting depicts Cupid complaining to Venus, the nude goddess of love, that he has been stung by bees.
