Curators Highlight Key Works from Pietzsch Surrealism Collection for Provenance Research Day

For International Provenance Research Day on April 8, curators from the exhibition 'Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism. Provenances of the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection' at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie have selected notable artworks from the presentation. The featured pieces illustrate themes of friendship, trade, loss, persecution, and new beginnings. André Masson's 1931/32 painting 'Massaker' addresses the artist's World War I experiences and pre-war tensions, originally handled by Jewish gallerist Paul Rosenberg who fled to New York in 1940. Max Ernst's 1935 work 'Flugzeugfalle' depicts airplane-devouring plants and belonged to his friend Kurt Seligmann, who escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to New York with his wife Arlette in 1939. Jacques Lipchitz's 1922 cubist sculpture 'Sitzender Mann mit Gitarre' represents the artist's exile story; the Jewish-Lithuanian sculptor fled France in 1941 with assistance from the Emergency Rescue Committee and later had new casts made in New York. Dorothea Tanning's 1942 painting 'Spannung' (Voltage) reflects her engagement with surrealism after discovering the movement in New York and later exhibiting with Peggy Guggenheim and Julian Levy. Max Ernst's 1943 painting 'Gemälde für junge Leute,' created in Arizona after his escape to the U.S., was shown in Julien Levy's New York gallery in 1944. The exhibition, showcasing these works with complex ownership histories, runs until April 8, 2026, at the Neue Nationalgalerie, highlighting the Pietzsch collection's focus on surrealist networks and displacement narratives.