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Between 1949 and 1953, about 2,100 "unclaimed" artworks returned to France from Germany after World War II were selected by museum professionals and labeled MNR (Musées nationaux récupération). About half of the works are paintings, while thirty percent are decorative arts, and the remaining pieces are drawings, sculptures, folk art, Asian art, and antiquities. This paper presents the so-called AOR (Antiquités orientales récupération), 31 objects entrusted to the care of the Département des Antiquités orientales, Musée du Louvre, which at the time included both pre-Islamic and Islamic objects. Research carried out by the Mission Mattéoli (1997-2000) determined that only two, maybe three, artworks are proven to have been looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg during the Nazi occupation of France. The rest of the AOR items were purchases made by German individuals and museums, confirming that the MNR corpus does not equate in its entirety to art plundered from Jewish collections. The study of this portion of the works is an opportunity to shed light on the Near Eastern art and antiquities market in Paris during the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the confiscation of many art collections, mainly from Jewish families, the Parisian art market was prosperous during the German occupation of France, from 1940 to 1944. This boom was also driven by the vast number of purchases made by German museums. After the war, most of these acquisitions were returned to France, with postwar investigations focusing on the recovery of paintings. The lack of interest in other types of art may explain, at least in part, why the acquisitions made by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin during the Occupation have been ignored for so long. Mainly antiquities, they are still part of the collections today. As this case study of the holdings of the Ägyptisches Museum in Berlin shows, these acquisitions can serve as a starting point for learning more about the antiquities dealers active during the Occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publishing tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843-1920) donated over 700 objects to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin between 1892 and 1894, among them the Green Head from a royal statue of Amasis (ÄM 11864). Most had been acquired on the antiquities market by Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch (1827-1894) during his journey to Egypt in 1891-1892, which was financed by Mosse. Leaving aside postcolonial discourse regarding the appropriation of ancient Egyptian artifacts by European travelers and scholars, this case study highlights another important and long-neglected aspect of the early history of German Egyptology: patronage or private support provided by Jewish entrepreneurs. Only recently a wider public was reminded of the engagement of James Simon (1851-1932), the most significant sponsor of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), whose gifts to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin included the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti. This article--which is based on the findings of a multi-author volume published jointly by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam and the Egyptian Museum in Berlin--discusses the prehistory of the seizure and sale of Mosse's private art collection in 1934, including Egyptian antiquities, and the attempted damnatio memoriae of him. The goal is to open a discussion with a broader, more complex approach, employing strategies of provenance research, to document the efforts and achievements of Jewish patrons of the arts and thus avoid their reduction to victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]