Translozierte Sammlung, fragmentierte Erinnerung: Die Sammlung Otto Krebs zwischen Deutschland und Russland

After WWII, part of Otto Krebs’s art collection, including works by Renoir, Cezanne, and van Gogh, was seized by Soviet trophy brigades and brought to the USSR. Their presence in the Hermitage was long unacknowledged. This history was reconstructed in detail in Oberländer’s 2014 dissertation, yet several works remained undocumented. This talk turns to that group, including paintings by Ottilie Roederstein and Max Liebermann, as well as small Degas bronzes, recently placed on display. The Hermitage has installed these works in the Shchukin–Morozov memorial gallery, disclosing their Krebs provenance through wall labels alone. The talk asks what it means for provenance to surface this way, silently and only through display, at a moment when institutional dialogue between Russian and Western museums has all but ceased. It argues that transnational provenance research can make history visible even where institutional dialogue is absent.