Max Silberberg (27 February 1878, in Neuruppin – after 1942, in Ghetto Theresienstadt or Auschwitz concentration camp) was a major cultural figure in Breslau,[1] a German Jewish entrepreneur, art collector and patron who was robbed and murdered by the Nazis.
At the age of 24, Silberberg joined the factory for metal processing M. Weißenberg, part of the Vereinigung der Magnesitwerke cartel, which manufactured refractory building materials for lining blast furnaces.
The dining room, including the furniture and the carpet, was designed by architect August Endell in 1923 in the Art Deco style and decorated with outstanding collection of paintings, mostly with German and French works from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Silberberg, like another famous Jewish Breslau art collector, Ismar Littmann, immediately lost all of his public offices and was hounded and robbed.
[22][23] The collection also included German Impressionism such as In the Kitchen and Market in Haarlem by Max Liebermann or Flieder im Glaskrug by Lovis Corinth as well as drawings by Adolph Menzel, Hans Purrmann and Otto Müller and sculptures by his contemporary Georg Kolbe.
[27] Impressionist works included Pertuiset as a lion hunter (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) and Young Woman in Oriental Costume (Foundation EG Bührle Collection) by Édouard Manet[28] and The Reading (Louvre), Little Girl with Hoops (National Gallery of Art) as well the privately owned pictures Laughing Girl, Gondola, Venice and Bouquet of Roses by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
The collector owned the paintings Boats on the Seine (private collection) and Snow in the Setting Sun (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen) by Claude Monet.
Late Impressionist works in Silberberg's collection included the paintings Still Life with Apples and Napkin (Musée de l'Orangerie), Jas de Bouffan (private property) and Landscape in the Aix Area (Carnegie Museum of Art), as well as the drawing of a male's back view Nude (Hermitage) by Paul Cézanne.
He acquired the wooden sculpture Die Mourning by Ernst Barlach from the actress Tilla Durieux, featured at the entrance of the Silberberg house.
The Berlin National Gallery which had acquired Hans von Marées' Husband with a Yellow Hat at the forced Graupe auction of 1935,[36] restituted the painting to the Silberberg heir in July 1999 and then bought it back the same year.
Vincent van Gogh's drawing Olive Trees in Front of the Alpilles Mountains, also auctioned at Graupe in 1935, was restituted to Greta Silberberg who later sold it.
Artworks from the Silberberg collection have also been located in the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt, including Market in Haarlem by Max Liebermann and Head of a Bavarian Girl with Inntaler Hat by Wilhelm Leibl.
[40] In 2014, Germany's Wiesbaden Museum attempted to draw attention to the problem of looted art by hanging Hans von Marees’ Die Labung facing the wall because it had been obtained due to a forced sale from the Silberberg collection under the Nazis.
[41] The painting Stockhornkette mit Thunersee by Ferdinand Hodler, claimed by the Silberberg family, is in St. Gallen Art Museum on loan from St. Gallen government councilor Simon Frick, who purchased it from the Kornfeld Gallery in Bern[42][43] According to the Swiss Independent Commission the provenance had been falsified to make it appear to have been from a different collection when it had in reality belonged to Max Silberberg.
[44] The Silberberg family also requested the restitution of Édouard Manet's painting Young Woman in an Oriental Costume (also La Sultane) from the Zurich E. G. Bührle Foundation which had purchased it from Paul Rosenberg[45] The museum refused, asserting that it was not sold under duress.
[48] Settlement agreements with the Silberberg heir were reached for the paintings The Rock in Hautepierre by Gustave Courbet in the Art Institute of Chicago[49][50] which had acquired it from Paul Rosenberg in 1965,[51] and Boulevard Montmartre, Spring (1897) by Camille Pissarro, in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
[58] Represented by Monika Tatskow, the Silberberg family made a claim against the Orangerie Museum in Paris for the return of the painting by Cezanne, Still Life with Apples and Napkin (Fruits, serviette et boîte à lait).
[59] The Silberberg family also initiated a claim concerning rare secular Gothic ivory relief panel showing a man and woman playing chess with three figures looking over their shoulders held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in the United Kingdom.The UK Spoliation Panel refused restitution, stating that the moral claim "is insufficiently strong to warrant a recommendation of restitution or the making of an ex-gratia payment.