Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Siegfried Aram" in English language version.
However, according to documents unearthed by Peter, the painting may have been seized by Oskar Sommer, a German department store owner who bought Aram's house in the Black Forest in 1933. The art dealer had fled the country by then, leaving his mother to sell the family's holdings. The painting had been promised to a buyer in California, but documents suggest that Sommer kept it.
Siegfried F. Aram was born in Wurttemburg, Germany, in 1891. Originally a lawyer, he later became a partner in the Ehrhardt Galleries in Berlin. He had to leave Nazi Germany, arriving in the United States in 1934. In 1935 he established Aram-Ehrhardt Galleries in New York, changing the name to S.F. Aram, Inc., in 1937.
Old court records indicate the painting, purchased by the Met in 1984, is likely the same one a Jewish art dealer, Siegfried Aram, left behind when he fled Germany as Hitler took power in 1933. The records, which recount the dealer's unsuccessful effort to reclaim his painting for more than a decade after the war, were discovered by a researcher and photographer, Joachim Peter, who has spent years studying the history of Heilbronn, the German city where Mr. Aram once lived, including the treatment of its Jews and the devastation from Allied bombing.
Siegfried Aram was a successful lawyer in Heilbronn, Germany, who owned a country house in the Black Forest. He left Germany and came to New York by way of Naples and Gibraltar, arriving on the ship Conte de Savoia on August 29, 1934. Aram's legal qualifications did not transfer to the U.S., so he turned what had been a hobby into a career. He became an art dealer.
Old court records indicate the painting, purchased by the Met in 1984, is likely the same one a Jewish art dealer, Siegfried Aram, left behind when he fled Germany as Hitler took power in 1933. The records, which recount the dealer's unsuccessful effort to reclaim his painting for more than a decade after the war, were discovered by a researcher and photographer, Joachim Peter, who has spent years studying the history of Heilbronn, the German city where Mr. Aram once lived, including the treatment of its Jews and the devastation from Allied bombing.
However, according to documents unearthed by Peter, the painting may have been seized by Oskar Sommer, a German department store owner who bought Aram's house in the Black Forest in 1933. The art dealer had fled the country by then, leaving his mother to sell the family's holdings. The painting had been promised to a buyer in California, but documents suggest that Sommer kept it.
Old court records indicate the painting, purchased by the Met in 1984, is likely the same one a Jewish art dealer, Siegfried Aram, left behind when he fled Germany as Hitler took power in 1933. The records, which recount the dealer's unsuccessful effort to reclaim his painting for more than a decade after the war, were discovered by a researcher and photographer, Joachim Peter, who has spent years studying the history of Heilbronn, the German city where Mr. Aram once lived, including the treatment of its Jews and the devastation from Allied bombing.
