Benno Griebert (1909 - 2000) was a German art historian and art dealer, and an early member of the Nazi party.
During the Third Reich
A member of the
Nazi party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
from before 1933, Griebert worked as an advisor for the
Reich Chamber of Fine Arts
The Reich Chamber of Culture (''Reichskulturkammer'') was a government agency in Nazi Germany. It was established by law on 22 September 1933 in the course of the ''Gleichschaltung'' process at the instigation of Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels as ...
in Berlin from 1934 to 1937. At the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, his role was to ensure that art exhibitions respected
Nazi ideology
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
. In 1938-1939 he advised the
Berlin National Gallery
The National Gallery (german: Nationalgalerie) in Berlin, Germany, is a museum for art of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It is part of the Berlin State Museums. From the Alte Nationalgalerie, which was built for it and opened in 1876, its exh ...
He also worked with the Nazi looting organisation known as the E.R.R.
(Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) and had ties to convicted Nazi art looter
Bruno Lohse who stayed with the Griebert's after Lohse's release from prison in 1950.
Benno Griebert's son, Peter, became close to Lohse. When Nazi looted art was discovered in the vault of Lohse's Foundation Schonart, the only person authorized to access it was reportedly the younger Grieber.
Benno Griebert was, along with
Fritz Nathan
Fritz Nathan (30 June 1895 in Munich - 28 February 1972 in Zurich) was a German-Swiss gallery owner and art dealer.
Early life
Fritz Nathan was born as a son from the second marriage of Alexander Nathan; from his father's first marriage he had ...
, a key dealer for the controversial art collector
Emil Bührle.
Postwar activities
After the Second World War, Benno Griebert initially worked as an art dealer in Constance from 1950; from 1958 he continued to run Alexander Gebhardt's Galerie für alte und neue Kunst (Gallery for Old and New Art) in Munich, which was dissolved in the same year.
Research projects about Benno Griebert
Numerous artworks that passed through Benno Griebert are currently listed on the German Lost Art Foundation's website.
Benno Griebert and his Meersburg Gallery in Lake Constance have been the object of research projects to identify the networks of art dealers trading in Nazi looted art after the war. From 4 May 2018 - 3 February 2019 an exhibition entitled "The Obligation of Ownership: An art collection under scrutiny - Provenance Research at the Friedrichshafen Museum" was devoted to "exploring post-war dealers' networks through whom the German museum acquired many works in its collection whose provenances were far from clean. Benno Griebert and his Meersburg Gallery in Lake Constance were a major source, which also involved Bruno Lohse, Adolf Weinmüller, Herbert Hoffmann and others."
The Aarguar Kunsthaus also undertook provenance research, notably into Griebert's sales to the art collectors Othmar und Valerie Häuptli, noting that "he was probably involved in the Nazi art looting in the territories occupied by the German Wehrmacht".
Restitutions of Nazi-looted art
In 2011 the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart, Germany restituted a 16th-century wooden sculpture of St. John the Baptist to the heirs of Jacob and
Rosa Oppenheimer, who had been plundered by the Nazis because Jewish. The
Jean Paul Getty Museum which acquired the artwork after it was restituted, noted in the provenance that Nazis had auctioned the looted sculpture to Heinemann and Dr. B. Griesbert, after which it disappeared into anonymous private collections before arriving at the Landesmuseum Württenberg.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Griebert, Benno
1909 births
German art dealers
German art critics
German art historians
Nazi Party members
2000 deaths