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# Munich museum returns painting to heirs of Jewish owner who fled Germany in 1938
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/miunkhenskii-muzei-vernul-kartinu-naslednikam-evreiskoi-vladelitsy-bezhavshei-iz-germanii-v-1938-godu/
- Published: 2026-09-25T08:01:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:05.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Archive, Museums, Heritage

The Bavarian State Painting Collections have returned to the heirs of Sophie Heilbronner, née Wimpfheimer, the painting "Music (Arcadian Scene)" by the German artist Albert Lang, painted in 1892\. The Bavarian State Painting Collections bring together the museums of Munich, among them the Alte and Neue Pinakothek. The ceremony of return took place on 22 September at the German embassy in Washington.

Lang depicted a Bacchic scene in a forest. In the foreground a nude figure reclines, while around it men and women play musical instruments. The scene might indeed have been played out in Arcadia, that idealised pastoral land whose inhabitants pass their days in music and repose.

The Nazi regime forced Heilbronner to sell part of her property, and in 1938 she fled to the United States. Before leaving she packed household goods and several works of art into crates, intending to ship them to New York and sell them there. The German state confiscated these belongings and sold them at auction, and the regime appropriated the proceeds. Later the American military authorities found Lang's painting, together with other works from unidentified Jewish collections, in a warehouse in former army barracks in Munich. In 1955 the Bavarian State Office for Property and Restitution handed these works over to the museum. The museum acknowledged that the painting had been looted, but did not know the name of its owner.

In 2015 the Bavarian State Painting Collections entered the painting in the Lost Art database. The database is maintained by the German Lost Art Foundation and holds information on cultural property whose owners were deprived of it through Nazi persecution. In 2018 Heilbronner's heirs applied to the Holocaust Claims Processing Office of the New York State Department of Financial Services. The state authorities established the office in 1997 to help victims of the Holocaust and their descendants recover lost property. The office's staff established that the painting in the Munich museum matched the lost work by Lang, and filed a claim for restitution. In 2024 the Bavarian Ministry of Science and the Arts decided to return the painting.

Heilbronner's great-grandson Paul Laporte spent eight years seeking the painting's return. He found his first lead in the digitised archive of the Heinemann Gallery in Munich, which in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was one of the largest art-dealing houses in Germany.

The Bavarian State Painting Collections themselves acknowledge that during the Nazi years they took part in the plundering of works of art. Their then general director, Ernst Buchner, was among Hitler's advisers