Qualla: Lempertz

Lempertz: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. In December 1939, three months into the Second World War, the auction house Lempertz held sale number 404. The lots included paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Camille Pissarro, Arnold Bocklin, Hans Thoma, and an attributed El Greco. The owner of the collection was Walter Westfeld, a Jewish art dealer who had already been arrested by the Nazis. The sale was a Zwangsversteigerung - a forced auction. Westfeld would die in Auschwitz in 1943. Eighty-five years later, his heirs were still suing the German state for the return of paintings the catalogue had so neatly described. Lempertz is Germany's oldest auction house, founded in 1798. It has sold for kings and the Schaumburg-Lippes and Mendelssohn-Bartholdys. It has also sold for the Reich.

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lempertz: From Printer to Auctioneer

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit elya, Public domain. Johann Matthias Heberle opened a printing company in Cologne in 1802 and gradually expanded into an antiquarian and auction business. The first Heberle auction took place in 1811. When Heberle died in 1840, his 24-year-old clerk Heinrich Lempertz took over, and the firm became J....

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Image: elya | Public domain

Lempertz: Heinrich Boll Behind the Counter

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. From 1937 to spring 1938, a young man named Heinrich Boll apprenticed as a bookseller in the Lempertz bookstore in Bonn. He hated the work and left after a year. Decades later he would win the 1972 Nobel Prize in Literature for novels that excavated, more relentlessly than almost...

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lempertz: Auction 392 and Its Long Shadow

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Wittwer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sale 392 took place in 1937. It dispersed 228 artworks belonging to Max Stern, a Jewish art dealer whose Dusseldorf gallery had been ordered closed by the Nazi Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. Stern survived, emigrated to Canada, and died in 1987 leaving an estate that has spent decad...

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Image: Michael Wittwer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lempertz: Speer, Goring, Beltracchi

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. Other names crowd the Lempertz ledger in ways that make the house's defenders uncomfortable. In May 1981 the firm auctioned twenty to thirty works from Albert Speer's possession for around a million Deutsche Mark, listing them as "From private property" - the anonymous formula th...

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lempertz: Six Hundred and Eighty Open Files

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Horsch, Willy, CC BY 3.0. Lempertz was named on the 1946 OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit's Red Flag List of Names. The German Lost Art Foundation today registers more than 680 artworks whose paper trails pass through Lempertz. Some have been returned. Some, like a 1923 Kandinsky called Zwei Schwarze Fl...

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Image: Horsch, Willy | CC BY 3.0