The Tower of Blue Horses, missing since 1945

On 7 July 1937, officials took Franz Marc’s The Tower of Blue Horses from the Nationalgalerie, Berlin’s national gallery. The Foto Marburg picture archive records that it was sent to Munich on 10 July. The oil painting, 200 by 130 centimetres, shows four blue horses stacked one above another. It is still missing.

Marc painted it in 1913, and it was shown that autumn at the Sturm gallery’s Herbstsalon in Berlin. Marc died at Verdun in 1916. In 1919 Ludwig Justi, the Nationalgalerie’s director, bought it for the gallery’s new modern section at the Kronprinzenpalais. Haus am Waldsee, a Berlin art centre, says it hung there until the autumn of 1936, when that department closed. After the seizure it was shown in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, which opened on 19 July 1937. It was then taken out, after a protest by a German officers’ association, because Marc had died as a soldier. Haus am Waldsee says Hitler ordered this and that it hung for only a week.

Hermann Göring, the Reich Marshal, then took the painting into his own control. According to Haus am Waldsee and The Art Newspaper, it was one of 13 modernist works held back from the confiscated stock to be sold abroad for foreign currency. Haus am Waldsee names Josef Angerer, a carpet dealer, as his agent and says the sale evidently failed. The date of the taking is disputed. Joachim Nawrocki, a Berlin journalist, wrote in Die Welt in 2001 that it was October 1937. Haus am Waldsee says early 1938, and The Art Newspaper says 1938. The Foto Marburg record says 1940. Nawrocki also cites an Allied-era list of 16,558 works, found in London, that gives the Reich Marshal as its owner. He thinks Göring probably never sold it.

Two people later said they saw it in Berlin. In 1977 Heinz Ohff, arts editor of the Tagesspiegel, reported that Edwin Redslob, an art historian and co-founder of the newspaper, had told him he saw and identified the painting in spring 1945, in the Haus am Waldsee, a villa in Zehlendorf. Redslob denied having taken it. Nawrocki says that in the winter of 1948 to 1949, then a scout, he saw a large unframed canvas with two or three cuts about 20 centimetres long on a stair gallery in a youth home in Argentinische Allee, next to the villa. He took it for a copy and first published his account 52 years later. Each account rests on one witness.

In its April 2001 issue the magazine art reported, citing Jan Ahlers, a collector from Herford, that the painting lay in a bank safe in Zurich. The Berliner Zeitung reported the claim on 30 March. Ahlers then told Der Spiegel that the remark about the safe was a joke, and that neither he nor anyone he knew had seen the painting. The Art Newspaper wrote in 2017 that he had been offered the painting for sale. The 2001 Spiegel report does not say so. The sources record no charge or legal case against Ahlers.

The sources give no evidence for any theory of where it went. Katja Blomberg of Haus am Waldsee told The Art Newspaper in 2017 that Soviet troops probably took it to Russia. A search exhibition, Vermisst / Missing, ran in Berlin and Munich in 2017 and in Rotterdam that autumn. Der Spiegel called the Nationalgalerie the lawful owner in 2001. No source consulted reports a recovery, and a regional newspaper in November 2024 still described the painting as missing since 1945.