Supporter of Canadian art

Max Stern grows up sheltered. With his older sisters Hedi and Gerda, in a house full of art, where relatives and friends came and went. His father, Julius Stern, actually started out in the textile trade, but then switched to the art trade.

Düsseldorf is a good place for this. The art academy attracts many famous personalities and enjoys an international reputation, there are numerous museums, a lively exhibition programme and many galleries. Königsallee is the city's most elegant boulevard and has been home to the Julius Stern Gallery since June 1918.

Julius is a real self-made man. With courage and skill, he and his wife Selma have built up a flourishing art trade. He is popular and recognised, generously supporting museums not only in his native Düsseldorf, but also in Dresden, Cologne and Berlin.

The period after the First World War, with inflation and unemployment, is difficult for the art trade. Despite this, Julius and Selma Stern send their son Max to study art history - in Cologne, Bonn, Berlin and Vienna. The professionalisation of his son and business successor was very important to his father, who had entered the art trade as an autodidact. As a reward for completing his doctorate with summa cum laude honours, his parents gave him the gift of a stay abroad. Max decides in favour of Paris. There he learnt about avant-garde art, visited Marc Chagall's studio and became fascinated by Amedeo Modigliani, who died young.

With this experience, he became a partner in his parents' art shop in 1928. His debut: a successful Spitzweg exhibition. Father Julius hesitantly accepts the junior's wishes to represent modern French art in Düsseldorf.

Fortunately, there are dedicated people on the ground who are committed to helping refugees and interned Europeans. One of them is William Birks, who comes from a family of jewellers who have been successful in Montreal for a long time. Birks, an avowed Methodist, criticises Canada's restrictive and anti-Semitic immigration policy. Impressed by Stern's knowledge and energy, he became a guarantor for him. As a result, Max Stern was allowed to leave the internment camp in 1941 and move to Montreal.

There he discovers a gap in the market: The galleries mainly sell 19th century European artworks, landscapes and genre paintings. But nobody represented contemporary Canadian art. Until Max Stern came along. Within a very short time, he organised exhibitions and helped many Canadian artists, such as the artist Emily Carr and members of the Group of Seven, to gain recognition and launch their careers. Even before the war was over, he had curated several exhibitions. Two circumstances worked in his favour: due to the war, there were restrictions on transferring large sums of money abroad. So Canadians preferred to buy at home. And at the same time, an unprecedented interest in Canadian art emerged in art history.

William Birks has another beneficial effect on Stern's life: He introduced him to a Swedish immigrant, Iris Westerberg. The two became a couple and married in 1946. The Sterns acquired the Dominion Gallery with the financial means that Iris brought into the marriage and the part of the holdings that Max Stern recovered in 1947 as part of the restitution. Max and Iris Stern not only promoted contemporary Canadian art, but also organised many exhibitions by women artists. With foresight, the Sterns broadened the range of their art dealership, also selling European sculptures in the 1950s, for example by Henry Moore and Auguste Rodin, and the first Kandinsky acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York also came from the Dominion Gallery.

Stern died in Paris in 1987 at the age of 83. He was a widower and the marriage remained childless. As a result, he named three universities as his heirs: McGill University in Montreal, which his benefactor William Birks had already supported, Concordia University, also in Montreal, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2005, these universities founded the Max Stern Art Restitution Project. Their aim is to reconstruct, locate and reclaim the art that was seized from Max Stern as a result of persecution by the Nazi regime. The Max Stern Art Restitution Project is working on the basis of around 400 works. So far, 250 works of art once owned by Stern have been identified.

In 2015, the Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) contacted the Bavarian State Painting Collections on behalf of the legal successors. It registered claims to the painting by Hans von Marées, „Ulanen auf dem Marsch“. This painting was acquired for the Staatsgemäldesammlungen at a Munich auction house in 1986 and had previously been privately owned.

As various gaps in the provenance cannot be closed beyond doubt, the Bavarian State Painting Collections and the HCPO agree to jointly appeal to the Advisory Commission. This recommends restitution, which will take place in 2022.