Lempertz

Early years

Lempertz's roots go back to 1802 when Johann Matthias Heberle (1775–1840) opened a printing company in Cologne in 1802, which was later expanded to include an “antiquarian and auction house”. The first auction of the J. M. Heberle company took place in 1811. After the company's founder died in 1840, his 24-year-old employee Heinrich Lempertz (1816–1898) took over the company, which from then on became “J. M. Heberle (H. Lempertz).

Mathias Lempertz (1821–1886), the brother of Heinrich Lempertz, opened the “Buch- und Kunsthandlung Heberle-Lempertz” in 1845 as a branch of the Cologne company at Fürstenstrasse 2 in Bonn. In the same year, the first public auction of August Wilhelm Schlegel's posthumous library took place on December 1. In 1854 the Bonn branch became an independent company owned by Mathias Lempertz.

In 1875 Peter Hanstein (1853–1925) bought the company, paying 20,000 gold marks for the name Math. Lempertz, bookstore and antiquarian bookshop. Three years later he founded the Peter Hanstein Verlag, which focused on history, philosophy and theology. In 1888 the bookstore moved to new premises in Hof 40, later in Franziskanerstraße 6 in Bonn. As more paintings by old masters and applied arts were auctioned, a branch was opened in Cologne in 1902, which was initially located at Domhof 6 in the house of the Archbishop's Diocesan Museum. In 1908 Lempertz was the first European auction house to start auctioning East Asian art.

In 1918 the Math. Lempertz company acquired the classicist house Fastenrat at Neumarkt 3, corner of Cäcilienstraße 48, from the estate of Johannes Fastenrath.

After Peter Hanstein's death in 1925, his two sons Hans Hanstein (1879–1940) and Josef Hanstein (1885–1968), who had been partners since 1912, inherited the company. Manfred Faber converted and expanded the office building on Neumarkt in 1933/34 before being murdered in the Holocaust. From 1937 to spring 1938 Heinrich Böll apprenticed as a bookseller in the Lempertz bookstore in Bonn.

Nazi Germany 1933-1945

Lempertz was involved in auctioning off Jewish property seized by the Nazis or sold due to Nazi persecution.

228 artworks from Jewish art dealer Max Stern (1904–1987) whose gallery was closed by the Nazi Reich Chamber of Fine Arts was sold off at Lempertz. On 12./13. December 1939, the collection of the Jewish art dealer Walter Westfeld (1889–1943) arrested by Nazis and plundered, was sold off at Lempertz.

In 1947 the bookstore was re-established as Mathias Lempertz Buchhandlung und Antiquariat GmbH in Bonn at Fürstenstrasse 1. It gradually developed into a university bookstore and in 1983 also became the official depository bookstore of the Bibliotheca Vaticana publishing house. In 1996 the publisher Franz-Christoph Heel bought the bookstore and in the following year founded the book publisher "Edition Lempertz" in Bonn, whose book program deals particularly with topics of Catholic theology and regional publications. The manager of Edition Lempertz was Antje-Friederike Heel, who in 1999 also took over the management of Matthias Lempertz Buchhandlung und Antiquariat GmbH. In 2003 Edition Lempertz and Siegler Verlag were merged. The Siegler Verlag program mostly includes military history publications, published under the imprint of the Brandenburg publishing house. Its naming rights come from the former military publisher of the German Democratic Republic. On December 31, 2005, the Lempertz bookstore in Bonn was closed after more than 150 years.

Criticism

Nazi-looted art

Lempertz was listed in the 1946 OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit's Red Flag List of Names for involvement in the Nazi-looted art trade. At present, the German Lost Art Foundation registers more than 680 artworks that mention Lempertz.

In 1977, and again in 1996, Lempertz sold art that it had previously sold in 1937, without mentioning that, under the Nazis, it had been subject to a forced sale from the collection of Max Stern.

In May 1981 Lempertz auctioned between 20 and 30 artworks, for one million DM, from Albert Speer's possession, using the anonymous provenance indication “From private property”.

In 2008, the heirs of Walter Westfeld, who was murdered in Auschwitz, sued Germany for the restitution of an art collection that including paintings by El Greco and Peter Paul Rubens, which had been seized by the Nazis and auctioned at Lempertz in 1939. According to NBC News the "Lempertz auction house in Cologne, Germany, claimed the property was destroyed during bombing in WWII, but the lawsuit includes a copy of the December 1939 sale catalog and price list."

In 2007, "Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe" by an unknown Dutch artist, originally from the Max Stern collection, was sold at Lempertz, which had conducted the forced sale in 1937 to a London dealer, Philip Mould Ltd., who then sold it to Lawrence Steigrad in NY where it was spotted by the Holocaust Claims Processing Office. It was restituted to the heirs of Max Stern in 2009.

In 2009 New York art dealer Richard Feigen restituted, to the heirs of Max Stern, an Italian baroque painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, attributed to Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619), that he had acquired at Lempertz. “I was surprised that Lempertz had been the auctioneer in the forced sale in 1937 and then resold it to me in 2000,” he said.