Carl Hofer, Madame Bailhache, Portrait of a Russian Dancer, 1926

Oil on canvas, 100,5 x 80,5 cm

Collection Lentos Art Museum Linz, Inv. Nr. 36

During the years of the Weimar Republic Carl Hofer was a highly respected painter. He had been appointed as professor at the Berlin College of Fine Arts and his pictures were on display in more than two dozen museum. The portrait of Madame Bailhache was acquired by Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie in 1929. When the National Socialists took over in 1933, Hofer’s life underwent a drastic change. His art was not ​‘German’ enough for the new regime and was therefore classified as ​“degenerate”. He was forced to resign from the College. More than 300 of his works, including ​“Madame Bailhache”, were confiscated. In spite of the contempt the Nazis professed to feel for ​“degenerate” art, they sought to make money from it. Hofer’s portrait was offered for sale at an auction in Lucerne in 1939, together with other first-rate ​“degenerate” works of art. The starting price called for ​“Madame Bailhache” was 6,300 Swiss francs. There were no bidders. It took a post-auction sale two years later for the painting to be sold – for the ridiculously low price of twenty francs. Today paintings by Hofer are expected to fetch hundreds of thousands of euros. 

The lucky buyer was an art dealer from Güstrow, who at some stage sold the painting to his Berlin colleague Wolfgang Gurlitt. This is where Linz comes in. After the war, Wolfgang Gurlitt became the founding director of the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, which later morphed into the Lentos. Gurlitt endowed the Neue Galerie with 120 works from his own collection, the majority of which, including ​“Madame Bailhache”, are on display at the Lentos.