Forgotten Spoils: The Postwar Fate of the Berlin Collections of Asian Art

Lecture on November 18, 2009, 6:15 pm, Karl Jaspers Centre, Voßstraße 2, Room 212

Evgeny Steiner, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

Forgotten Spoils: The Postwar Fate of the Berlin Collections of Asian Art

Abstract

This lecture discusses the fate of the collections of East Asian and to a lesser extent, of Central Asian and Indian art from Berlin museums that were taken by the Red Army in 1945 and sent to Russia. These collections were randomly distributed between The Pushkin Museum for Fine Arts (Moscow) and The State Hermitage (Leningrad) and have never been catalogued, researched or exhibited since then. The presentation is based on personal observations and research conducted in Russian and German archives.

Evgeny Steiner

graduated from Moscow University and received his PhD from the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1985. He left the USSR during the Perestroika, and since then he has been teaching and conducting research in the field of Japanese art and culture in Jerusalem, Tokyo and New York.

This lecture is funded by the Cluster of Excellence, "Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows".