The reconstruction of the art collection of Felix Ganz (1869–1944)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Felix Ganz was a businessman from Mainz, Germany, and the owner of a substantial collection of art objects from the Middle East and East Asia. In 1934, his company was ‘aryanized’, in 1941 his home was seized, he and his wife were deported to Theresienstadt a year later and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The project presented here is to reconstruct the scope and character of Felix Ganz’s art collection and to research the mechanisms of its dispersion between 1933 and 1945 as well as the location of the objects today. The project combines family history and provenance research.