On Thursday, 5 November 2026, at 18:00, the Kunstmuseum Marburg — the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte of Philipps-Universität — opens the exhibition “Wem gehör(t)en die Werke? Provenienzforschung im Kunstmuseum Marburg” at Biegenstraße 11. The patron is Hessian Science Minister Timon Gremmels.
Two and a half years, about 250 paintings
Provenance researcher Susanne Ehlers has spent roughly two and a half years investigating around 250 paintings that the university museum acquired after 1933 and that were made before 1945. The project focuses on National Socialist-era acquisitions: works that entered the collection under conditions that demand careful reconstruction of ownership chains, dealer networks and possible persecution-related losses.
Funding comes from the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste in Magdeburg, the federal institution that supports research into cultural property seized under the Nazi regime and other contexts of injustice.
What the exhibition shows
Rather than treating provenance as a closed file in the archive, Marburg brings the research into the galleries. Visitors encounter not only paintings but the questions that hang around them: Who owned this work in 1933? Through which dealers did it travel? When did the museum buy it, and what did the paperwork say — or leave out? The German title’s play on tense — gehören / gehörten — underlines that ownership is both a past fact and a present responsibility.
A university museum’s duty
University collections often grew quietly, through gifts, estates and bargains that looked routine at the time. Showing that history publicly, under a minister’s patronage and with Magdeburg funding, signals that even mid-sized museums in Hesse are part of Germany’s larger reckoning with cultural property. For anyone following restitution debates, the Marburg show is a concrete case study: patient research, limited numbers, and the courage to ask aloud who these works belonged to — and who they belong to now.