BREMEN, Germany, March 29 (UPI) -- Bremen's Kunsthalle museum will benefit from a recent flurry of repatriation of art stolen in Germany by Soviet soldiers at the end of World War II.
A panel of a 1505 altarpiece by Albrecht Durer, one of Germany's greatest Renaissance artists, will be returned to the Kunsthalle by the government of Estonia under the terms of a 1993 treaty with Germany on cultural cooperation, according to an announcement made Monday by the museum. In return the Kunsthalle is loaning 60 to 80 drawings by Durer to an exhibition opening in April at the Kadriorg Museum in Tallin, Estonia.
The museum identified the Durer panel as one showing John the Baptist and said it was first exhibited in Estonia in 1994. Details on what happened to the work after it was stolen in 1945 are not known, a spokesman said.
The Kunsthalle also expects to receive 362 Old Master drawings and paintings by Durer and Francisco de Goya from Russia as the result of a recent repatriation order by Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoi. The collection was brought to Russia in 1945 by Viktor Baldin, a Soviet army officer and later director of the Moscow Architecture Museum.
