BORDEAUX.- The three works shown here were part of a consignment that Fédor Löwenstein tried to send to an American gallery. Seized at the port of Bordeaux, they were sent to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, to be stored in the “Salle des Martyrs”, a room to which works in a style condemned by the Nazi aesthetic were relegated.

It was only at the end of 2010 that the connection between these works now held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne and the Löwenstein seizure of Bordeaux was established. These are MNR (Musées Nationaux Récupération) works, shown to the public for the first time since the appropriation.

Originally from Czechoslovakia, Fédor Löwenstein (Munich, 1901 - Nice, 1946) studied art in Germany before moving to Paris in 1923, attracted by its artistic influence. There he mixed with the painter André Lhote from Bordeaux and joined the Groupe des Surindépendants in 1936. His style evolved from Cubism to a form of Romantic abstraction. In 1938, he painted La Chute (The Fall), inspired by the signing of the Munich Agreement ratifying the dismantling of the Czechoslovakia created in 1918. France’s entry into the war drove him to leave the capital for Mirmande, a ruined village in the Drôme region, where Lhote held a summer academy. Löwenstein then divided his time between Mirmande and Nice where his mother and sister lived, but had to take refuge for a time in the Abbey of Aiguebelle. He fell ill in the autumn of 1943 and went to Paris to see a doctor; he died in Nice in 1946.