Overview

• Sixteen sculptures unearthed in 2010 during U5 construction by the Rotes Rathaus, recovered from rubble at Königstraße 50, are reunited in the Archäologisches Haus Petri’s first special exhibition opening Thursday.
• Archival photographs and the recovered head of Emy Roeder’s Pregnant Woman enabled identification of several pieces as works shown in the 1937 Degenerate Art propaganda exhibition.
• Researchers linked the cache to a Reichspropagandaministerium depot in the building that was destroyed in an air raid, leaving fire-scarred bronzes, stone and terracotta buried in the cellar debris.
• The show features works by artists including Marg Moll, Edwin Scharff, Otto Freundlich, Will Lammert and Richard Haizmann, with context noting Freundlich’s murder in a concentration camp in 1943.
• Curators outline the Nazi categorization of confiscated art and the loss of roughly 16,000 works—mostly paintings and graphics—while emphasizing the sculptures’ patina, soot and breakage as material evidence.