Where is the Portrait of Bismarck, formerly in the Museum of Fine Arts?
The painting the Third Reich diplomat set his eye on
MúzeumCafé 13.
In April 1893 representatives of the Museum of Fine Arts turned up at a Lenbach exhibition in the old Kunsthalle. The purchase was an everyday practice for museologists and the portrait they bought was not sensational. Highlighting the sound political relationship between the German Empire and Hungary must have played a role in selecting it. Joachim von Ribbentrop became Hitler’s committed follower, but due to his ancestry and suspicious marriage of convenience his party associates did not trust him, so he became one of the cruellest Nazi politicians. Hitler found his work useful due to his extensive social contacts both in Germany and abroad. He first employed him as a diplomat, then appointed him foreign minister of the Reich in 1938. The two stories came together during World War II when the painting by Lenbach turned into a gift intended for the German foreign minister, a symbol of Hungarian-German friendship. In January 1942 von Ribbentrop visited Hungary. A selection of paintings exhibited for Ribbentrop, a known collector with fine taste, not only recalled more peaceful times but corresponded to the strict expectations of official German cultural policy. The display of paintings by Goya and the French impressionists, by Böcklin, Stuck and Lenbach, together with works by the already highly regarded 19th-century Hungarian masters had a symbolic meaning. After all, it was only a few years after large scale exhibitions had demonstrated what art Nazi cultural policy regarded as desirable and what was to be denounced. At the end of the visit the Hungarian government presented the Portrait of Otto von Bismarck as a gift to Ribbentrop.