Lady in a Park

The Museum of Modern Art dates this to July 1914, a few weeks before the war began. What happened to the canvas afterwards is unusually well recorded. It went through Berlin hands in the 1930s and reached the dealer Karl Buchholz, who shipped it to New York in August 1938 on consignment to Curt Valentin, a colleague who had left Germany and opened a gallery there. The pictures were still sitting in New York when the United States entered the war. On 29 May 1944, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the American government vested 401 works Buchholz had sent over, this one among them, as the property of an enemy national, and they were auctioned off the same year. The buyer was Henry Pearlman, a New York businessman who collected. His foundation gave the painting to the museum in 1956.