On the Balcony

When Schrimpf showed this painting at the Munich Secession in 1927, the Bavarian state collections bought it straight off the exhibition wall. A young woman leans at a balcony rail with a wide, still landscape opening behind her, the composed calm he built out of Italian models. For ten years it hung as public property in Munich. Then, on 9 July 1937, officials from the Reich propaganda ministry took it down along with thousands of other modern works swept up as so-called degenerate art. What the German state discarded, a foreign museum wanted: in November 1939 the Kunstmuseum Basel bought it, and it has stayed in Switzerland since. It hangs among other pictures the museum acquired in those same months, as Swiss curators bought up what German collections were being forced to give away.