The Beautiful German Woman

The Beautiful German Woman

This life-size woman catches you off-guard at the entrance to the Northern European sculpture room (Denon, room 169). With her pink skin, she is fully nude. Her modesty is nevertheless spared thanks to her very long hair that flows past her buttocks and luckily covers her pudenda. This is Saint Mary Magdalene or Penitent Magdalene, the repentant prostitute according to medieval legend, or The Beautiful German Woman. The realistic polychrome wood statue, attributed to the sixteenth-century sculptor Gregor Erhart, was part of the Nazi confiscations during the Occupation, like all German works, claimed to have been illegally acquired. Hermann Goering claimed The Beautiful German Woman for his Carinhall hunting lodge. When Rose Valland, the curator who bravely kept a record of the looted works the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rozenberg) deposited at the Musée du Jeu de Paume between 1940 and 1944, recovered her in Munich after the war, it is said that two of Magdalene’s fingers were missing. I don’t know which ones.