2012 Munich artworks discovery

Franz Marc's Pferde in Landschaft, one of the artworks discovered in the Gurlitt collection (probably 1911, gouache on coloured paper).

In February 2012, the District Prosecutor of Augsburg confiscated 121 framed and 1,285 unframed artworks found in an apartment in Schwabing, Munich in the course of an investigation into possible tax evasion.^[1] The apartment was rented to Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of celebrated art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, and grandson of the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt. Some of the paintings were immediately suspected of having been looted by the Nazis during the Second World War. The collection is largely undamaged and of remarkable quality. It contains Old Masters as well as Impressionist, Cubist, and Expressionist paintings by artists including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, and Max Liebermann, among many others. Although German authorities seized the entire collection, Gurlitt was not detained. Not until 3 November 2013 did the magazine Focus report the find.^[2] News of this extraordinary discovery provoked a worldwide sensation.^[3]

Gurlitt initially refused to cooperate with German investigators. He retained several dozen additional suspect paintings, kept not in Munich but in his home in Salzburg, Austria.^[4] On 7 April 2014, an agreement was finally reached whereby the collection confiscated in Munich was to be returned to Gurlitt in exchange for his co-operation with a government-led task force charged with determining which of the pieces had been stolen and returning them to the rightful heirs.^[5] However, Gurlitt died only a month later, on 6 May 2014.^[6] In his will, he bequeathed all his possessions to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland, with the museum to inherit his collection after all legitimate claims of ownership against it had been evaluated.^[7][8]

Background

In the 1920s and early 1930s, art collector Hildebrand Gurlitt held a number of positions within the German art and museum establishment. In 1930, he was removed as director of the museum in Zwickau because he exhibited contemporary artists. After the Nazis came to power, he was stripped of another job as a museum director because one of his grandmothers was a Jew.^[2][9][10] He subsequently moved the family to Dresden and built a prosperous business as an art dealer, specializing in modern art.^[6]

Hildebrand was appointed as a dealer for the Führermuseum in Linz, Austria. On instructions from Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring personally appointed a Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art. The Commission in turn appointed a series of dealers approved by the official Nazi confiscation service, the ERR, to handle the marketing of these art assets. Four men who had been dealing in modern art for years were chosen: Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller, Bernhard A. Böhmer and Hildebrand Gurlitt.^[11] They were instructed to sell these artworks abroad for foreign currency and to make a good profit. Hildebrand's extensive network of European and North American art contacts proved invaluable.^[2][9][12] Göring used the funds raised to grow his personal art collection, though the four men did not always report to the Commission all proceeds of their sales.^[13] Among the works of so-called "degenerate art" that the Commission sold off were many paintings stolen from noted French art dealer Paul Rosenberg.

1945 sworn statement by Dr. Hildebrand Gurlitt to allied authorities in 1945. Gurlitt describes his dealings before and during the war and lists (with purchase price and seller) the art in his possession

After the discovery in the Munich apartment, Bild am Sonntag reported that, as part of its investigative process, German authorities had gone back through Nazi records looking for correspondence exchanged with Hildebrand Gurlitt.^[14] This search uncovered the fact that in May 1940 the Reich Propaganda Ministry sold to Gurlitt 200 paintings, including Chagall’s The Walk, Picasso’s Farming Family, and Nolde's Hamburg Harbour, for a trifling sum of 4,000 Swiss francs.^[14] Hildebrand acquired an additional 115 works of "degenerate art" in the same way in 1941.^[14] It is estimated that, at his height, he had a personal trading collection of more than 1,500 art objects.^[2][9][15]

Gurlitt used his position to sell art to domestic collectors, most notably to Bernhard Sprengel, whose collection forms the core of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover.^[16]

Captured with his wife and 20 boxes of art in Aschbach (Schlüsselfeld) in June 1945, Gurlitt upon interrogation told United States Army authorities acting on behalf of the Allied armies' Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) that the art was part of his personal collection. He claimed that most of his collection and all of his records had been destroyed at his home in Kaitzer Straße during the bombing of Dresden in February 1945.^[17] Gurlitt's interrogators focused on the MFAA's core brief of preserving Europe's centuries-old cultural history in preference to the impressionist and post-impression "degenerate art" in which Gurlitt traded under the Nazis. Hildebrand was specifically questioned only about the origins of some 200 paintings whose owners had been French. He stated that he had legally acquired them between 1942 and 1944 from a French art dealer in Paris.^[18] Hildebrand painted himself as a victim of Nazi persecution due to his Jewish heritage, and on those grounds he was released.^[2][9]

Max Liebermann's Riders on the Beach in the Gurlitt collection and subject to a claim by the descendants of the original Jewish owner

Still suspicious of his story, the U.S. Army investigated further, but nonetheless returned 206 items to Gurlitt on 15 December 1950. These included Max Liebermann's Two Riders On The Beach, Otto Dix's self-portrait, an allegorical painting by Marc Chagall, 112 further paintings, 19 drawings, and 72 "various other objects".^[19] Hildebrand Gurlitt continued trading artworks until his death in a car crash in 1956.^[2][9][15]

Discovery by German customs authorities

According to Focus magazine, in September 2010 German customs officers undertook a routine search of passengers on a train traveling from Zurich to Munich and found Cornelius Gurlitt, Hildebrand's son, carrying €9,000 (£7,500; $13,000) in cash.^[2] Since the reporting limit is €10,000,^[20] the sum in Gurlitt's possession was perfectly legal.^[21] Gurlitt was allowed to go on his way, but he had aroused suspicions. Further investigation by the prosecutor's office, the federal police and the tax authorities uncovered a number of oddities.^[9] Gurlitt failed to say that, despite the address in Salzburg listed in his Austrian passport, his main residence was in Munich. Investigators discovered that Gurlitt had never been employed and had no obvious source of income. He was not registered with the Einwohnermeldeamt—a requirement under German law—or with the tax authorities or social services. He had never married, had no pension and no health insurance. Officially, he did not exist.

In September 2011, the prosecutor obtained a search warrant to enter his rented apartment in Schwabing, Munich. In late February 2012, the authorities executed the warrant. They broke down the door to the apartment, expecting to find a few thousand undeclared euros or evidence of a foreign bank account. Instead, they made an astonishing discovery: more than a thousand paintings hidden behind mountains of expired cans of food. The value of the haul was estimated at as much as €1 billion.^{[2][9][22][23]} Eighteen months later, in November 2013, the lead prosecutor said in an interview that the authorities had not found the collection by chance, but had been looking for it from the outset.^[24]

When the magazine Focus made public the discovery, it stated that, of the estimated 1,500 pieces, at least 200 were believed to have been lost during the Nazi era.^[2] Numerous commentators expressed outrage to the international press over the fact that the discovery of Gurlitt's hoard was kept secret for nearly two years.^[3]

The collection was moved to a secure warehouse in Garching. The paintings recovered included works by the following artists:^[2] Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Canaletto, Marc Chagall, Hans Christoph, Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Eugène Delacroix, Otto Dix, Albrecht Dürer, Erich Fraaß, Conrad Felixmüller, Bonaventura Genelli, Ludwig Godenschweg, Otto Griebel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Bernhard Kretzschmar, Oskar Kokoschka, Wilhelm Lachnit, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Franz Marc, Fritz Maskos, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Théodore Rousseau, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Carl Spitzweg, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Christoph Voll.

Initial legal handling of the Gurlitt case

On 5 November 2013, Reinhard Nemetz, the head of the prosecutors' office in Augsburg, said that 121 framed and 1,258 unframed works had been seized from the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt in early March 2012,^[1] including unregistered works by Chagall, Dix, Liebermann, and Matisse.^[1] The art historian who first examined the collection, Meike Hoffmann, claimed in print in 2010 that "not a single one" of these works was ever acquired by Hildebrand Gurlitt. Dr. Meike Hoffmann wishes to remark that this controversy derives from a misreading of her book on Bernhard A. Böhmer. In her book, the art historical term ‘Bildwerke’ is used. The term refers only to sculptures, which indeed Hildebrand Gurlitt did not take from the ‘Degenerate Art’ Confiscation. Of course, Meike Hoffmann has never questioned the fact that Hildebrandt Gurlitt dealt with other kinds of artworks from the ‘Degenerate Art’ Confiscation.^[25] She stated to Focus that as many as 300 pieces had appeared in the 1937 Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich.^[2][9][22] At the time of the interview with Focus, she was trying to trace the original owners of the works and their surviving relatives.^[2][9] Art historians asked that a complete list of the paintings be published in order that they be returned to their rightful owners.^[26]

Speaking to Der Spiegel magazine in November 2013, Cornelius insisted that his father had obtained the works legally and stated that he would not voluntarily return any of them to previous owners.^[27][28] Feeling threatened by the intense media attention, Gurlitt's brother-in-law offered 22 works in his possession to the police for safekeeping.^[14][29]

Portrait of a woman by Henri Matisse was directly traceable to the collection of Paul Rosenberg, a Jewish art dealer from Paris who had represented Matisse and Picasso and who had been forced to leave his collection behind when he fled France.^[30] When approached by Focus, Rosenberg's granddaughter, French television presenter Anne Sinclair, who had been fighting for decades for the return of the art dealer's paintings, stated that she knew nothing of the existence of the painting.^[2][9] Recovery efforts for Portrait of a woman were immediately undertaken on behalf of the Rosenberg heirs by Christopher A. Marinello, who entered into negotiations with Cornelius Gurlitt, his legal representatives and the German state.^[31] Portrait of a woman was in fact returned to Paul Rosenberg's heirs on 15 May 2015.^[32] Other paintings that Gurlitt had already sold have yet to be recovered, such as an oil on canvas of Aline Charigot done by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1881. It is believed the work was sold to a collector in Florida in 2002.

One of the last pieces that Cornelius Gurlitt sold was The Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann. After a settlement, initiated by the Lempertz auction house in Cologne, was reached between Gurlitt and the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim, it was auctioned off for nearly £750,000.^[2][9] Another work was reportedly sold in 1990 through the Bern-based gallery of Eberhard Kornfeld.^[17]

In March 2014, a BBC reporter was granted access to one of the locations where 238 of the seized works were stored. He viewed works such as Monet's Waterloo Bridge (1903) and others by Picasso, Cezanne, Liebermann, Renoir, Courbet, and Manet.^[33]

On 7 April 2014, a month before Gurlitt's death, an agreement was reached whereby the seized artwork was to be returned to Gurlitt in exchange for his co-operation with the government-led task force charged with determining which of the pieces was stolen and returning them to the rightful heirs.^[5]

Schwabinger (Gurlitt) Art Trove Task Force

An entity called the Schwabinger Kunstfund or Gurlitt Task Force was created to research the provenance of the paintings in the Gurlitt trove. However, after several years of operations under the direction of Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel it was widely criticized for having few results and little visibility.^[34]

Death of Gurlitt, and after

Cornelius Gurlitt died on 6 May 2014.^[35] In his will, Gurlitt named the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland as his sole heir.^[7]

Gurlitt's cousin, Uta Werner, filed a claim of inheritance on the artwork. Werner's lawyer, Wolfgang Seybold, argued that Gurlitt's relatives were the righful heirs. Seybold supported his argument with the opinion of psychiatrist and lawyer Helmut Hausner, who stated that Gurlitt suffered from schizoid personality disorder, delusions, and dementia when he wrote the will bequeathing his collection to the museum.^[36] It is possible that a number of artworks will be returned to Gurlitt's estate, as he would have been considered the rightful owner unless the heirs of previous owners could prove that he obtained them through unlawful means.^[37] German authorities estimate that around 590 pieces need further investigation to determine whether they were confiscated under the Nazi regime, and a further 380 have been definitively identified as confiscated by the Nazis as "degenerate art".^[38]

Art objects continued to surface after Gurlitt's death. In July 2014, a new discovery was made in his Munich apartment: two sculptures, possibly the work of Rodin and Degas.^[39] In September, a landscape by Claude Monet was discovered in a suitcase Gurlitt had left in a hospital where he stayed.^[40]

Max Liebermann's painting Riders on the Beach was auctioned at Sotheby's on 24 June 2015 in London.^[41]

Legalities

German newspapers questioned the prosecutor's right to seize the collection.^[42][43] Property rights in cases of works of art acquired during the Nazi period are highly complex.^[44] After the war the Nazi law legalizing possession of stolen works of degenerate art was deliberately upheld by the Allied Control Council in order that the trade in artworks could continue.^[45]

Unlike in Austria,^[46] there is no law in effect in Germany requiring the return of Nazi-looted art, as long as the items in question can be proven to have been, at any point in time, legally acquired. As signatories of the 1998 Washington Agreement, Germany agreed that all of its public institutions would check their inventories for Nazi-looted goods and return them if found. However, this is on a strictly voluntary basis and, 15 years later, very few museums and libraries^[47] have done so. Individuals are under no legal requirement whatsoever to return Nazi-looted art. Any failure on the part of the German government to return the rightful possessions of Cornelius Gurlitt might very well prove to be a violation of his property rights as guaranteed in the German constitution.^[48]

On 4 December 2013, prominent German art historian Sibylle Ehringhaus, who was one of the first experts to view the artworks in the spring of 2012, gave an interview in the newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine, demanding the immediate return of the complete collection to Gurlitt. However, she had looked at the works very briefly and had not researched their provenance because, as she stated in the interview, "Cornelius Gurlitt commissioned neither myself nor anyone else" to perform such research. Chief Prosecutor Reinhard Nemetz vehemently denied her appeal, yet apparently failed to cite any concrete legal grounds for the seizure.^[49][50]

On 20 November 2014, the German jurist Jutta Limbach, the head of the Limbach Commission on Nazi-looted art, confirmed the opinion of the German Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that the Bavarian “State Prosecutor used an incorrect application of the tax liability law to seize" the artworks of Cornelius Gurlitt.^[51]

There are a number of outstanding claims against the Gurlitt collection from descendants of the original Jewish owners of a number of the paintings, including Max Liebermann's Two riders.

Swiss museum's acceptance of Gurlitt's estate

On 24 November 2014, the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern agreed to accept the Gurlitt estate. Museum officials stated that no art looted by the Nazis would be permitted to enter the museum's collection. Some 500 works were to remain in Germany until their rightful owners could be identified. Three pieces were singled out for immediate return: Henri Matisse's Femme Assise to the descendants of the Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg, Max Liebermann's Two Riders on the Beach to the great-nephew of the industrialist and art collector David Friedmann, and Carl Spitzweg's Playing the Piano to the heirs of music publisher Henri Hinrichsen, who was murdered at Auschwitz.^[52]

List of selected works

German authorities announced that they will list all 590 suspect pieces in the Lost Art Internet Database.^[38] As of 17 March 2016 only 464 objects are listed.^[53] Descriptions of some of the artworks found have been made public since their discovery, which include:^{[29][54][55][56][57]}

See also

• Looted art
• Nazi plunder

References

Further reading

• German watercolors, drawings and prints [1905–1955]. A midcentury review, with loans from German museums and galleries and from the collection Dr. H. Gurlitt, Catalogue of the exhibition in New York City, San Francisco and Cambridge MA, 1956
• Feliciano, Hector; Vernay, Alain (1998). The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04191-4. 
• Hoffmann, Meike, ed. (2010). Ein Händler "entarteter" Kunst: Bernhard A. Böhmer und sein Nachlass. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-05-004498-9. 
• Petropoulos, Jonathan (2000). The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512964-4. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to 2012 Nazi loot discovery.

• Official website
• Obituary in The Independent by Marcus Williamson
• Haaretz, Israeli art expert says Nazi-looted trove in Munich is 'just the tip of the iceberg' (requires subscription and/or registration)
• Documents Reveal How Looted Nazi Art Was Restored to Dealer, NY Times, 6 November 2013
• Germany to Form Task Force on Looted Art, NY Times, 12 November 2013
• Michael Kimmelman, NY Times, In a Rediscovered Trove of Art, a Triumph Over the Nazis’ Will, 6 November 2013
• Smale, Alison (4 November 2013). "Report of Nazi-Looted Trove Puts Art World in an Uproar". The New York Times. 
• Verena Nees, Nazi looted art works discovered in Munich
• BBC inspects art stash