Gurlitt Collection

The collection attracted international interest in 2013 when it was announced as a sensational 2012 "Nazi loot discovery" by the media as a result of actions by officials of Augsburg in Cornelius Gurlitt's apartment in Schwabing, Munich, investigating Gurlitt on suspicion (later shown to be unfounded) of possible tax evasion. German authorities seized the entire collection, although Gurlitt was not detained.[1] Gurlitt repeatedly requested the return of the collection on the grounds that he had committed no crime, but eventually agreed that the collection could remain with the Prosecutor's office for evaluation in case any Nazi-era looted works could be identified. In 2014, a new agreement was reached that the collection would be returned to Gurlitt, but he died shortly thereafter, leaving all his property – including two Munich apartments plus a house and additional works stored at his residence in Salzburg, Austria – to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland, which agreed to accept the collection (minus any works suspected of being looted) in November 2014. Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had assembled the collection, was suspected of incorporating a number of looted items and, potentially, works acquired in dubious circumstances during the Second World War and preceding period in Nazi Germany, in addition to works acquired legitimately and/or passed down through his family; the provenance of a significant subset of items is still under investigation.

The collection contains Old Masters as well as Impressionist, Cubist, and Expressionist paintings, drawings and prints by artists including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Rodin, Otto Dix, Edvard Munch, Gustave Courbet, Max Liebermann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, among many others, as well as works by family members who were themselves artists. A considerable portion of the collection is in the form of prints and other "dealer stock" in addition to a smaller, but still noteworthy number of unique and more valuable works; initial sensationalist claims of the value of the collection being "in excess of 1 billion dollars" based on its size alone have proved to be unfounded, though the collection is certainly worth tens of millions of dollars. Legally, Cornelius was the owner of all the works upon their discovery, because in Germany, legal claims on potential looted works expire after 30 years; however, from 2012 he agreed to voluntarily return any works that were shown to be looted to the heirs of the families concerned, a provision that has been carried on by the new custodians of the collection. To date, six pieces have been returned, being works by Henri Matisse, Max Liebermann, Carl Spitzweg, Camille Pissarro, Adolph von Menzel and Paul Signac, while a profit-sharing agreement was reached with the heir of another family for a work by Max Beckmann prior to its sale in 2011.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was an art historian, museum director and art dealer in Germany during the 1930s who became an official art dealer for the Nazis.[4][5][1] He was particularly interested in modern art of the day, befriended a number of artists and purchased their works for the museums under his control; when he became a dealer he often exhibited their works for sale, and on occasion purchased items he particularly liked for his own collection. From the mid 1930s onwards, he also purchased and, in some cases, sold on artworks, often bought for low prices, from private individuals including Jewish owners who were under duress to pay extortionate taxes, or were otherwise liquidating assets in order to flee the country. On the one hand he claimed he was helping the owners in their predicament, since there were few dealers who were prepared to undertake such transactions, but on the other he was not averse to enriching himself in the process, as well as providing no cooperation to post-war claimants seeking to reclaim or obtain compensation for such works sold under duress.[6]

In 1937, Nazi Germany under Hitler condemned modern art as "degenerate" (not fitting to be called art in Hitler's view) and confiscated it from museums all over Germany. A travelling Degenerate Art Exhibition was set up where some of these pieces were displayed to the public to show their so-called "degenerate" nature. The Nazis set up a system to raise cash by selling as confiscated items abroad. The Nazis authorized four dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller and Bernhard Böhmer to trade such pieces, seeking overseas buyers in return for an agent's commission. Gurlitt's name appears against many of the entries on a listing compiled by the Ministry of Propaganda and now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum that provides details of the fate of each object, including whether it was exchanged, sold or destroyed.[7]

Max Liebermann's Two Riders On The Beach in the Gurlitt collection and now passed on to the descendants of the original Jewish owner

Following the fall of France, Hermann Göring appointed a series of Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce approved dealers, including Gurlitt, to acquire French art assets – mainly comprising works looted from museums and from the previously wealthy collectors of the day – for Hitler's planned Führermuseum which he wanted to build in Linz; some of the works also went to swell Göring's personal art collection.[8] Gurlitt, who had already embarked on purchasing trips to Paris on behalf of German museums, purchased around 200 works in Paris and the Netherlands between 1943 and 1944, not including works acquired for his own collection, of which 168 were intended for the Führermuseum.[9] Gurlitt undoubtedly used his thus "officially sanctioned" purchasing trips to Paris – which was at that time awash with artworks, including old masters of dubious provenance and including many items now recognised as being looted – to further enrich his own holdings, and also became very wealthy from commissions on the enormous amounts of money being paid by Hitler's regime for artworks at that time.

Gurlitt also purchased paintings on his own behalf from artists who were being persecuted by the Nazis, among them Max Beckmann who by 1944 was living in exile in the Netherlands, prior to departing for the United States in 1947. Gurlitt and his associate Erhard Göpel, local buyer for Hitler's planned Führermuseum, purchased five works from Beckmann in September 1944, including Bar, Brown which Gurlitt retained for himself. After Gurlitt's death the painting was offered for sale by both his widow (unsuccessfully) and subsequently by his son Cornelius, when at auction by Ketterer in Stuttgart in 1972 it realised DM 90,000 to Cornelius after auctioneer's fees (the same painting later re-sold at Sotheby's in London for £1.2 million). Beckmann's family did not dispute the distribution of the sale proceeds and considered that the original purchase by Gurlitt had been legitimate, albeit under reduced circumstances of the artist.[10]

Hildebrand was captured with his wife and twenty boxes of art in Aschbach (Schlüsselfeld) in June 1945. Under interrogation after capture, Gurlitt and his wife told United States Army authorities that in the fire bombing of Dresden of February 1945 much of his collection and his documentation of art transactions had been destroyed at his home in Kaitzer Strasse.[11] One hundred and fifteen pieces were taken from him by American and German authorities, but returned to him after he had convinced them that he had acquired them lawfully. Gurlitt successfully presented himself to his assessors as a victim of Nazi persecution due to his Jewish heritage, and negotiated the release of his possessions. Whether or not portions of his collection and records of business transactions were destroyed in Dresden as Gurlitt claimed, additional portions apparently had been successfully hidden in Franconia, Saxony and Paris, from which they were retrieved after the war.[12]

By 1947, Gurlitt had resumed trading in art works and also took up a position as Director of the Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, based in Düsseldorf. In 1949 his mother died (his father, Cornelius senior, having died in 1938) and he may have inherited additional works held by the family at that time, if not previously; according to his papers (later found not to be entirely trustworthy), Monet's painting of Waterloo Bridge, subsequently one of the most valuable in the collection, was purchased by his father as a gift to his mother at some point from 1914 onwards, and had passed already to Hildebrand in 1923 as a wedding present.[13][14] He continued to purchase works for his own collection, including Courbet's Village Girl with Goat for which he paid the then very large sum of 480,000 French Francs,[15] and lent works from his collection for several travelling exhibitions: one such show, "German Watercolors, Drawings and Prints: A Mid-Century Review" included 23 works from Hildebrand's collection and toured the United States up to and beyond his premature death at age 61 in a car crash in 1956.[16] On his death, the collection passed to his wife Helene, and on her death in 1964, mainly to their son Cornelius, with some items also passed to Cornelius' sister. Knowledge of the collection appears to have persisted in the minds of his contemporaries in the German art dealing world, and in some cases with their successors in business, but eventually – particularly with the passage of more than four decades – faded from public awareness.

The bulk of Hildebrand's collection survived with his son Cornelius, who lived a quiet, virtually reclusive life with the artworks inherited from his father for over forty years,[1] with portions of the collection kept at his two addresses in Munich, Germany and Salzburg, Austria; additional items appear to have been held by Cornelius' sister Benita, who later married and moved away to Stuttgart with her husband. Apart from any monies inherited after his parents' deaths, Cornelius survived by selling a small number of items from the collection, notably in 1988 and 1990, with the proceeds paid into a Swiss bank account which he would visit at four- to six- week intervals to withdraw money for his living expenses. Another painting, Max Beckmann's The Lion Tamer, was sold at auction in 2011, most likely to cover medical bills; Cornelius had already agreed to share the around €800,000 proceeds equally with the heir to the Jewish family that had originally possessed the painting.[17]

On 22 September 2010, German customs officials at the German–Swiss border stopped Cornelius on the return leg of one of his visits to Switzerland and found him to be carrying €9,000 in cash, within the legal limit for cash transfers across the border but which was notified as suspicious to the German tax authorities; under questioning, he explained that it was proceeds from the sale of a painting.[18] Since Cornelius had no occupation and no obvious means of income, the tax office suspected that he might be involved in the illegal transfer of artworks across the border without paying the relevant taxes, and obtained a warrant in 2011 to search his apartment in Schwabing, Munich, to see if they could find any evidence to support their suspicion.[19][20][21] On 28 February 2012 officials of the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office entered his apartment and found not records of past sales, but a reported 121 framed and 1,258 unframed works, the major part of the collection inherited from his father, with an initial reported worth of €1 billion (approx. $1.3 billion),[22] although this value eventually proved to be a significant overestimate. The collection was confiscated, under a process that was subsequently challenged in court since Cornelius had committed no crime under German law; it was also subsequently claimed that the scale of the action was disproportionate to any supposed tax irregularities.

Authorities initially banned reporting on the raid, which only came to light in 2013.[22][23] Initial media hysteria with sensational headlines such as "Artworks Worth $1.6 Billion, Stolen by Nazis, Discovered in German Apartment" proved to be an overstatement; writing in 2017, the German Lost Art Foundation concluded that "Looking at the art trove as a whole, it becomes clear that it is not so much a collection of highly valuable artworks worth billions as was initially assumed, but rather a mixture of family heirlooms and dealer stock. It does contain some very high quality, outstanding pieces, but most of it consists of works on paper, including a large number of serial graphic works."[24]

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, although subsequently he said that in respect of the latter statement he was misquoted.[25][26] Feeling threatened by the intense media attention, Gurlitt's brother-in-law offered 22 works in his possession to the police for safe keeping.[27]

Portrait de Monsieur Jean Journet by Gustave Courbet, 1850, one of the works found in the Salzburg portion of the collection; location previously unknown since 1914.

Gurlitt repeatedly requested the return of his collection but did not obtain legal representation until December 2013 when a Munich court appointed an official "Custodian" on his behalf, Christoph Edel, who initiated action against the Prosecutor's Office for the return of the collection to Gurlitt. Gurlitt also told Edel about the additional artworks stored at his Salzburg address; Edel was given permission by Gurlitt to remove these for safe keeping, a task which was carried out in February 2014. This portion of the collection, numbering 254 items, contained works by Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Liebermann, Toulouse-Lautrec, Courbet, Cézanne, Munch and Manet, some of extremely high quality, and were removed to a secure location where their provenance could be investigated further; the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office would not have access to them.[28] Access to the Salzburg works was provided, in a "secret location", to BBC reporter Stephen Evans, who showed some of them in a brief video segment made available by the BBC in March 2014.[29] One painting, Portrait de Monsieur Jean Journet by Gustave Courbet, had disappeared in 1914 and had previously been believed to have been lost during World War II.[30]

In April 2014, Edel obtained an agreement with the Augsburg prosecutor 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 returning any stolen pieces to the rightful owners which Gurlitt signed.[31] However, Gurlitt was by then very ill and died on 6 May 2014, never seeing the paintings again.[32] His will bequeathed all his property to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland, after all legitimate claims of ownership against it had been evaluated.[33][34]

An entity called the Schwabinger Kunstfund (Schwabing Art Trove) Task Force was set up in November 2013 under the direction of Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel to research the provenance of the paintings in the Gurlitt trove. However, after several years of operations it was widely criticized for having few results and little visibility.[35] The taskforce initially identified around 590 works as "possibly looted", but after two years of research had published provenance reports on only five items from the collection; under a flood of criticism, the taskforce was disbanded in December 2015. "We are disappointed," said Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress.[36][37][38] Its activities and some of its personnel were passed to a new "Centre for Lost Cultural Property", project name "Gurlitt Provenance Research", under the direction of Dr. Andrea Baresel-Brand.[39]

By December 2018, the Gurlitt Provenance Research project reported that it had completed its activities, with the results being presented on the German Lost Art Foundation website.[40] 1,039 items were investigated; of these, 315 were identified as confiscated from German museums during the "degenerate art" campaign, and thus not subject to suspicion of looting, so their responsibility could be passed directly to the Kunstmuseum Bern. The remaining 724 were assessed according to a "traffic light" system: green for works "proven or highly likely not to be Nazi-looted art" (28 items); yellow for "provenance during the period between 1933 and 1945 is not entirely clear; there are gaps in the provenance", i.e., requiring further investigation (650 items); and red for works "proven or highly likely to be Nazi-looted art" (4 items). A further 42 works were not reviewed, but also believed not to represent looted artworks, either because they could be assigned to additional works known to originate from German museums (22 items), be commercially mass produced goods (2 items), or have a reasonable explanation for their presence in Gurlitt family holdings, for example being created by family members, and/or created after 1945 (18 items). These "traffic light" categorizations are carried through to the complete lists of items as published on the Kunstmuseum Bern website.

Cornelius Gurlitt died on 6 May 2014.[41] In his will, written shortly before his death, Cornelius named the Museum of Fine Arts Bern (Kunstmuseum Bern) in Switzerland as his sole heir.[33] People close to Gurlitt told an American newspaper that he decided to give the collection to a foreign institution because he felt that Germany had treated him and his father badly.[42] The legacy included the paintings Cornelius' had kept in Salzburg, which German authorities had not confiscated because their permit did not extend to property held in Austria. His decision created further controversy over the appropriateness of the museum accepting this bequest. The will stipulated that the museum would be required to research the provenance of the paintings and make restitution as appropriate.[43] The museum decided to initially accept only those works for which original legal ownership by the Gurlitts could be established, including items acquired from the "degenerate art" collection and those passed down from other family members, and has entered into a joint agreement with German and Swiss authorities about the further researching of items in this bequest.

Cornelius' family (cousins) also entered the discussion, raising questions about the legality of the will, based on his state of mind at the time. His cousin, Uta Werner, filed a claim of inheritance on the artwork. Werner's lawyer, Wolfgang Seybold, argued that Gurlitt's relatives were the rightful heirs; however this claim was rejected by relevant authorities.[44] Around 590 pieces remain in Germany pending further investigation to determine whether they were confiscated from individuals under the Nazi regime, and a further 380 have been definitively identified as removed from museums by the Nazis as "degenerate art" so will pass to Bern without further obstruction.[45]

Art objects continued to surface after Cornelius' death. In July 2014, a new discovery was made in his Munich apartment: a Rodin marble and a Degas sculpture, along with some Roman, Greek, Egyptian and Asian objects, which had been missed when the apartment was originally searched in 2012.[46][47] In September, an early pastel landscape by Claude Monet was discovered in a suitcase Gurlitt had left in the last hospital where he had stayed.[48]

Initial media reports that the collection was worth in excess of $1 billion,[49] based apparently on its size alone plus descriptions of one or two contained works, have proved to be an over-estimate, bearing in mind that a substantial component of the collection contains printed graphic works on paper whose individual value may be in the order of no more than €1,000 per item, or possibly even less.[50][51] Nevertheless, the collection does contain a number of significant, high value items including, among others, a Claude Monet painting "valued at $12 million",[52] a Matisse painting ("$20 million"),[52] a major Cézanne 1897 painting La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, as well as Liebermann's Two Riders on the Beach which subsequently realised almost 1.9 million pounds at auction (see below), and others including original works by Manet, Degas, Renoir and more; in 2019 it was also reported that the Manet painting, Marine, Temps d'Orage ("Ships at Sea in Stormy Weather") had been sold for US $4 million to Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art.[53] In 2020, it was reported that Paul Signac's 1887 painting Quai de Clichy. Temps Gris, which had been returned to the heirs of the original owner, had been consigned for auction and was estimated to sell for up to £800,000 ($1 million).[54]

The overall value of the collection as held by Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012 may thus conservatively be stated to have been in the order of at least several tens of millions of dollars, although no official valuation has ever been publicly released.

German newspapers questioned the prosecutor's right to seize the collection.[55][56] Property rights in cases of works of art acquired during the Nazi period are highly complex.[57] 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.[58]

Unlike in Austria, where the Kunstrückgabegesetz 1998 (Art Return Law 1998) regulates the return of Nazi-looted art, 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 have done so.[59] Individuals are under no legal requirement whatsoever to return Nazi-looted art. A failure on the part of the German government to return the rightful possessions of Cornelius Gurlitt might have been a violation of his property rights as guaranteed in the German constitution.[60]

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.[61][62]

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.[63]

• Looted art
• Nazi plunder
• List of claims for restitution for Nazi-looted art
• The Holocaust

• 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.

• Hickley, Catherine. "The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler's Dealer and his Secret Legacy." Thames & Hudson, London, 2015, 272 pp. ISBN 9780500292570
• Ronald, Susan. "Hitler's Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe's Treasures." St. Martin's Press, New York, 400 pp. ISBN 9781250061096
• Collins, Jacob R. "The Gurlitt Trove: Its Past, Present and Future". Undergraduate Thesis, University of Vermont, 2016, 54 pp.

Media related to Gurlitt collection at Wikimedia Commons

• German Lost Art Foundation: Gurlitt Art Trove
• BBC inspects art stash
• Video: "Hitler's Art Dealer" - short documentary, c. 2017 by Mounia El Aboudi / University of the Arts London
• Video: "Bestandsaufnahme Gurlitt – Behind the Art" - 2017 video, 25 mins, based around the 2017 Bonn and Bern exhibitions
• BBC Arts: Nazi art dealer's secret hoard revealed after half a century Article, 9 November 2017
• Kunstmuseum Bern (2017). Gurlitt Status Report: "Degenerate Art" - Confiscated and Sold (Exhibition Guide) (PDF). Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern.
• Kunstmuseum Bern (2018). Gurlitt Status Report Part 2: Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences (Exhibition Guide) (PDF). Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern.