Nazi loot extravaganza (ctd.)
November 5 2013
Video: BBC
Not only are the German authorities refusing to publish a list of the art found in that son-of-a-Nazi fellow's flat in Munich, but they've also lost track of him. Unglaublich.
Mind you, judging by the few photos released so far, there's a lot of truly terrible art there too. I wonder if some of it is a bit fake.
Mark Hudson in the Telegraph has a good article on German reluctance to return looted works.
Update - a reader writes:
[...] there must be more to that story. Some of the pictures do indeed look dreadful - and the conveniently round billion euro valuation is inherently suspicious.
I keep reading the phrase 'not previously known' when the press discusses this or that 'new' Matisse, Chagall, Dix etc., which makes me a little suspicious.
However, in Bloomberg, Catherine Hickley reports that many of the works were inventoried by the Alleis after the war, and returned to Gurlitt, the Nazi art dealer who first amassed the collection, in 1950:
A list of art compiled by U.S. troops in 1950 may help Jewish heirs identify works looted by the Nazis that wound up in a squalid Munich apartment, researchers from the Holocaust Art Restitution Project said.
U.S. troops vetted Hildebrand Gurlitt’s collection and missed a chance 63 years ago to seize the stash, which included works by Max Beckmann and Edgar Degas, according to a custody receipt that Marc Masurovsky and Willi Korte, researchers at HARP, found yesterday in the National Archive in Washington.
Their discovery includes a five-page list of artworks held by the allies and returned to Gurlitt in 1950. Prosecutors said they won’t publish an inventory of the 1,400 works seized in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, Hildebrand’s son. Groups representing the heirs of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution protested the secrecy.
“A great many people don’t know what is missing from their collections,” Wesley Fisher, Director of Research at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said by telephone from New York. “This secrecy is not going to help families. Many of the items that clearly seem to have come from France may have been seized or lost in forced sales.”
Authorities seized Cornelius Gurlitt’s cache of more than 1,400 paintings, lithographs, drawings and prints as part of an investigation on suspicion of tax evasion in a three-day operation in March 2012. It took 1½ years to announce the hoard. Though refusing to provide a list of the works, they said it includes works by Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Max Liebermann.
Update II - the Commission for Looted Art in Europe has published Hidebrand Gurlitt's interview with the allies, and a (much smaller) list of the pictures he had here.
