Gurlitt dies
May 7 2014
Picture: Artnet
Cornelius Gurlitt has died from heart complications. It's hard not to feel sorry for him, when one sees the headlines like the above from Artnet: Gurlitt may have inherited some Nazi loot, but that doesn't make him either a Nazi or a looter.
Quite what will happen to his collection now is anyone's guess. Bloomberg reports that the German courts will have to decide on whether there is a valid will. The Art Newspaper reports that:
At the beginning of April, Gurlitt signed an agreement with the federal government of Germany and the state of Bavaria to allow a dedicated task-force to research the collection and to return those works with a questionable provenance. The seized works were subsequently released.
It's thought that not many of Gurlitt's pictures will fall into the provably returnable category, however.
Update - he's left it all to a Swiss Museum! See the above post.
