The Gurlitt Collection

The Gurlitt collection, around fifteen hundred works of art assembled by the Nazi-era German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt and inherited at his death in 1956 by his son Cornelius, was the largest single hoard of Holocaust-looted art identified in private hands in the postwar period. The discovery of the collection in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment by Bavarian customs investigators in February 2012 was the most significant restitution event of the twenty first century. The provenance research that followed has so far identified around two hundred and fifty works as Nazi-looted, with restitutions made to identified Jewish heirs and the remainder transferred to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland under the terms of Cornelius Gurlitt’s will of 2014.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was an art historian and museum director by training. He had been director of the König-Albert Museum in Zwickau in the early 1930s and was dismissed in 1933 for his support of modernist art and for his Jewish maternal grandmother. He continued to work as an art dealer in Hamburg and Berlin through the 1930s. From 1938 he was one of four official dealers appointed by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda to dispose of the so-called degenerate art that had been confiscated from German museums in the campaigns of 1937 and 1938. The other three were Karl Buchholz, Bernhard Böhmer and Ferdinand Möller. The four men were authorised to sell the modernist works abroad for foreign currency.

Gurlitt’s larger role came after 1940. He was appointed by Hans Posse and then by Hermann Voss as a buyer for the Führermuseum project in Linz, with operating territory in occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He travelled regularly to Paris between 1941 and 1944, working out of the Hotel Bristol on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and bought works for the Sonderauftrag Linz from the dealers and from the auction houses that were processing the property of arrested Jewish families. He also bought, on his own account, works from Jewish owners under the duress conditions of the occupation, often at prices that were a fraction of the pre-war market value. Some of the Jewish sellers, including the heirs of the dealer Paul Rosenberg and the descendants of the artist Max Liebermann, are now identifying their works in the Gurlitt holdings.

The Allied investigators interrogated Gurlitt at the end of the war, at the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point and elsewhere. He told them that almost all of his stock had been destroyed in the Allied bombing of Dresden, his home city, in February 1945. The Allies accepted this account. Gurlitt was returned to civilian life in 1948 and lived out his remaining years as a respected art historian, dying in a car accident near Oberhausen in 1956. The collection passed to his widow Helene and then to his son Cornelius. Cornelius Gurlitt lived alone in his Munich apartment until his death in May 2014, supported by the gradual sale of works from the holdings through the Lempertz auction house in Cologne and the Galerie Kornfeld in Bern. He paid no income tax for sixty years and the works were undeclared.

Cornelius Gurlitt’s lifestyle came to the attention of the Bavarian customs office in late 2010 after he was detained on a German train returning from Switzerland with a large quantity of undeclared cash from the sale of a single Beckmann work. The customs office obtained a search warrant for the Munich apartment in 2011 and executed it on 28 February 2012. The investigators found around twelve hundred and eighty paintings and works on paper in the apartment, plus around two hundred and thirty more in his second residence at Salzburg. The German authorities held the discovery in confidence for a year and a half. The story broke in November 2013 when the German news magazine Focus published a cover story.

The German Federal Ministry for Culture and Media established the Schwabinger Kunstfund Task Force in 2013 to research the provenance of the works. The task force was succeeded in 2016 by the German Lost Art Foundation provenance research project. By 2024 the research had identified around two hundred and fifty works as Nazi-looted with sufficient certainty to justify restitution. Around twenty works have been restituted to identified Jewish heirs. The major restituted works include Henri Matisse’s Sitting Woman, returned to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg in 2015; Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on a Beach, returned to the heirs of David Friedmann in 2015; and Carl Spitzweg’s The Pianist, returned to the heirs of Henri Hinrichsen in 2017.

Cornelius Gurlitt died in May 2014 leaving a will that bequeathed the entire collection to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, on condition that the museum cooperate with the German provenance research and restitute identified Nazi-looted works to the heirs. The Kunstmuseum Bern accepted the bequest in November 2014. The works that have not been identified as Nazi-looted, and works that the heirs of an identified Jewish original owner have agreed to release to the museum in exchange for compensation, are now part of the Bern collection. The provenance research continues. The case is the most thoroughly documented private holding of Nazi-era art in the postwar literature.

See also

Sources

  • Catherine Hickley, The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler’s Dealer and His Secret Legacy, Thames and Hudson, 2015
  • Susan Ronald, Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures, St Martin’s Press, 2015
  • German Lost Art Foundation, Schwabinger Kunstfund task force final report, 2016
  • Kunstmuseum Bern, Gurlitt provenance research database
  • Meike Hoffmann and Nicola Kuhn, Hitlers Kunsthändler: Hildebrand Gurlitt 1895, 1956, C. H. Beck, 2016
  • German Federal Ministry for Culture and Media, Gurlitt files