Barely weeks after the public announcement of results of an investigation on the provenance of 139 artworks confiscated from their Jewish proprietors by the Nazi regime, the largest-ever cache of European early-Twentieth Century masterworks was seized in a Munich apartment, with a total value of over 2 billion euros. The recovered items are close to 1,500 paintings by such renowned artists as Picasso, Chagall, Klee Beckman, Nolde, and Matisse, all taken during the Nazi occupation.
According to the German weekly Focus, these masterworks had been deemed lost until now. Originally, they were labeled "degenerate art" by Third Reich authorities, since Adolf Hitler viewed classical art forms as the last decent artistic expression in history and thought that Germany should be purged of the degeneration represented by Modernism. Since 1933 through the start of the war, these works, now considered master exemplars of cubism, impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, and Dada, were exhibited as "degenerate".
In this way, Jewish collectors of the 1930s and 1940s were dispossessed of their properties, which ended up in the hands of German collector Hildebrand Gurlitt. Gurlitt had been the director of the Zwickau museum when Hitler seized power but was forced to step down because of his Jewish ancestry; nevertheless, he was later hired by the regime as the foremost expert in German art of that era and because of his many contacts around the world, which facilitated the sale of artworks. After the war, Gurlitt was considered a victim of the Nazis. He reported having helped finance the escape of many Jews from Europe and asserted that the entre collection had been destroyed during the bombing of Dresden.
It seems that after his death, the art and the apartment were left to his son, Cornelius. Gurlitt's son, who had no judicial records of any kind, first attracted the attention of customs authorities after cashing a large check in Switzerland in 2010. Afterwards he boarded a train towards Munich, where he was immediately questioned by police about the origins of those funds. Later, in 2011, investigators raided Gurlitt's apartment and discovered the large collection of stolen art. It is believed that the items had been held in a dark warehouse alongside juice boxes, canned food, and the multifarious knick-knacks a hoarder usually accumulates.
Since the seizure, University of Berlin art historian Meike Hoffmann has been researching and analyzing the works to determine their origin and authenticity. Hoffmann told journalist she had been authorized only now to publish her data, since at the time she was bound by a strict confidentiality commitment.
Focus adds that Cornelius Gurlitt was able to support himself with the occasional sale of individual items from the collection, since several empty frames were found along with the recovered art.
The British daily The Guardian has deemed this discovery a veritable banquet for art historians, but at the same time the beginning of a long, intricate series of legal processes that will start as soon as claims on the ownership or each work are entered. This is the main justification for having kept the seizure secret until now. Another justification is the difficulty in establishing which European galleries cold have been in business with Gurlitt and tracking the current location of the works he sold, in order to process the corresponding reparations.