Cornelius Gurlitt | |
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Born | Hamburg, Germany | 28 December 1932
Died | 6 May 2014 81) Munich, Germany | (aged
Occupation | Art collector |
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Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt (28 December 1932 – 6 May 2014) was a German art collection owner. The son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art gallery director and Nazi-era dealer of looted art who worked for Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, [1] Gurlitt inherited from his father a collection of over 1,400 artworks known as the Gurlitt trove or Gurlitt Collection, a small number (less than 20) of which were subsequently demonstrated to have been looted from Jews by Nazis. [2] [3] [4] [5] Upon its public discovery, the collection was impounded by the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office as evidence in a possible case for tax evasion that was never mounted; the works were not returned to Gurlitt's estate until after his death. In his will, Gurlitt left the entire collection, minus any works that turned out to be looted, to a lesser known gallery in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts Bern (German : Kunstmuseum Bern), apparently in reaction over his perceived poor treatment by the German authorities.
Gurlitt's parents were the art dealer and previous museum director Hildebrand Gurlitt, who worked for the Nazis selling looted art, [2] and his wife, Helene Hanke. [6] He grew up in the Dammtor district of Hamburg with his sister Renate (later known as Benita), who was born there in 1935. [7]
After attending primary school in Hamburg, he went to secondary school in Dresden until the city was destroyed by allied bombing in 1945, when Gurlitt was 13. The family moved to rural Aschbach, then in 1946 Gurlitt and his sister were sent to the private Odenwaldschule at Heppenheim for a short period until he joined his family again, now settled in Düsseldorf, where he took his school leaving examination in 1953 at the age of 20. [8]
Three years later, while Gurlitt was enrolled at Cologne University studying art history, his father Hildebrand was killed in a 1956 road accident, [2] leaving to his wife Helene the custodianship of his extensive and valuable, but generally little known, private art collection. In 1961, Helene bought two small apartments in the Schwabing suburb of Munich, while Gurlitt moved to Austria, building himself a small house in Aigen, a relatively affluent suburb of Salzburg.
His mother died in January 1968, after which time Gurlitt divided his time between one of the two fifth-floor Munich apartments (which his sister had inherited) and his Salzburg house; he never married and lived alone for the next four decades, surrounded by the art collection he had inherited upon his mother's death. [2] He lived modestly, drove an inexpensive Volkswagen car, and was a virtual recluse, maintaining as little contact with the outside world as possible, with the exception of regular visits from his sister Benita.
In addition to possessing a German passport, he had taken out Austrian citizenship and was registered in that country for tax purposes. However, by the 2000s, his Salzburg house was becoming neglected and Gurlitt, whose health was failing, visited it less frequently, spending more of his time residing in the Munich apartment. [9]
Since he had never had any other source of income, after exhaustion of any other money inherited from his mother, Gurlitt appears to have lived by selling the occasional painting from his father's collection, [2] the proceeds being paid into an account in Zurich, Switzerland, to which Gurlitt would travel every four to six weeks and withdraw €9,000 to pay his living costs. [10] The existence, quality and extent of the collection that he had inherited remained largely secret, unknown to his acquaintances and the public at large, although according to one dealer was "common knowledge among dealers in southern Germany". [11]
In September 2010, Gurlitt, then aged 77, was stopped[ why? ] on a train returning from Zurich to Munich and found to have €9,000 in his possession, which he said came from selling some paintings he had had in his possession in 1978. He made regular trips to the Swiss art dealer Eberhard Kornfeld who paid him in cash or by cheque. [12] The amount was below the legally allowed limit to be carried between countries in cash but aroused the suspicion of authorities that he might be involved in some sort of art fraud selling stolen artworks on the black market, on which he was paying no tax in Germany. [13] "Cornelius Gurlitt was not registered with Munich municipal authorities and had no tax number or pension - enough to start a probe" Reuters reported. [14]
German customs officials obtained a warrant to search his sister's Munich apartment where he was living and discovered 1,406 works of art initially reported as worth €1 billion (this figure was subsequently revised downwards to some tens of millions of euros). The collection included works by Renoir, Matisse, Otto Dix and many other famous artists. These works were all confiscated by officials of the Augsburg Prosecutor's office, although the legality of that action was later challenged in court. [15]
Gurlitt had no lawyer at the time, and his repeated requests for the collection to be returned to him on the basis that he had committed no crime went unheeded. The Augsburg Prosecutor's investigation, meanwhile, proceeded very slowly and out of public sight until the find was leaked to the press and sensationally reported by the German magazine Focus on 3 November 2013. [16] News of the discovery was reported worldwide. [17] [2]
In December 2013, a local court in Munich appointed a German lawyer, Christoph Edel, to look after Gurlitt's affairs for the next six months, under a scheme which provides legal representation for old or infirm clients. Edel filed lawsuits first against unidentified officials who had leaked information on the discovery to the press, then on the Prosecutor's office for return of the collection, which, however, Gurlitt was never to see again. Gurlitt also revealed to Edel the existence of a second portion of the collection at his Salzburg house, which Edel took steps to secure and remove to a new location on Gurlitt's behalf; these items, more than 250 pieces including works by Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Liebermann, de Toulouse-Lautrec, Courbet, Cézanne, Munch, and Manet, were never touched by the German authorities. [18]
Initially, Gurlitt reportedly maintained that all of the works in his collection had been acquired legally by his father; however subsequent research proved that this was not true. [3] [4] [5] Artworks from the collections of Fritz Salo Glaser, [19] Armand Dorville, [20] Henri Hinrichsen, [21] Georges Mandel [22] and David Friedmann were among the many previously owned by Jewish collectors found in Gurlitts possessions. In 2014 he stated he would restitute to victims' families works found to be looted as recommended by the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. [23]
In 2011 when he put Max Beckmann's The Lion Tamer up for sale at the Cologne auction house Lempertz, it was recognized by Mike Hulton, heir to the Jewish dealer Alfred Flechtheim who had been persecuted and plundered in the Nazi era. [24] Hulton requested its return and a settlement was reached to share the profits of the sale, the picture eventually selling for €864,000. [25] [26]
Following a number of years of ill health, Gurlitt died of heart failure on 6 May 2014 at the age of 81. The will he wrote shortly before his death unexpectedly named a museum in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts Bern (German: Kunstmuseum Bern), as his "sole heir". 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. [27] The legacy included the items that Gurlitt had kept in Munich and also in Salzburg, which German authorities had not confiscated because their remit did not extend to property held in Austria, plus his properties in the two locations, which the Bern Museum subsequently announced they would be selling in order to offset some of the costs associated with accepting the bequest. [28]
The will stipulated that the museum would be required to research the provenance of the paintings and make restitution as appropriate. [29] The museum decided to accept those works, none of which are suggested to represent the proceeds of Nazi-era looting, and enter into a joint agreement with German and Swiss authorities about the handling of this bequest. The will was challenged by one of Gurlitt's cousins based on a psychiatric report concluding that Gurlitt suffered from dementia, schizoid personality disorder, and a delusional disorder at the time he wrote his will. [30] The challenge was defeated in court and the Bern bequest permitted to stand.
Among the Nazi-looted artworks in Gurlitt's collection were a portrait by Matisse restituted to the heirs of French art dealer Paul Rosenberg,Two Riders on a Beach (1901), by Max Liebermann, which was returned to the heirs of the German-Jewish industrialist and art collector David Friedmann, [31] and sold at auction in June 2015, [32] and Carl Spitzweg's Musical Pair, looted from Henri Hinrichsen who was murdered in the Holocaust. [33] [34]
Additional items have continued to be identified as looted and have been returned to the original owners' heirs where known. Exhibitions of some of the works from the collection went on show in November 2017. [35] [36] [37]
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Thomas Couture was a French history painter and teacher. He taught such later luminaries of the art world as Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, John Ward Dunsmore, Karel Javůrek, William Morris Hunt, and Joseph-Noël Sylvestre.
Otto Müller was a German painter and printmaker of the Die Brücke expressionist movement.
Paul Rosenberg was a French art dealer. He represented Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. Both Paul and his brother Léonce Rosenberg were among the world's major dealers of modern art.
Wolfgang Gurlitt was a German art dealer, museum director and publisher whose art collection included Nazi-looted art.
The Bavarian State Painting Collections, based in Munich, Germany, oversees artwork held by the Free State of Bavaria. It was established in 1799 as Centralgemäldegaleriedirektion. Artwork includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, video art and installation art. Pieces are on display in numerous galleries and museums throughout Bavaria.
The Museum Georg Schäfer is a German art museum in Schweinfurt, Bavaria. Based on the private art collection of German industrialist Georg Schäfer (1896–1975), the museum primarily collects 19th-century paintings by artists from German-speaking countries.
The Museum of Fine Arts Bern, established in 1879 in Bern, is the museum of fine arts of the de facto capital of Switzerland.
Serena (Szeréna) Pulitzer Lederer was an Austro-Hungarian art collector and the spouse of the industrial magnate August Lederer, close friend of Gustav Klimt and instrumental in the constitution of the collection of Klimt's art pieces.
Hildebrand Gurlitt was a German art historian and art gallery director who dealt in Nazi-looted art as one of Hitler's and Goering's four authorized dealers for "degenerate art".
The Gurlitt Collection was a collection of around 1,500 art works inherited by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of Hitler's official art dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956), and which was found to have contained several artworks looted from Jews by the Nazis.
Two Riders on the Beach is the title of two similar paintings by the German artist Max Liebermann. Both were painted in 1901 while Liebermann was on vacation in Scheveningen on the North Sea. The paintings are considered masterpieces of German impressionism, heavily influenced by the style of French impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.
Eberhard W. Kornfeld was a Swiss auctioneer, author, art dealer, and collector based in Bern.
Mary MacPherson Lane is an American non-fiction writer and journalist specializing in Western European art and history.
Henri Hinrichsen was a German music publisher and patron of music in Leipzig. He directed the music publishing house C. F. Peters, succeeding his uncle. He helped found the Hochschule für Frauen zu Leipzig, the first academy for women in Germany, and financed the acquisition of a collection of musical instruments by the University of Leipzig. He was murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Adolf Hitler's art collection was a large accumulation of paintings which he gained before and during the events of WWII. These paintings were often taken from existing art galleries in Germany and Europe as Nazi forces invaded. Hitler planned to create a large museum in Linz called the Fü
Erhard Göpel was a German art historian and high level Nazi agent who acquired art, including looted art, for Hitler’s Führermuseum.
David Friedmann was a German entrepreneur and art collector.
Fritz Salo Glaser was a German Jewish art collector.
Today, January 22, Germany is handing over three works from the collection to Dorville's heirs after they submitted a claim for their return. Two paintings by Jean-Louis Forain, a watercolor titled Lady in an Evening Gown and the oil painting Portrait of a Lady in Profile, were located within the hoard of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Nazi-era art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt
Among the some 1,500 artworks found in Cornelius Gurlitt's hoard, 14 were proven to have been looted under the Nazis.
Seated Woman, painted in 1921, was taken from Paul Rosenberg as he fled Germany, but was discovered in Cornelius Gurlitt's Munich flat
In his first interview about the reclusive Gurlitt – who died in 2014, a year after his secret trove of art first seized headlines - Kornfeld told Swiss Public Television, SRF, that he paid Gurlitt in cash or by cheque for the artworks he sold. Gurlitt, who had never had a job, needed the money to live on and to pay for medical treatment.
Georges Mandel, Paris August 1940: Wahrscheinlich von den deutschen Besatzern beschlagnahmt (…) Spätestens 28. April 1944: Raphaël Gerard, Paris Nach September 1953: Hildebrand Gurlitt, Düsseldorf Durch Erbgang an Cornelius Gurlitt, München/Salzburg Seit 6. Mai 2014: Nachlass Cornelius Gurlitt
A drawing by Carl Spitzweg that was uncovered in a secret cache of art in a Munich apartment 73 years after it was seized by the Nazis has been returned to the heirs of Henri Hinrichsen, a Jewish music publisher and philanthropist who was murdered at Auschwitz.