Tainted art
‘Degenerate’ works seized by the Nazis see the light of day
In 1964, a reclusive German named Cornelius Gurlitt, who lived between Munich and Salzburg, received a letter from his sister. “Do you occasionally take pleasure in what you have?” she wrote, referring to the many paintings, drawings and prints that he had inherited from their father, Hildebrand, a museum director and art dealer. “It sometimes seems to me that his most personal and valuable bequest has become the darkest burden for us.”
Half a century later, this “dark burden” was brought, sensationally, into the light. After a routine check by customs officers on a train travelling from Zurich to Munich in 2010, during which a jumpy Cornelius was found to be carrying €9,000 in cash, he was flagged for further investigation, under suspicion of tax evasion.
When the authorities searched his apartment, they discovered an extraordinary cache of art. Mostly, it consisted of unframed works on paper stored in a nondescript plan chest, but there were also paintings, including one by Matisse. Upon learning that Cornelius’s father had acted as a dealer for the Nazis, Bavarian investigators suspected that the art had been looted – and, in 2012, they confiscated the whole lot. More than a year later, the story of the find was broken by the German news magazine Focus, and the international media went wild. There were excitable reports about the discovery of a Nazi-looted art “hoard” worth more than a billion euros.
In 2014, having negotiated the return of his art by agreeing to give back anything that had been stolen, Cornelius died. In a mysterious twist, he bequeathed everything to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland, before anything had been restituted. And last week, Bern’s Kunstmuseum opened one chapter of
Gurlitt: Status Report, a two-part exhibition presenting his “art trove” to the public for the first time. The second instalment was unveiled the next day, at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany. During both packed press conferences, the exhibitions’ organisers attempted to “neutralise” the emotional response to the Gurlitt saga, and lay bare the facts. As they did so, however, it was impossible to avoid the sensation of being sucked into a vortex of complexity and sadness.
Each exhibition is devoted to a different theme. In Bern, a selection of works represents the core strength of Gurlitt’s bequest: vigorous prints and drawings by 20th-century German Expressionists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-rottluff, as well as bold works on paper by those “New Objectivity” artists of the Weimar Republic: Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Otto Dix. These were the modern artists whom the Nazis considered “degenerate”, and whose work they confiscated en masse. Between 1937 – the year of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition held in Munich – and 1939, more than 20,000 modern artworks by 1,400 artists were seized from more than 100 German museums. Incredibly, the law that the Nazis passed in 1938 to legalise these raids has never been repealed. Some of the confiscated art was burned, in the courtyard of Berlin’s main fire station in 1939. A lot, though, was sold abroad, to amass foreign currency that could be spent on arms. The Nazis appointed four art dealers as middlemen in these transactions. One of them was Cornelius’s father, Hildebrand.
In Bonn, the focus is art looted by the Nazis from mostly Jewish collectors and dealers. Spanning many eras of art history, the selection is surprisingly varied. There are prints by Dürer, drawings by Tiepolo, a view of Waterloo Bridge by Monet, and sculptures by Rodin. In other words, Gurlitt’s trove was never a “collection”, as such, but stock built up over many decades by an unscrupulous art dealer who profited under the Nazis.
Both exhibitions try to present the art as art – that is, to contextualise it historically, and highlight its aesthetic merits. In a sense, though, this approach is irrelevant, since there was little rhyme or reason to the way Gurlitt built up his inventory, and the quality of what he amassed is patchy. The truth is that the interest of this art is its fraught historical context. Forevermore it will be viewed through the prism of Hildebrand Gurlitt and his Nazi links, and seen as emblematic of the atrocities of the Third Reich.
It remains a mystery why Gurlitt, a reserved and cultured man, whose grandmother was Jewish, and who was a champion of modern art in his first career as a progressive museum director, should have offered his services to the Nazis. But he did. In 1938, he volunteered to sell “degenerate art” for them. By 1943, he was working officially on the so-called “Special Commission Linz”, a well-
‘Incredibly, the law the Nazis passed in 1938 to legalise these raids has never been repealed’
funded project to provide masterpieces for Hitler’s neverrealised “Führermuseum” in the Austrian city on the Danube.
During the first half of the Forties, Gurlitt spent much of his time in occupied France acquiring, on Hitler’s behalf, more than 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and tapestries, and pocketing a handsome commission on each sale. Most likely, it was during these murky, lawless years that he also amassed, dubiously and on the cheap, many of the works that his son inherited. This is probably how the cache’s most expensive work, a late painting by Cézanne, of Mont Sainte-victoire, which was found sandwiched between plywood behind a cupboard in Cornelius’s second residence in Salzburg, ended up in Hildebrand’s possession. (It is not displayed in either exhibition.)
For many people, the cloud of unknowing that still envelops this entire sorry tale will be its saddest aspect. So far, just six works from the Gurlitt trove, including paintings by Matisse and Max Liebermann, have been confirmed as looted. Of these, only four have been “restituted”.
Given the complexities of restitution, this is not a small number, according to Andrea Baresel-brand, of the Gurlitt Provenance Research project, which receives an annual budget of €1million from the German government. Moreover, the Kunstmuseum must remain vigilant for “gold-diggers”, says the institution’s vice-president, Marcel Brülhart. “Restitution has become big business.”
Still, 112 artworks remain on Gurlitt Provenance Research’s “amber” list – which means that suspicions they were looted by the Nazis can be neither confirmed nor discounted.
In short, in too many cases, despite reasonable suspicions and thorough investigation, we simply don’t know what happened – and, frankly, are unlikely ever to find out.
Gurlitt: Status Report, “Degenerate Art” – Confiscated and Sold is at Kunstmuseum Bern (+41 31 328 09 44), until March 4; Gurlitt: Status Report, Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences is at Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (+49 228 9171-200), until March 11