News from the art world
Returning Nazi loot...
Eight years ago, tax investigators discovered a 1,500-strong “hoard of art looted by the Nazis” in the Munich flat of 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, said David Crossland in The Times. It has taken nearly a decade of research, but one of the works recovered from the apartment – a drawing entitled Playing the Piano by 19th century German artist Carl Spitzweg – has finally been reunited with its rightful owners. In 1939, Nazi authorities confiscated the work from Henri Hinrichsen, a Jewish music publisher from Leipzig whose business had recently been seized under Hitler’s “Aryanisation” laws; he and much of his family would later perish in the Holocaust. The drawing was acquired by Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer appointed by the Nazis to market confiscated art. When the Third Reich collapsed, Gurlitt held onto the works he had amassed, which subsequently passed to Cornelius, his son. Playing the Piano – one of Hinrichsen’s most prized possessions – is the 14th work from Gurlitt’s collection to be returned to its rightful owners.
...and a stolen Leonardo copy
A 500-year-old copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi has been found in a Naples flat and returned to a museum “where staff were unaware it had even been stolen”, reports BBC News. Italian police officers discovered the painting in a bedroom cupboard when searching an apartment belonging to a 36-year-old man, who has since been arrested “on suspicion of receiving stolen goods”. Believed to have been painted in the early 1500s by Girolamo Alibrandi, one of Leonardo’s students, the painting is part of the collection of the Doma Museum, within Naples’s San Domenico Maggiore church. At present, it is not known when the work was stolen, “as no one had reported it missing”. Police are investigating the theft, and say that there was no sign of a breakin at the museum, which has spent much of the past year closed due to pandemic restrictions. “It is plausible that it was a commissioned theft by an organisation working in the international art trade”, said Naples prosecutor Giovanni Melillo.