U.S. doctor makes claim against $1B Nazi art trove
A British doctor who is the heir of a renowned Jewish art dealer believes a $1-billion trove of looted Nazi paintings includes masterpieces that belong to his family.
Michael Hulton — 67-yearold anesthetist based in San Francisco — is the great-nephew of Alfred Flechtheim, a famous art collector and socialite whose galleries were seized after he fled to London from Berlin in 1933.
Hundreds of pieces that he owned were never seen again. But last weekend it emerged that German customs officials had found 1,400 paintings in the cluttered Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who traded plundered works for the Nazis.
Hulton now believes some of his family’s missing masterpieces are among the trove, which is in the hands of the German authorities.
Only two years ago, his lawyers secured a share of the sale price of $1.2 million after Cornelius Gurlitt put up for auction a painting that had belonged to his great uncle. The work, the Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann, had originally been given to Flechtheim by the painter himself in 1931.
At the time, Hulton had “no idea” that Gurlitt was in possession of hundreds of other paintings that had been looted by the Nazis. Now he believes his family is likely to have strong claims to some of the other works that had been gathering dust in Gurlitt’s unremarkable Munich apartment.
In his first interview, Hulton told The Daily Telegraph that he was unhappy at how the German authorities had behaved since the trove of looted art was discovered. The paintings were found by German customs officials last year, but their discovery only came to light at the weekend.
Hulton said he was angry that German authorities had been slow to reveal the discovery and had not released an inventory of their findings.
Earlier this week, Bavarian officials cited privacy issues and concerns about establishing provenance of the paintings. But Hulton said they were breaking the spirit of the 1998 Washington accords when Germany and other countries agreed to speedy restitution of Nazi-plundered works.
“The German bureaucratic language carries a very nasty taste for those of us who lost relatives in the Holocaust,” he said. “The reasoning is reminiscent of what happened in the 1930s and 1940s.
“We need transparency from the Germans and we need them to answer our questions quickly. We have very real claims.”
Hulton and his elderly stepmother, Flechtheim’s only other heir, are not sure exactly which of his paintings may be in Gurlitt’s collection. However, they think there are probably other works by Beckmann and possibly a self-portrait by Otto Dix. Flechteim owned works by the likes of Picasso, Klee, Monet, Renoir and Matisse.
Flechtheim became an immediate target after the Nazis seized power in 1933, persecuted both because he was Jewish and because he specialized in modern art, which was categorized as “degenerate” by the new regime.