European museums to showcase art treasures plundered during Nazi era

Hundreds of works discovered in Munich

Five years after a surprise stash of stolen Nazi- era art was discovered in the home of a German collector, the trove arrived in Switzerland this month in preparation for its first public viewing later this year.

A parallel exhibit will be held at the same time at the Bundeskunsthalle museum in the German city of Bonn.

The two exhibits, opening Nov. 2, will display several hundred works from the collection found in a Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt. His father, Hildebrand, was an art dealer commissioned by Adolf Hitler to sell works looted from Jews or seized from museums as “degenerate art.”

That term was coined by Hitler to describe modernist pieces that deviated from traditional forms he favored.

The elder Gurlitt, who died in 1956, was supposed to sell the plundered works abroad to finance Germany’s World War II effort, but he kept some pieces for himself.

The cache, estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, includes artworks by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and PierreAuguste Renoir. The collection was found by chance in 2012, when German authorities investigating the younger Gurlitt on tax evasion charges raided his apartment.

A month before his death at 81 in May 2014, Gurlitt bequeathed the entire collection to Bern’s Museum of Fine Art. A relative challenged the will, triggering a lengthy legal dispute, but a German court ruled in the museum’s favor.

“This came as a total surprise,” the museum’s chairman, Christopher Schaublin, said at the time. He added that the board hesitated to accept the collection “because of its origins.”

The decision was finally made to take the bequest, on the condition that “all looted art will be returned by the German government to the heirs of the rightful owners before coming to us,” said Nina Zimmer, director of the Bern museum.

“All looted art will be returned by the German government to the heirs of the rightful owners before coming to us.” Nina Zimmer, director of the Bern museum

MANUEL LOPEZ, EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY A painting titled Maschka by German artist Otto Mueller is among the pieces that will be shown this fall in Bern, Switzerland.