Museums prepare to exhibit art treasures stolen by the Nazis
Hundreds of works to have public viewings in Geneva and Bonn
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 Pierre-Auguste 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, told the media at the time. He added that the board hesitated whether 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.
However, since the works were forcibly removed from individuals and museums, “all these pieces should be considered as looted,” said Christopher Marinello, CEO of Art Recovery International in Venice, Italy, which spearheads the hunt for and restitution of stolen art.
Works whose origins are still investigated in Germany will be displayed in Bonn.
“This exhibit will include 200 pieces that were taken from their owners as part of the Nazi persecution or whose provenance has not yet been established,” said Sven Bergmann, spokesman for the Bundeskunsthalle.
While there are no exact figures on the extent of art theft during World War II, a 1997 report by the U.S. National Archives said that “approximately 20% of the art in Europe was looted by the Nazis, and there are well over 100,000 items that have not been returned to their rightful owners.”