Face to face with the Gurlitt

hoard
Madeleine Schwartz
31 JANUARY 2018

Installation view of 'Gurlitt: Status Report' at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2017, photo: David Ert; © Kunst und Austellungshalle der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH
When the German customs authorities began to investigate a quiet old man travelling on
a train from Switzerland to Munich in 2010, little did they know what it would lead to.
Cornelius Gurlitt probably didn’t seem very interesting at first. He was a recluse in his
80s. He had never had a job and had no family. He claimed never to have been in love.
He hadn’t watched television since the early 1960s. All he had done, he would later tell
reporters, was stay home with his pictures: hundreds of works of art by Matisse and
Picasso, Cézanne and Renoir, which authorities discovered stuffed in drawers and behind
cabinets in his Munich and Salzburg homes when they conducted raids in 2012.

The reaction of the press to this discovery, when it was announced a year later, was one
of euphoria, curiosity, and disgust. ‘This retiree is hoarding 1,400 masterworks!’
exclaimed the German tabloid Bild. Yet the find immediately raised difficult questions.
Why had Cornelius’s father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who worked for Hitler,
selling works owned by Jewish families, never been punished for his activities? How
had his son managed to profit from the sale of these works? And what to do with the
paintings themselves – hadn’t Germany already dealt with art looted during the war?
Evidently, the discovery troubled the government, which had hidden knowledge of
Gurlitt’s hoard from the press, and from any potential owners who might have a claim on
these artworks, for over a year.
Undated photograph of Cornelius Gurlitt’s house in Salzburg, showing Waterloo Bridge (1903) by Claude
Monet, Still Life with Glass and Fruit  (1909) by Pablo Picasso, and Danaïde (1885) by Auguste Rodin. © Estate
of Cornelius Gurlitt

Historians estimate that more than 650,000 artworks were stolen in the Nazi era. Efforts
to restitute works began before the Second World War was even over. In 1943, the
American Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme, later known as the
‘Monuments Men’, undertook the task of meticulously cataloguing and understanding
who had taken what, working with art historians to identify pieces of art and their origin.
They opened vaults where Nazis had stored paintings and sifted through the
masterpieces Hitler had planned to display at the Führermuseum, which had he hoped to
open in his hometown of Linz in Austria.

The Monuments Men did not, however, return works to individual owners. This was to
be a national duty. In 1947 the Americans passed a law in their zone of occupation in
Germany to return all work belonging to ‘persons who were wrongfully deprived of [it]’.
The principles established by the Allies, ‘some of which turned into laws, some of which
guided judicial interpretation […] cast a long shadow into the future,’ writes the lawyer
Nicholas O’Donnell in his book A Tragic Fate: Law and Ethics in the Battle Over Nazi-
Looted Art (2017). But ‘actual private party disputes were relatively rare for the better
part of fifty years’. The issue of restitution re-entered the public eye in the 1990s when
new scholarship and new sources revealed the amount of work looted and how little had
been given back. Representatives of 44 countries and 13 NGOs established a new set of
principles at the Washington Conference of 1998 to further ease the return of Nazi-looted
art around the world.
Germany was among the countries that adopted the Washington Conference principles
and, in theory, the task of restitution should have been done long ago. After the public
disclosure of Gurlitt’s hoard, the German government announced funds to study the
provenance of these works and the creation of the German Lost Art Foundation. Most
importantly of all, officials renewed their commitment to a task to which the country had
committed and recommitted for 70 years.

Now we have ‘Gurlitt: Status Report’, the first exhibition of works in the Gurlitt hoard
open to the public. The works are divided into two categories and on display at two
venues. At the Kunstmuseum Bern (until 4 March), to which Cornelius Gurlitt left his art
in his will, there is the ‘degenerate art’ Hildebrand Gurlitt sold on behalf of the German
Reich after 1937: works by artists such as Kokoschka, Macke, and Beckmann, taken
from museums and sold abroad to finance the Third Reich. Art whose provenance could
not be determined was sent back to Germany to be studied. Another exhibition at the
Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (until 11 March) focuses on this second category of works, as
well as on the dealer himself and his association with the Nazi regime.

Much of the two exhibitions is devoted to discussing Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had been a
progressive museum director – a champion of Expressionist artists – in first Zwickau,
then Hamburg. Hildebrand was partly Jewish; after 1935 the gallery he had set up to deal
in modern art was in his wife’s name. The wall texts and accompanying catalogue are
filled with attempts to understand his behaviour, but some of explanations come across
as wilfully oblivious. ‘Apart from all the contradictions with the Nazi hierarchy and
ideology,’ states one catalogue essay discussing Hildebrand’s political beliefs, ‘the idea
of Volksgemeinschaft promised the working classes the opportunity to climb the social
ladder and to bring an equal society within reach.’ Gurlitt’s daughter Renate didn’t see
any contradictions in her father’s reasoning when she wrote to her brother Cornelius in
the 1960s: ‘Do you ever enjoy what you have of [our father’s collection] in Salzburg?
For us, I sometimes think, his most personal and most valuable legacy has turned into
the darkest burden.’ After the war Hildebrand lied about his activities to the
denazification tribunal in Bamberg, presenting himself as an unwilling employee of the
Nazi regime.
Portrait of a Young Woman  (1850–55), Thomas Couture. Kunstmuseum Bern, bequest of Cornelius Gurlitt;
provenance before 1940: Georges Mandel, Paris Photo: David Ertl, © Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH

Just before the Bonn and Bern exhibitions opened, the German Lost Art Foundation
announced that it had identified a painting by Thomas Couture belonging to the French
resistance leader Georges Mandel. Researchers had noticed a small hole in the canvas;
the hole was mentioned in a catalogue of art stolen from the politician, which the
committee had studied. The exhibitions are so tightly focused on Hildebrand’s activities
and guilt that the wider issues surrounding post-war restitution seem to recede into the
background. Yet in other areas of restitution law there are signs of what O’Donnell calls
‘guilt fatigue’. In 2016, an investigation by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe
found that art meant to be returned to Jewish families in Bavaria had instead been sold to
the descendants of SS officers after the war, including Hermann Goering’s family. Just
last year, a Frankfurt court threw out a case brought by the descendants of the art
collector Robert Graetz, who were claiming ownership of a painting by Max Pechstein,
now in the possession of a German family. The old provisions of the German civil code,
which were applied in the Graetz case, place a 30-year statute of limitations on property
claims, including restitution disputes. And although the Washington Conference
principles sought to ease the return of works in public collections, those within private
collections remain protected by law.

Switzerland’s role in the Gurlitt story remains ambiguous. Cornelius Gurlitt was
travelling to Bern when he was caught. ‘He travelled to Zurich every four to six weeks
and fetched his €9,000 to pay his living costs,’ Eberhard Kornfeld, one of the dealers and
auction house employees who sold art on behalf of Cornelius Gurlitt, told a Swiss
television station in October. Some speculate that Switzerland’s perceived neutrality is
what prompted Gurlitt to bequeath his works to the Kunstmuseum Bern; he was angry
that his collection had been such a scandal in Germany.

Towards the end of the press conference at the opening of the exhibition in Bonn, a
question-and-answer session was interrupted by Ekkehart Gurlitt, a cousin of Cornelius
who lives in Barcelona. He stood up and asked why his family name should be linked to
the Nazis if, at the end of all this research, only six of the paintings had been found to
have had Jewish owners, and wondered why tax payers should pay for this whole thing,
anyway. The panellists, including Andrea Baresel-Brand, director of the Gurlitt
Provenance Research Project, and Rein Wolfs, head of the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn,
stiffened and rejected his argument. But the government does seem to agree with some
part of the argument. As I write, funding for the task force is in place only until the end
of 2017; by the time this article appears it will be wound down, although the provenance
of many works hasn’t been fully established.

Quai de Clichy (1887), Paul Signac. Kunstmuseum Bern, bequest of Cornelius Gurlitt, provenance undergoing
clarification. Photo: Mick Vincenz; © Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH

Christopher Marinello of Art Recovery International is arguably the most high-profile of

a cadre of lawyers who specialise in restitution of Nazi-looted works. Among other
cases, Marinello arranged the return of Matisse’s Seated Woman from the Gurlitt trove to
the heirs of its owner. Is it valid, I ask him, to say that after 75 years we should accept
the limited successes of restitution efforts and set the failures aside? Sure: ‘If restitution
was handled in a proper fashion and taken seriously all these years,’ Marinello says. But
the cut-off point ‘should start from a period in time when we say we’ve done everything
we can do, our archives have been opened, we’ve thoroughly researched collections,
dealers are properly doing due diligence, collectors are doing due diligence, people
coming forward. None of this is happening.’ In Marinello’s opinion, private collectors
with stolen art have simply been waiting for the original owners and their immediate
heirs to die. When we talked in November, he had just been in Berlin, meeting the
minister of culture.
Changing the law to extend restitution efforts to private collections would have
farreaching consequences. What would happen if the work is currently in the hands of
owners who bought it after the war, as was the case recently with a Pissarro painting in
Paris? Are they at fault, or is it the person who sold it to them? Marinello argues that it is
up to the sellers to ensure that they are not trading in stolen goods. ‘Sometimes when
[auction houses] get extremely bad press and start losing business, that seems to get their
attention.’ Many of these cases have already continued for decades. Without a statute of
limitations, one could easily imagine them going on for many more generations. Given
the examples of theft that continue to be uncovered, though, it seems right to allow
families to keep pursuing cases at present.

Figuren am Strand (n.d.), Max Liebermann. Kunstmuseum Bern, bequest of Cornelius Gurlitt, provenance
undergoing clarification. Photo: Mick Vincenz; © Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
GmbH

And what if a little complexity is a good thing – not for the owners of these works, but
for the art itself? It struck me, walking through the two exhibitions, how little
discussions of provenance seem to include the qualities of the actual works in question.
There is an obvious change in the art Hildebrand Gurlitt bought and sold before he
worked for the Nazis and after. The works in the degenerate art collection in Bern are
particularly vivid. In Lady in a Car (1913), a watercolour by Macke, a young woman is
seated in a carriage, head down, disappointed perhaps, or lost in thought. In The
Alley (1985) by Edvard Munch, a naked woman makes her way through two lines of
menacing men in top hats. However, as soon as Gurlitt started buying art for the
Führermuseum as one of the four official art dealers for the Nazi regime, the bright
colours and stark lines were replaced with the kind of academic painting of which the
regime approved.

In Bern, one drawing in particular caught my eye. Old Woman with Cloche Hat (1920), a
satirical drypoint by Max Beckmann, depicts a woman dressed in typical Biedermeier
style. She looks in alarm at something to the left of the picture: a person perhaps, or the
future direction of Germany. Seventeen years after it was made, this gentle caricature
would be deemed too threatening to be seen, confiscated as ‘degenerate’ and taken by
Hildebrand Gurlitt for possible sale abroad. Art can make its viewer question power
rather than worship it. If provenance research, with its tangled questions of ownership
and responsibility, power and memory, contributes to that discussion, why not welcome
it?

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/face-to-face-with-the-gurlitt-hoard/