The Gurlitt Collection (alternatively known as the "Gurlitt Trove", "Gurlitt Hoard", "Munich Art Hoard", "Schwabing Art Trove", "Schwabing Art Find", etc.) was a collection of around 1,500 art works assembled by the late German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) which was passed first to his wife, Helene, and on her death to their son, Cornelius Gurlitt, who died in 2014.
The collection contains Old Masters as well as Impressionist, Cubist, and Expressionist paintings, drawings and prints by artists including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Rodin, Otto Dix, Edvard Munch, Gustave Courbet, Max Liebermann, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, among many others, as well as works by family members who were themselves artists.
History of the collection:
Hildebrand Gurlitt was an art historian, museum director and art dealer in Germany during the 1930s. He was particularly interested in modern art of the day, befriended a number of artists and purchased their works for the museums under his control; when he became a dealer he often exhibited their works for sale, and on occasion purchased items he particularly liked for his own collection. From the mid 1930s onwards, he also purchased and, in some cases, sold on artworks, often bought for low prices, from private individuals including Jewish owners who were under duress to pay extortionate taxes, or were otherwise liquidating assets in order to flee the country. On the one hand he claimed he was helping the owners in their predicament, since there were few dealers who were prepared to undertake such transactions, but on the other he was not averse to enriching himself in the process, as well as providing no cooperation to post-war claimants seeking to reclaim or obtain compensation for such works sold under duress.
In 1937, the German Government under Hitler decided, that, under Hitler's instructions, much modern German art was classified as "degenerate" (not fitting to be called art in Hitler's view) and was confiscated from museums all over Germany. A travelling Degenerate Art Exhibition was set up where some of these pieces were displayed to the public to show their so-called "degenerate" nature. The government then decided that a system would be set up to sell as many as possible of the confiscated items abroad to raise hard currency for Government coffers. Four dealers, including Gurlitt, were then given permission to trade such pieces, seeking overseas buyers in return for an agent's commission (the others being Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller and Bernhard Böhmer). When such pieces failed to sell, as was frequently the case, Gurlitt and others were often able, legitimately or illicitly, to add them to their personal collections, or purchase them for a low value.
2012 collection discovery:
On 22 September 2010, German customs officials at the German–Swiss border stopped Cornelius on the return leg of one of his visits to Switzerland and found him to be carrying €9,000 in cash, within the legal limit for cash transfers across the border but which was notified as suspicious to the German tax authorities; under questioning, he explained that it was proceeds from the sale of a painting. Since Cornelius had no occupation and no obvious means of income, the tax office suspected that he might be involved in the illegal transfer of artworks across the border without paying the relevant taxes, and obtained a warrant in 2011 to search his apartment in Schwabing, Munich, to see if they could find any evidence to support their suspicion.On 28 February 2012 officials of the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office entered his apartment and found not records of past sales, but a reported 121 framed and 1,258 unframed works, the major part of the collection inherited from his father, with an initial reported worth of €1 billion (approx. $1.3 billion),although this value eventually proved to be a significant overestimate. The collection was confiscated, under a process that was subsequently challenged in court since Cornelius had committed no crime under German law; it was also subsequently claimed that the scale of the action was disproportionate to any supposed tax irregularities.
Collection today:
Gurlitt repeatedly requested the return of his collection but did not obtain legal representation until December 2013 when a Munich court appointed an official "Custodian" on his behalf, Christoph Edel, who initiated action against the Prosecutor's Office for the return of the collection to Gurlitt. Gurlitt also told Edel about the additional artworks stored at his Salzburg address; Edel was given permission by Gurlitt to remove these for safe keeping, a task which was carried out in February 2014. This portion of the collection, numbering 254 items, contained works by Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Liebermann, Toulouse-Lautrec, Courbet, Cézanne, Munch and Manet, some of extremely high quality, and were removed to a secure location where their provenance could be investigated further; the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office would not have access to them.
In April 2014, Edel obtained an agreement with the Augsburg prosecutor whereby the collection confiscated in Munich was to be returned to Gurlitt in exchange for his co-operation with a government-led task force charged with returning any stolen pieces to the rightful owners which Gurlitt signed.[25] However, Gurlitt was by then very ill and died on 6 May 2014, never seeing the paintings again.[26] His will bequeathed all his property to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland, after all legitimate claims of ownership against it had been evaluated.
To learn more about the story , the book below is the best choice for you.