Mystery surrounds discovery of art trove stolen by Nazis
Source: rawstory.com
The discovery in a rubbish-strewn flat in Germany of nearly 1,500 paintings including works by Picasso and Matisse looted by the Nazis sparked urgent calls Monday to hunt for their rightful owners.The shock find, valued at an estimated one billion euros ($1.3 billion dollars), was reported Sunday by news weekly Focus. Authorities repeatedly declined to comment on the trove apparently uncovered in 2011.
But German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said Berlin had been aware of the case for “several months” and was assisting an investigation by public prosecutors with experts in Nazi-era stolen art.
Hundreds of the modernist masterpieces are believed to have been stolen by the Nazis from Jewish collectors.
“I think it’s the biggest single find of Holocaust pictures that there’s been for years, but it’s still a tiny fraction of the total number of pictures that we’re looking for,” Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, told AFP.
“They were the sort of pictures that the Nazis would have looted, either to sell for hard currency, or in certain cases because they wanted them for their own museums, particularly if they were Old Masters.”
Investigators came upon the paintings during a 2011 search of an apartment belonging to the now 80-year-old son of art collector Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had bought them during the 1930s and 1940s, according to Focus.
The search was carried out because the son, Cornelius Gurlitt, was caught by customs authorities on a train from Switzerland to Munich with a large amount of cash.
The collection included many of the masters of the 20th century, among them Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and the German painters Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann and Max Liebermann.
The artworks lay hidden amid old jam jars and junk in darkened rooms in Gurlitt’s apartment in the southern city for more than half a century, the magazine said.
Gurlitt, a recluse without a job, had sold a few over the years, living off the proceeds.
His father, despite having a Jewish grandmother, had become indispensable to officials in the Third Reich because of his art expertise and vast network of contacts.
Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels put Gurlitt in charge of selling the art, much of which the Nazi party deemed “degenerate”, to foreign buyers abroad.
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