1500 art masterpieces, many banned by Nazis as "degenerate," found in Schwabing

wfgodot

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German police recover 1,500 modernist masterpieces 'looted by Nazis'. (Guardian)
Works by Chagall, Klee, Matisse and Picasso – worth up to £860m – had been considered lost until raid on flat in Schwabing
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Gwendolen Webster, an art historian who has spent time studying works from the Nazis' "degenerate art" collection, told the Guardian the significance of the find was "absolutely staggering for historians" but opened a legal can of worms.

One of the reasons why German customs may have been sitting on their find for such a long time is that they can expect a huge number of claims for restitution from around the world, with all the diplomatic difficulties that entails.
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much more at each link

£1bn haul of art treasures seized by Nazis found in squalid Munich flat: 1,500 works by masters hidden behind tins of noodles, fruit and beans. (Sunday Mail)
• More than 1,500 paintings found including pieces by Picasso and Matisse
• Collector Hildebrandt Gurlitt ordered for them to be destroyed in 1945
• Officials searched his small rented apartment in Munich and found the art
• Experts claim most were acquired from Jews in exchange for escape
• But in a routine search on a train from Switzerland to Germany, his son was caught with 9,000 euros cash earned from an illicit art deal
 
earlier discoveries in this same line (from 2010, NYT)

Art’s Survivors of Hitler’s War
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In January workers digging for a new subway station near City Hall unearthed a bronze bust of a woman, rusted, filthy and almost unrecognizable. It tumbled off the shovel of their front-loader.

Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by Edwin Scharff, a nearly forgotten German modernist, from around 1920. It seemed anomalous until August, when more sculpture emerged nearby: “Standing Girl” by Otto Baum, “Dancer” by Marg Moll and the remains of a head by Otto Freundlich. Excavators also rescued another fragment, a different head, belonging to Emy Roeder’s “Pregnant Woman.” October produced yet a further batch.
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more at link
 
German police recover 1,500 modernist masterpieces 'looted by Nazis'. (Guardian)
Works by Chagall, Klee, Matisse and Picasso – worth up to £860m – had been considered lost until raid on flat in Schwabing

much more at each link

£1bn haul of art treasures seized by Nazis found in squalid Munich flat: 1,500 works by masters hidden behind tins of noodles, fruit and beans. (Sunday Mail)
• More than 1,500 paintings found including pieces by Picasso and Matisse
• Collector Hildebrandt Gurlitt ordered for them to be destroyed in 1945
• Officials searched his small rented apartment in Munich and found the art
• Experts claim most were acquired from Jews in exchange for escape
• But in a routine search on a train from Switzerland to Germany, his son was caught with 9,000 euros cash earned from an illicit art deal

What a treasure trove!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
German police recover 1,500 modernist masterpieces 'looted by Nazis'. (Guardian)
Works by Chagall, Klee, Matisse and Picasso – worth up to £860m – had been considered lost until raid on flat in Schwabing

much more at each link

£1bn haul of art treasures seized by Nazis found in squalid Munich flat: 1,500 works by masters hidden behind tins of noodles, fruit and beans. (Sunday Mail)
• More than 1,500 paintings found including pieces by Picasso and Matisse
• Collector Hildebrandt Gurlitt ordered for them to be destroyed in 1945
• Officials searched his small rented apartment in Munich and found the art
• Experts claim most were acquired from Jews in exchange for escape
• But in a routine search on a train from Switzerland to Germany, his son was caught with 9,000 euros cash earned from an illicit art deal

What a treasure trove! Such history and art


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
The Chagall is astoundingly wonderful!

I am still trying to digest this whole story. It seems fairly complicated and I have a feeling it is just a part of a larger puzzle.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Eberhard Kornfeld, the guy who runs the gallery in Switzerland that Mr. Gurlitt had dealings with. He has apparently been around a very very long time.

This article from The New York Observer in 2007 includes him:

Lawsuit Over Schiele Drawing Has Legs
By Jason Horowitz 2/19/07

It is an equally interesting article.
 
Guardian's article today, with short video from Augsburg presser w/pics

Picasso, Matisse and Dix among works found in Munich's Nazi art stash
Art historian describes 'incredible joy' at seeing previously unknown works among 1,406 found
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In an editorial in Süddeutsche Zeitung, arts editor Thomas Steinfeld said the tale of the treasures made for "a great adventure story", but would also bring up the ghosts of the past: here was another reminder of "the crimes against Jewish artists, dealers and collectors that won't go away".

The Gurlitt case could represent nothing less than "the final charge of the story of the Third Reich against the gradual forgetting of individual lives and fates".
 

Which one? I think even the one that "doesn't look like a Chagall" is gorgeous!

(BTW what was so "decadent" about Courbet and Canaletto? I suppose anything that didn't support Nazi ideology was suspect, but I'd expect Courbet's paintings of hearty peasants would suit the SS.)

I'm sure it will take years of litigation to sort this out (perhaps not even to be resolved in my lifetime), but I am so happy that these masterpieces have been rediscovered! If the collection is worth 1 billion euros, imagine the additional money that could be earned if the pictures went on tour as "Stolen Nazi Art"! (ETA a better title would be "Art Stolen by Nazis from Jews".)

And a special and standing shout out to you, wfgodot! I wouldn't have known about these treasures without your thread.
 
Guardian's article today, with short video from Augsburg presser w/pics

Picasso, Matisse and Dix among works found in Munich's Nazi art stash
Art historian describes 'incredible joy' at seeing previously unknown works among 1,406 found

I'm ever so sorry that German crimes against humanity "won't go away", but they should be comforted by American culture. From jazz to blues to musical theater, it is now "world culture" and every form traces its roots to art invented by slaves from Africa.
 
US reportedly pushing Germany for transparency on return of Nazi-looted art

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/1...-to-return-nazi-looted-art/?intcmp=latestnews

The State Department is calling for greater transparency from Germany in returning Nazi-confiscated artworks discovered in a Munich apartment to their rightful owners, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Under current German law, there is no basis for what the Nazis termed "degenerate art" to be returned to their rightful owners.
 
Daily Mail, with classic tabloid noun-use, is on it, lol:

The oddball who hid £1bn of art in his squalid flat... and the extraordinary story
of how his father, who stole paintings for the Nazis, conned Allied investigators

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This week, I was able to unearth some formerly top-secret U.S. government documents that allow us to draw a direct line from the chaos of post-war Germany to the strange world of a weird old man almost all of whose life has been defined by keeping the world’s greatest art collection a total secret.

More disturbingly, the story of the Gurlitt Hoard also reveals how Hildebrand ran rings around Allied investigators who never realised the true nature and scale of his ill-gotten haul — and handed back most of what they confiscated from him.
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Interesting, and with all sorts of pictures, at the link.
 
Monet found in art hoarder’s SUITCASE:

Landscape discovered in bag left at hospital by dead collector

"A landscape by Claude Monet has been found in a suitcase the late German collector Cornelius Gurlitt had with him during a hospital stay, becoming the latest piece to emerge from his long-hidden art trove.
The suitcase was left at the hospital for unknown reasons, and was handed over earlier this week to the court-appointed administrator of Gurlitt's estate, the task force investigating the piece's origin said today.
The find comes after officials reported finding a few more works at Gurlitt's Munich apartment in July, including a sculpture apparently by Edgar Degas.
Like the Monet, they were not among 1,280 pieces authorities seized from the apartment in 2012 while investigating a tax case, a collection that included works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall.
It was not immediately clear where the Monet was kept and why it was not seized.
The task force said it will check whether the Monet was stolen by the Nazis, as it is doing with many other works in Gurlitt's collection."

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