Posted on 11/03/2013 9:53:59 AM PST by Uncle Chip
A treasure trove of artworks worth almost £1billion seized by the Nazis and reportedly destroyed in RAF bombing raids during WW2 has been found behind rotting food in shabby apartment in Munich.
Experts have hailed the discovery of the 1,500 pictures, thought to have been lost or bombed, as a sensational find.
The story of the lost masterpieces of such painters as Pablo Picasso, Renoir, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall is revealed in this week's edition of Germany's Focus magazine which broke the story of the incredible find by customs officials.
Art historians examining the collection claim up to 300 of the Gurlitt collection appeared in a Nazi exhibition called Degenerate Art - displaying what they deemed to be poor.
The rest were bought at 'shamefully' low prices from Jews in exchange for an escape route out of the country.
One of the paintings is a portrait of a woman by the French master Matisse that belonged in the collection of the Jewish connoisseur Paul Rosenberg, who had to leave behind his collection before his escape from Paris when the country fell in 1940.
His granddaughter Anne Sinclair, the wife of disgraced former top banker Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been fighting for decades for the return of his pictures stolen by the Nazis, but according to Focus she 'knew nothing' of the existence of this painting.
It was found, alongside around 1,500 other pieces, in the Aladdin's Cave behind a wall of tins of beans and fruit in the decrepit flat of loner Cornelius Gurlit in the Munich suburb of Schwabing.....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Other works discovered in the flat are by Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Liebermann.
The astonishing story of their recovery is like the plot from a thriller.
*
interesting bit of history
“Hildebrand Gurlitt (15 September 1895 - 9 November 1956) was a German art historian and dealer who traded in ‘degenerate art’ during the Nazi era.[1] In 2011, about 1500 stolen and confiscated works (by Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, among others) he had hidden were confiscated from his son.[2]”
"Cornelius Gustav Gurlitt (1 January 1850 – 25 March 1938) was a German architect and art historian. Life
Gurlitt was born in Nischwitz in Thallwitz, Saxony, the son of the landscape painter Louis Gurlitt and nephew of his namesake, the composer Cornelius Gurlitt.
He was co-founder and president of the Bund Deutscher Architekten ("Association of German Architects") and principal of the Technische Universität Dresden, where he was also professor of art history and the history of construction.
He is regarded as the founder of art historical research into the Baroque, and thus as the founder of the conservation of historical monuments in Saxony. He often worked as a consultant with the architects Schilling & Graebner. From 1894 he continued the Saxon inventory work of the art historian Franz Richard Steche.
Gurlitt died in Dresden in 1938 and is buried in the Johannisfriedhof.
His sons were the musicologist Wilibald Gurlitt and the art dealer and historian Hildebrand Gurlitt."
Runs in the family.
Sort of like how Obama and friends deemed our health insurance plans substandard.
Wow makes one wonder what else is still hidden away!
Okay so this seizure took place in 2011 — there was no date in the article. The way it was written it appeared to be news rather than history.
Wow.
When we visited my great grandparents’ home in the 90s, the home they were forced from when they were thrown into concentration camps, the woman living there was the daughter of the former maid. They gave the home to the maid. A lot of second generation from that era Germans just seem to be immune from guilt.
An AMAZING story, especially if the “Degenerate” works ordered destroyed by Hitler were not really destroyed.
Thank you so much for the post!
That’s what I’m thinking.
If the supposedly destroyed works of these masters are still around, how will this affect the prices and value of the known works of these masters.
Interesting.
better hide them again before Sharia takes effect.
Experts have hailed the discovery of the 1,500 pictures, thought to have been lost or bombed, as a sensational find... up to 300 of the Gurlitt collection appeared in a Nazi exhibition called Degenerate ArtThe whisper about the Berlin Exhibition was that the good stuff was listed as destroyed, along with the frankly garbage that was indeed incinerated; but the good stuff was squirrelled away into private collections of loot by various Nazi higher-ups who never got the opportunity to recover their loot and flee (killed, hanged, beaten by new finders); the rest of that rumor is that caches have been discovered here and there (particularly in the French occupation zone after the war) and when reported, were smuggled out and sold by corrupt occupation officials and/or the locals, vanishing into secretive private collections.
What is known about this collection apparently discovered in 2011???
That’s amazing! I hope the heirs, if any remain, can reclaim the artworks their fathers and grandfathers had to sell, at what was likely a huge loss, in order to save their families from the Nazis!
The seizure did take place in 2011, but the Customs Department placed an embargo on information regarding it, for a while. The story may only have come out in the past few months.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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