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!
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!
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.
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 collection has meant that Gurlitt has managed to survive his entire life without any official bank account, pension or insurance.
When stopped by customs, extensive checks found that he was not registered with the police - mandatory in Germany - the tax authorities or social services. He drew no pension and had no health insurance.
‘He was a man who didn’t exist,’ said one official.
***** He was living off the grid
***** He survived by selling off the art piece by pice
Fascinating! I hope a full book treatment - with plenty of illustrations! - will come out eventually and appear in my local library.
