PRECIOUS NAZI ARTWORKS HIDDEN FOR DECADES REVEALED TO THE PUBLIC
by Justin Huggler, November 1, 2017
A hoard of precious art works collected by a Nazi dealer and kept in secret by his reclusive son will on Thursday go on public display for the first time.
Paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cezanne and Otto Dix are among hundreds of works found hidden in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt[1] that will go on display in two simultaneous exhibitions in the Swiss capital, Bern, and the German city of Bonn.
Many are believed to have been looted from their rightful Jewish owners by the Nazis. Others were confiscated as "degenerate art" — modernist works Hitler did not approve of.
The remarkable trove made headlines around the world in 2013 after it emerged that it had been discovered in the then 80-year-old Gurlitt's Munich flat.
Gurlitt died the following year, and efforts are still ongoing to restore looted works to their rightful owners.
But the rest of the collection has been caught up in legal battles between Gurlitt's family and the Bern Kunstmuseum, the Swiss art museum he left it to in his will, and it is only now that some of the works are being put on display for the first time.
Simultaneous exhibitions in the Bern Kunstmuseum and Bonn's Bundeskunsthalle exhibition hall are expected to attract art lovers from around the world.
But the exhibitions are about more than just displaying the rarely seen art works, according to Rein Wolfs and Nina Zimmer, the directors of the two museums.
They are intended to "show respect to the victims of National Socialist art theft, as well as to artists who were defamed and persecuted by the regime as 'degenerate'," they wrote in the exhibition catalogue.
The exhibition in Bern is themed around "degenerate art" which was confiscated from public galleries by the Nazis as "un-German" and sold abroad to fund the regime.
The Bonn exhibition will focus on art looted from Jewish private owners. Most of the works on display are suspected of being looted.
"'It is extremely important that this chapter of German — and consequently European — history is never forgotten," Dr Wolfs of the Bonn Bundeskunsthalle said.
"Nazi art theft is still far from being resolved conclusively, and it absolutely has to be seen within its overall historical context, which includes the persecution, disenfranchisement and dispossession perpetrated by the Nazi regime and, ultimately, the Holocaust."
While hundreds of the works in the collection are suspected of being stolen by the Nazis, only six have so far been identitied as looted, and only four returned to their rightful owners.
The latest, Portrait of a Sitting Young Woman by the 19th century French artist Thomas Couture, was only identified last week when a tiny repaired hole was found in the canvas.
The hole matched a claim filed at the end of the Second World War and proved it had been looted from Georges Mandel, a Jewish French politican.
The two exhibitions will also explore the role of Gurlitt's father, Hildebrand, who collected the art works while working as an art dealer for the Nazis.
The elder Gurlitt was himself persecuted by the Nazis as the grandchild of a Jew, and for refusing to fly a swastika outside his gallery. But he later volunteered to work for the regime and became one of four official Nazi art dealers.
Footnote
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10455300/They-have-to-come-back-to-me-Cornelius-Gurlitt-demands-Nazi-era-art-hoard-back.html
Justin Huggler is a writer and journalist, who has written for The Telegraph, Yahoo, Sydney Morning Herald, MSN, Business
Insider, National Post, New Zealand Herald, Brisbane Times, inter
alia. He writes often of events in the Middle East and his first
novel, The Burden of the Desert, is set in Iraq during the
American occupation. This article appeared November 1, 2017 in the
Telegraph (UK) and is archived at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/01/precious-nazi-artworks-hidden-decades-revealed-public/
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