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In 2012 the sensational discovery of more than 1400 precious works of art piled up in a small apartment building in Munich required the creation of a taskforce in charge of investigating its links with the Nazi regime. The collection belonged to Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956). He had kept the collection secretly in his aprtment for years before making an unxespected bequest to the Museum in Bern. The news of the discovery was not made public until 2013, when it went viral. But what happened to the collection?
Since then, the Gurlitt collection has grown to include paintings, drawings and other pieces of art from other properties of the German merchant. The German Art Lost Foundation has started a long phase of cataloguing and research on the origin of the pieces. Hildebrand Gurlitt had in fact come into possession of a part of the goods selected for the Führermuseum in Linz, Hitler's limitless project to exhibit masterpieces representing 20% of the art ever produced in the world. In 1945 Hildebrand declared that his art collection had been destroyed during the bombing of Dresden and evryone believed this heritage got lost then.
After a big effort to return the works to their rightful owners, only 14 drawings and paintings have been returned to the families from which they had been stolen by the Nazis. In the meantime, Cornelius Gurlitt's donation to the Museum of Bern was only partially accepted, as the museum refused to include in its collection pieces linked to illicit trafficking. The rest, most of the collection, undertook a long journey between exhibitions in Swiss, Germany and in Israel.
Masterpieces of German Expressionism, the Secessionist movement and Der Blaue Reiter created by great artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Otto Dix, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz, Paul Klee, and Emil Nolde, remain homeless today. The history of their owner, Hitler's merchant, marked their fate forever. They will continue to travel aimlessly around the world until somone could demonstrate the right ownership.
Yet Cornelius Gurlitt was the first private collector to have presented his private collection for investigation in accordance with the rules of the Washington Principles of Nazi-looted Art of 1998. Whether or not he was fully aware of what was in his hand, or whether he was convinced that the works belonged to him legally, is still a bit of a mystery. What is certain, however, is that his father, Hildebrand, had managed to save the collection from the bombings in Dresden. After the war he claimed that he was a victim of the Nazi system was able to return to the international art market.
His daughter Renate, Cornelius Gurlitt's sister, wrote to her brother, "Can you appreciate your collection? It seems to me that the most personal and important part of our legacy is also our greatest burden."
