Uta Werner, cousin of Cornelius Gurlitt, is appealing a Munich court’s decision rejecting her claim to Gurlitt’s trove of works. The German court system is currently reviewing the appeal before it makes its decision to pass the claim on or reject it again. (more…)
German investigators have announced that they have found a landscape by Claude Monet hidden inside the suitcase of Cornelius Gurlitt, adding yet another work to the considerable selection of works he had stored away in his Munich apartment. Gurlitt had apparently tried to bring the work with him when he left for the hospital, which scholars are estimating was painted around 1864. (more…)
A viewer looking at Max Beckmann’s Departure (1932-1933), All Images via Kelly Lee for Art Observed
As much as it was an act of overt political action, the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Munich marked a pivotal juncture in German art. Intended as an outright attack on the careers of artists like Emil Nolde, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Georg Grosz and many more, the original exhibition crammed hundreds of works together for a mocking, derision-filled critique of the perversions and mistakes of the modernist practice.
George Grosz, Portrait of the Writer Max Herrmann-Neisse (1925)
A cache of 60 artworks have been removed from the Salzburg home of Cornelius Gurlitt, the elderly son of a Nazi-era dealer whose trove of over 1,000 works was seized late last year from his Munich flat. The new set of works features paintings by Renoir and Picasso, among many others. “Cornelius Gurlitt has ordered experts to examine these works on suspicion of having been looted,” says spokesman, Stephan Holzinger. (more…)
ArtNews offers an inside look on the secret market for Nazi-looted artworks, an underground network of curators, dealers and collectors who maintained a market for looted works long after the war. With little involvement from occupying American forces, former influential Nazi art officials quickly attained positions of prominence again after the war, often maintaining ties to collectors with little qualms in purchasing formerly confiscated works. (more…)
A Nazi-instituted law from 1938 is complicating the situation in the return of the works discovered in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the New York Times reports. Allowing the government to seize non-German or Jewish artworks deemed “degenerate,” the law is still on the books, and has made it more difficult for German and European museums which previously had work removed from its collection. “The legal situation is relatively obvious and clear,” said Wolfgang Büche, of the Moritzburg Foundation in Halle. “With art taken from Jewish collectors, there are sometimes legal or at least moral circumstances under which they can seek to have their works restituted. We can only seek to buy them back.” (more…)
The New York Times reports on the private life of German collector Cornelius Gurlitt, whose huge trove of Nazi-looted art, including works by Otto Dix and Pablo Picasso, left him leading a secluded existence in his Munich flat. “There is nothing I have loved more in my life than my pictures,” he said. (more…)
The recent disclosure of hundreds of looted Nazi artworks discovered this past month in Munich has families around the world digging through archives and records in an effort to fulfill their claims to a number of masterpiece works confiscated or sold during World War II. “It’s a little out of the respect for the memory of my grandfather that I pursue it,” says Michel David-Weill, former banker whose grandfather’s Canaletto etching appeared in the first round of works placed on the Lost Art Database. (more…)
British artist David Shrigley has chosen an unlikely subject for his sculptural commission outside the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich: Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. Standing near a fan monument to Jackson, Shrigley’s sculpture will aim to bring attention to Bubbles’s currently unfunded care in Florida. “Michael Jackson’s will made no provision for the care of Bubbles, yet the Estate of Michael Jackson still claims ownership of him. It costs $20,000 US a year to care for each of the 30 apes at the sanctuary and whilst some Michael Jackson fans have donated money to the cause there is still a massive shortfall in funding. Apes live almost as long as humans, so the cost of lifetime care for the apes will run into many millions.” The press release on the website claims. (more…)
In a bid for the attention of the international arts community, the city of Munich has partnered with artists Elmgreen & Dragset for a year-long series of public art installations across the Bavarian capital. “We hope the art will become a reason for people to come to Munich,” says Michael Elmgreen, one half of the duo. “And that by placing different artworks throughout the city, it will encourage them to explore the whole place. It’s an optimistic, maybe naive hope to get people into the streets again.” (more…)
