Gurlitt Collection

From the mid-1930s onwards, he also purchased and, in some cases, sold on artworks, often bought for low prices, from private individuals including Jewish owners who were under duress to pay extortionate taxes, or were otherwise liquidating assets in order to flee the country.

On the one hand he claimed he was helping the owners in their predicament, since there were few dealers who were prepared to undertake such transactions, but on the other he was not averse to enriching himself in the process, as well as providing no cooperation to post-war claimants seeking to reclaim or obtain compensation for such works sold under duress.

The Nazis authorized four dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller and Bernhard Böhmer to trade such pieces, seeking overseas buyers in return for an agent's commission.

Gurlitt's name appears against many of the entries on a listing compiled by the Ministry of Propaganda and now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum that provides details of the fate of each object, including whether it was exchanged, sold or destroyed.

[8] Following the fall of France, Hermann Göring appointed a series of Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce approved dealers, including Gurlitt, to acquire French art assets – mainly comprising works looted from museums and from the previously wealthy collectors of the day – for Hitler's planned Führermuseum which he wanted to build in Linz; some of the works also went to swell Göring's personal art collection.

[clarification needed] Gurlitt also purchased paintings on his own behalf from artists who were being persecuted by the Nazis, among them Max Beckmann who by 1944 was living in exile in the Netherlands, prior to departing for the United States in 1947.

Beckmann's family did not dispute the distribution of the sale proceeds and considered that the original purchase by Gurlitt had been legitimate, albeit under reduced circumstances of the artist.

Under interrogation after capture, Gurlitt and his wife told United States Army authorities that in the fire bombing of Dresden of February 1945 much of his collection and his documentation of art transactions had been destroyed at his home in Kaitzer Strasse.

Knowledge of the collection appears to have persisted in the minds of his contemporaries in the German art dealing world, and in some cases with their successors in business, but eventually – particularly with the passage of more than four decades – faded from public awareness.

Apart from any monies inherited after his parents' deaths, Cornelius survived by selling a small number of items from the collection, notably in 1988 and 1990, with the proceeds paid into a Swiss bank account which he would visit at four- to six- week intervals to withdraw money for his living expenses.

[23][24] Initial media hysteria with sensational headlines such as "Artworks Worth $1.6 Billion, Stolen by Nazis, Discovered in German Apartment" proved to be an overstatement; writing in 2017, the German Lost Art Foundation concluded that "Looking at the art trove as a whole, it becomes clear that it is not so much a collection of highly valuable artworks worth billions as was initially assumed, but rather a mixture of family heirlooms and dealer stock.

"[25] Speaking to Der Spiegel magazine in November 2013, Cornelius insisted that his father had obtained the works legally and stated that he would not voluntarily return any of them to previous owners, although subsequently he said that in respect of the latter statement he was misquoted.

This portion of the collection, numbering 254 items, contained works by Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Liebermann, Toulouse-Lautrec, Courbet, Cézanne, Munch and Manet, some of extremely high quality, and were removed to a secure location where their provenance could be investigated further; the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office would not have access to them.

[30] One painting, Portrait de Monsieur Jean Journet by Gustave Courbet, had disappeared in 1914 and had previously been believed to have been lost during World War II.

[37][38][39] Its activities and some of its personnel were passed to a new "Centre for Lost Cultural Property", project name "Gurlitt Provenance Research", under the direction of Dr. Andrea Baresel-Brand.

[40] By December 2018, the Gurlitt Provenance Research project reported that it had completed its activities, with the results being presented on the German Lost Art Foundation website.

[41] 1,039 items were investigated; of these, 315 were identified as confiscated from German museums during the "degenerate art" campaign, and thus not subject to suspicion of looting, so their responsibility could be passed directly to the Kunstmuseum Bern.

[34] People close to Gurlitt told an American newspaper that he decided to give the collection to a foreign institution because he felt that Germany had treated him and his father badly.

[55] The overall value of the collection as held by Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012 may thus conservatively be stated to have been in the order of at least several tens of millions of dollars, although no official valuation has ever been publicly released.

[58] After the war the Nazi law legalizing possession of stolen works of "degenerate art" was deliberately upheld by the Allied Control Council in order that the trade in artworks could continue.

[61] On 4 December 2013, prominent German art historian Sibylle Ehringhaus, who was one of the first experts to view the artworks in the spring of 2012, gave an interview in the newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine, demanding the immediate return of the complete collection to Gurlitt.

[69] In 2017, it was announced that the Camille Pissarro painting La Seine vue du Pont-Neuf, au fond le Louvre, found in Gurlitt's Salzburg house had been restituted to the heirs of Max Heilbronn, a Paris businessman from whom it had been confiscated in 1942,[70] and that a drawing by Adolph von Menzel Interior of a Gothic Church had been returned to the descendants of Elsa Helene Cohen.

Benita's husband Nikolaus also consigned Max Liebermann's pastel drawing The Basket Weavers for sale via a Berlin auction house in 2000, where it sold to a private Israeli collector for DM 130,000 (around US$70,000), more than double its pre-sale estimate.

[92] Paul Klee's Swamp Legend, purchased by Hildebrand from the "degenerate art" holdings, was still in his possession at his death and then sold some time between 1956 and 1962 (when it appeared at auction), probably by his widow; after several changes of ownership, this work ended up in Munich's Lenbachhaus Museum, where in 2015 it was under protracted legal action from the heirs of original owner Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers for its restitution.

and found to be not only genuine, but also to have been legitimately purchased from a London exhibition by the artist in 1931 by Dr Max Sauerlandt, head of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg; from there the drawing entered the confiscated, "degenerate art" exhibition and was subsequently purchased by Hildebrand Gurlitt in 1940, remaining undocumented to curators of Moore's legacy until its emergence in the holdings of Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012.

Hioki subsequently sold a number of paintings from the collection, including Marine, Temps d'Orage, in order to raise funds to safeguard the others; Hildebrand Gurlitt had acquired it in Paris in the 1940s.

The Tokyo National Museum of Western Art was "thrilled to announce the purchase of [the painting]"... since it was part of the focus of "a great effort to reunite the collection" originally belonging to Matsukata, under a single roof.