Public prosecutors in Augsburg have announced that they will release the artworks they seized from the home of reclusive collector Cornelius Gurlitt two years ago, making the 81-year-old once again the legal owner of the most contentious private collection in recent German history.
While the artworks’ legal status may have changed, they are likely to remain in a secret location in Bavaria for now. Gurlitt signed an agreement with German authorities on Monday to allow a taskforce of experts to continue examining the providence of the works for another year — a process which is under increasing criticism for its slow progress and lack of transparency.
In 2012, 1,280 works including pieces by Picasso, Chagall and Matisse were seized from Gurlitt’s Munich home by investigators who suspected some of them had originally been looted by the Nazis. When the find was made public in November last year, many hoped that any stolen works in the collection would eventually be returned to the descendants of the rightful owners, many of them Jewish collectors.
Photo: AFP
But five months later, the case has become caught up in bureaucracy. On Wednesday, the public prosecutor in Augsburg had to give in to a complaint from Gurlitt’s lawyers and release the hoard. While Gurlitt is still being investigated for possible tax evasion, he is now once again the rightful owner of the pictures, unless it can be proved that some of them count as looted art.
Stephan Holzinger, a spokesman for Gurlitt, said the ruling was a significant step in redeeming the collector’s name: “This is a good day for Cornelius Gurlitt,” Holzinger said in a statement. Around 500 artworks were originally suspected of having been looted by the Nazis, though Gurlitt’s legal team puts the number much lower.
Holzinger told the Guardian that 300 to 350 works were owned by the Gurlitt family before Hitler came to power. Gurlitt’s lawyers said they were aware of only seven restitution claims so far, including two claims for Henri Matisse’s painting Seated Woman.
It remains unclear where the works will eventually end up — Gurlitt’s spokesperson said he would not comment “for security reasons.” Keeping the collection safe in Gurlitt’s homes in Munich or Salzburg is presumably out of the question, given that their locations have been widely reported.
Some Bavarian politicians have already suggested they should be stored in a museum, where they could be seen by the public — an option that Holzinger seemed to reject, saying it was questionable “whether the Bavarian state should be rewarded for its disproportionate actions towards Mr Gurlitt.” Gurlitt himself is currently in hospital.
Meanwhile, criticism of the Bavarian state prosecutor’s handling of the case is mounting. Sabine Rudolph, a restitution expert and lawyer who represents the descendants of the Dresden art collector Fritz Salo Glaser, criticized the state taskforce’s slow progress and lack of transparency. “Every time we see signs of progress, there is another catch,” she told the Guardian.
Rudolph has written to the Augsburg state prosecutors four times, requesting access to documents that might illuminate how 13 works from Glaser’s collection ended up in Gurlitt’s hands. But after five months she feels no significant progress has been made. “A better taskforce would have put some of the key documents online,” she said, criticizing the choice of experts as “political” and saying that few art historians had been commissioned to work on the collection full-time.
In a statement, Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel, the leader of the taskforce, welcomed the decision to release the pictures back into Gurlitt’s hands, since it would allow “a more transparent display of the taskforce’s working methods.”
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
Many Taiwanese have a favorable opinion of Japan, in part because Taiwan’s former colonial master is seen as having contributed a great deal to the development of local industries, transportation networks and institutions of education. Of course, the island’s people were never asked if they wanted to be ruled by Tokyo or participate in its modernization plans. From their arrival in 1895 until at least 1902, the Japanese faced widespread and violent antagonism. Things then calmed down, relatively speaking. Even so, between 1907 and 1916 there were eleven anti-Japanese revolts. A map in the National Museum of Taiwan History (國立臺灣歷史博物館)