Portions of the spectacular art collection hoarded by the son of a Nazi-era dealer will be shown for the first time since World War II in parallel exhibitions in Switzerland and Germany starting today.
“Gurlitt: Status Report,” which displays about 450 works by masters including Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Pablo Picasso, aims to shed a light on the systematic looting of Jewish collections under Adolf Hitler.
The works in the two exhibitions, which are to run in Bern and the German city of Bonn until March next year, are just a small fraction of the more than 1,500 pieces discovered in 2012 in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt.
His father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, worked as an art dealer for the Nazis starting in 1938. The discovery of the stash made headlines around the world and revived an emotional debate about how thoroughly Germany had dealt with art plundered by the Nazi regime.
“At last it is out of hiding,” the German weekly Die Zeit said about the collection: “For the first time it will be possible to view what many have spoken and written about in the past few years, without being able to see it so far.”
The show, split between the two museums, is the result of years of disputed research into Gurlitt’s collection, which was discovered in the course of a tax probe.
Inspectors found the works in Gurlitt’s Salzburg home and his cluttered Munich apartment, many in poor condition, unframed and moldy.
“With these two exhibitions, we wish to pay homage to the people who became victims of the National Socialist art theft, as well as the artists who were defamed and persecuted by the regime as ‘degenerate,’” Rein Wolfs and Nina Zimmer, directors of the Kunsthalle Bonn and the Kunstmuseum Bern respectively, said in a statement.
Gurlitt, who died in 2014 at the age of 81, was described in the media as a recluse who lived off of the sale of his collection, valued in the millions of euros.
The exhibition in Bern will focus on modern works that were in 1937 classified by the Nazis as “Degenerate Art” and confiscated for sale abroad. In Bonn, the show will present art that was looted from victims of the Nazi regime and works whose provenance has not yet been established.
The exhibits themselves have prompted difficult legal tangles. When Gurlitt died he left more than 1,500 artworks to the Bern museum. It accepted the collection, although it left about 500 works in Germany so that a government task force could research their often murky origins.
However, determining their provenance has been slow and it is not yet clear how many of the works were stolen. Researchers have definitively identified just six works of art as looted from Jewish owners.
Four, including Max Liebermann’s Riders on the Beach and Henri Matisse’s Seated Woman, have now been returned to their heirs.
Last week, the German Lost Art Foundation said it had identified a painting by Thomas Couture as belonging to French Jewish politician and resistance leader Georges Mandel.
Other families have also tried to lay claims to works.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not