A Years-Long Research Project Into the Gurlitt Trove Has Ended Without Being Able to Resolve ‘a Very Large Gray Area’ Around 1,000 Works

Eight years after the discovery of a hidden trove of artworks
belonging to Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, a group of researchers have
completed their investigation into the collection’s provenance with
only a handful of conclusive answers.

Of the 1,590 total artworks examined by the German Lost Art Foundation, an
organization funded by the German government, only
14 were definitively recognized as looted and returned to the
heirs of their rightful owners. The provenance of some 1,000
other artworks remains unclear, despite initial reports that
500 pieces were of
suspicious origin.

“There is a very large gray area,” the foundation’s director,
Gilbert Lupfer, told Swiss Info. But he
believes there is nothing more that can be done. “Whatever research
was possible, we have exhausted it.”

German authorities first stumbled upon Cornelius Gurlitt’s art
collection in his Munich and Salzburg apartments in 2012, thanks to
a tax investigation that began two years earlier. Quickly, they
came to realize that the collection, which passed to Cornelius upon
his father’s death, likely contained works that were stolen by the
Nazis from Jewish families before and during the Second World
War.

When Gurlitt died in 2014,
he left the entire
collection to Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern, much to the
chagrin of his family,
who mounted an unsuccessful legal
challenge to claim ownership. In accepting the stash,
the institution vowed to uncover any looted works and restitute
them to the proper parties.

The German Lost Art Foundation took over provenance
research in 2016 after a task force organized by the German
government issued a report on the collection that was criticized by
some for its slow progress, lack of transparency, and high
taxpayer cost of €1.8 million ($2
million). That initial report took two years to compile, but
uncovered the origins of only 11 works, five of which were
identified as Nazi loot.

The collection was publicly
unveiled in 2017, and the first exhibitions from
the trove took place later that year at the Kunstmuseum Bern
and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. Last year, works from
the Gurlitt hoard travelled to the Israel
Museum in Jerusalem.

The post A Years-Long Research Project Into the Gurlitt
Trove Has Ended Without Being Able to Resolve ‘a Very Large Gray
Area’ Around 1,000 Works appeared first on artnet
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