The figure usually touted is 650,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, books, and other works, taken from museums and churches and private collections across the continent. The scale of such theft is hard to comprehend, and even harder to quantify. In the decade leading up to 1945, it’s estimated that the Nazis stole one-fifth of all the artworks in Europe. Above all, the trove was an inconvenient reminder that the issue of looted and confiscated art persists as one of the unresolved crimes of the Nazi regime.
In that sense, the Gurlitt Dossier, as it came to be known, was representative of so much about Nazi art plunder. The fact that the Bavarian authorities seem to have sat on the find was attributed to the reality that they just didn’t know what to do with what they’d uncovered.
The article also noted the baggage associated with the Gurlitt name: that the items hoarded by Cornelius Gurlitt had likely been acquired by his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of the most notorious art dealers employed by the Third Reich. It was also kept quiet for more than a year, until the German magazine Focus published a breathy report about the discovery, alleging that the value of the secret masterpieces could total one billion Euros. The trove was seized by Bavarian officials and taken away for inspection. The German authorities were investigating Gurlitt for tax evasion what they found instead was an amassment of art that was immediately, incontrovertibly suspicious.
Inside a small flat in a boxy white building, hidden in filing cabinets and suitcases, investigators found more than 1,500 works by artists including Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Liebermann, Chagall, Durer, and Delacroix. But the strangeness of the situation led to further investigation of Gurlitt’s finances, and a search warrant for his Munich apartment that in February 2012 uncovered one of the most extraordinary stashes of art since the end of World War II. The cash itself wasn’t a crime Gurlitt had reportedly visited Switzerland to sell a picture to a gallery in Bern.
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