For Son of a Nazi-Era Dealer, a Private Life Amid a Tainted Trove of Art
MUNICH -- As an expert in works of art that the Nazis called "degenerate"
and in the dealers who traded
them during World War II, Vanessa Voigt often wondered what had become of
Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a
prominent Nazi-era art dealer and a figure she had come to view as a
"phantom."
Early last year, Ms. Voigt finally came face to face with the elusive man
who kept popping up vaguely in
her research. German customs officers had just stumbled on some 1,280
paintings and drawings --
masterworks possibly worth more than $1 billion -- stashed in Mr. Gurlitt's
Munich apartment, and they
turned to her to help them understand what was going on.
As the customs officers confiscated the works, a distressed Mr. Gurlitt
paced restlessly around his
previously inviolable domain, muttering over and over to himself, "Now they
are taking everything from
me," recalled Ms. Voigt, who was present. "He was mortified," she said.
In an interview, his first, published on Sunday, Mr. Gurlitt, 80, told the
German newsmagazine Der
Spiegel that the confiscation of the artwork was a devastating blow -- more
difficult even than the loss
of his sister, Benita, to cancer last year. "Saying goodbye to my pictures
was the most painful of all,"
he said.
Speaking to Der Spiegel last week, during a trip to an unidentified German
town to see a doctor for a
heart condition, Mr. Gurlitt said he had not watched television since 1963
and had never gone online, but
did talk to his pictures. He kept his favorites, a collection of works on
paper, in a small suitcase that
he would unpack each evening to admire.
Until the raid in February 2012, Mr. Gurlitt had guarded his privacy
zealously, refusing to open his door
even to meter readers from the gas company. He rarely spoke to or even
acknowledged his neighbors. He had
no friends whom anyone ever saw.
His sudden fame as the keeper of the largest trove of masterworks to be
uncovered since World War II has
left him bewildered. "What do these people want from me?" he asked Der
Spiegel. "I'm just a very quiet
person. All I wanted to do was live with my pictures."
Indeed, for more than a half-century, Mr. Gurlitt's only true companions
were a vast menagerie of
vibrant, multicolored images created by Picasso, Chagall, Gauguin and a host
of other modern masters. He
inherited the works from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, an exuberant
Nazi-era art dealer, partly Jewish,
who at times worked in the service of the Third Reich but also counted
artists disliked by the Nazis
among his friends.
The collection was so valuable and, perhaps, its provenance so tainted by
the family's association with
the Nazis, that the desire to keep it secure compelled Mr. Gurlitt to live a
strange, Gollum-like
existence behind permanently drawn blinds, obscuring not only the works but
also the man himself.
Those works, rare and irreplaceable, became his entire world. He played
among them as a child, he told
Der Spiegel, and now grieves their loss. "There is nothing I have loved more
in my life than my
pictures," he said.
He added, with tears in his eyes, that "they have to come back to me"
because his family had "saved," not
looted, the works. The German authorities are still trying to determine the
rightful ownership of the
collection and whether Mr. Gurlitt broke any laws.
Mr. Gurlitt told Der Spiegel that he knew a lot about the origins of the
works but wanted to keep that
information to himself, like a private love affair. "People only see
banknotes between these papers with
paint, unfortunately," he said.
Christine Echter, for 29 years the caretaker of the building where Mr.
Gurlitt lives, said, "He wasn't
just weird these last few years; he's always been that way." She never saw
anyone enter Mr. Gurlitt's
sixth-floor apartment, she said, except for his sister, who lived near
Stuttgart and stopped visiting
about six years ago.
Konrad O. Bernheimer, a prominent Munich art dealer, said he had never come
across Mr. Gurlitt despite
decades in the business. "The saddest part of this whole story is this man's
life," he said. "He was
locked up in the dark with all these wonderful paintings. He is a man in the
shadows, a ghost who never
came out."
Mr. Gurlitt's apartment was not the home of a collector, said Ms. Voigt, the
art historian. "A collector
prides himself on his art and shows it off," she said. It was, rather, that
of someone who "wanted to
hide from the world." The darkened living room had a "cavelike" quality, she
said.
Despite his seclusion, Mr. Gurlitt clearly calculated his risks. When German
customs officers questioned
him in 2010 on a train to Munich from Switzerland, where he is known to have
a bank account and has sold
at least one work, they discovered he was carrying EUR9,000, just below the
legal limit.
His excessively shy manner nonetheless set off alarm bells. Their volume
increased when investigators
discovered later that Mr. Gurlitt did not exist, bureaucratically speaking.
He was not listed in Munich's
registry of residents or in other official records.
Watching over his family's art trove was Mr. Gurlitt's only known job.
Periodically, he dipped into the
collection to select a work to sell, a need that, according to Der Spiegel,
became more pressing in
recent years as his health declined.
The last piece he is known to have sold -- "The Lion Tamer," by the German
artist Max Beckmann -- fetched
864,000 euros, or $1.17 million, including commissions, at an auction in
Cologne in 2011. Mr. Gurlitt
agreed to give 45 percent of the proceeds to a Jewish family that had
originally owned the work.
Emmarentia Bahlmann, a Munich-based art expert for the Cologne auction
house, Kunsthaus Lempertz, that
organized the sale, said Mr. Gurlitt "called out of the blue." Eager to see
what, exactly, he had, she
arranged an appointment at his apartment, which she described as "gloomy"
but reasonably tidy.
There, she found Mr. Gurlitt alone in semidarkness with a single "marvelous
piece of art" hanging on the
wall, the Beckmann. The glass covering it was caked in dust. The work was
torn in two places.
Ms. Bahlmann said she found Mr. Gurlitt to be a "shy old man" with elegant
attire, good manners and a
clear mind. In their dealings, she said, he handled the negotiations
himself. She asked, gently, if he
possessed other pieces of art. "No, only this," he said, according to Ms.
Bahlmann. "It belonged to my
mother."
Before that, though, it belonged to his father, Hildebrand, one of just four
people authorized by the
Nazis to trade so-called degenerate art during the war.
As the Allied forces advanced and German defenses crumbled, the elder Mr.
Gurlitt, according to an
account he later gave to American interrogators, drove his wife, Helene, and
two children, Cornelius and
Benita, in a truck and trailer piled with boxes of art to the castle of an
acquaintance, Baron von
Pollnitz.
Soon after, he was detained there and questioned by members of the
Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit
of the United States military, the group of historians, curators and
soldiers entrusted with safeguarding
Europe's cultural heritage.
In his statements to investigators, he emphasized his anti-Nazi sentiments
and maintained that he had
never handled stolen art, and that the works in his possession were mostly
"the personal property of my
family or myself." Investigators concluded that he was not an important
player in the art trade and later
returned to him more than 115 paintings, in addition to drawings and other
fine art objects.
In 1956, Hildebrand Gurlitt died in a crash on the autobahn while racing
from Berlin back to the family's
home in Düsseldorf, but the war years continued to shadow the family. At the
time of his father's death,
Cornelius was just 23 and was already retreating deep into his own world.
"Even then, he was considered an eccentric fellow," recalled Karl-Heinz
Hering, whom the elder Mr.
Gurlitt had hired to work as his assistant at the Düsseldorf Kunstverein,
the region's leading art
museum. Mr. Hering said he had not known that the family owned a large,
private art collection.
Later, in 1961, Hildebrand's widow moved to the same Munich apartment
Cornelius occupies today. In late
1966, a government agency in Berlin responsible for the restitution of
assets plundered during the Nazi
era sent a formal letter asking about four paintings acquired by her
husband. Mrs. Gurlitt replied that
all her husband's records and artworks had been "incinerated" when the
Allies bombed Dresden in February
1945.
The search of Cornelius's apartment last year proved this to be a deception:
Investigators found not only
paintings but also record books kept by his father.
/:b
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