Catherine Hickley reports from Berlin that the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is looking into ways to put lists and/or photographs online concerning the Cornelius Gurlitt seizure of roughly 1,400 paintings with connections to Nazi looting. This followed heavy complaints in the first days of the revelation, that the government had failed to identify what has been found. The biggest question remains why this remained a secret for roughly two years since the discovery. Merkel’s government claimed yesterday it learned of the find only in the last few months.
Yesterday, the researchers at the Holocaust Art Project posted a five-page inventory list of works at the Wiesbaden Collecting Point run by the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program at the end of World War II. The list, from the National Archives, identifies the works as having come from “Collection Gurlitt: Hamburg.” HARP reports further that:
“In January 1947, the French restitution specialist assigned to the Munich Central Collecting Point, Capt. Doubinsky, noted that Dr. Hildebrand Gurlitt was the subject of an on-going investigation. Gurlitt told the Allies that he was in Paris during the war but avoided the Jeu de Paume like the plague, went to a number of German Embassy parties and met Dr. Lohse only once. . . .
“According to Gurlitt, he acquired 200 paintings in occupied France from 1941 to 1943 or so "for German museums," dealt extensively with Theo Hermsen, specialist in evading French export procedures to ship works of art to Germany, and also dealt indirectly with Wuster of the German Embassy, which might explain how he might have acquired looted French Impressionists.”
HARP also unearthed a note from the Roberts Commission that identies Hildebrand Gurlitt as an “Art Historian + Art Dealer” and an official buyer of works of art in France in 1944. When one stops to consider the state of the art market, occupation, and the impending Allied invasion, there are few places more presumptively suspicious for art sales than 1944 France.
Over at the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art (ARCA), Judge Arthur Tompkins (who chaired the panel that I was on at ARCA’s annual conference in Italy in June) calls for an international tribunal to sort out the Gurlitt affair. Judge Tompkins notes:
“What is needed is, in short, an ad-hoc International Art Crime Tribunal. Such a Tribunal would be assisted by art historians, provenance researchers, advocates to assist the commission and, crucially, claimant advocates and advisers who will work with claimants so that they can properly and effectively present their claims. By this means the Tribunal could create the kind of neutral ground necessary for the lasting resolution of the disputes that will inevitably arise concerning the art.”
ARCA has also started an online petition to release the full list of paintings found.
