[NetBehaviour] For Son of a Nazi-Era Dealer, a Private Life Amid a Tainted Trove of Art (fwd)

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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.



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