page_title: Hildebrand Gurlitt
section_title: Survival of art collection
hierarchical_section_title: Hildebrand Gurlitt / Survival of art collection
context_page_description: Hildebrand Gurlitt was a Nazi German art historian, art gallery director and subsequently, Nazi-associated art dealer, and war profiteer, who traded in "degenerate art" during the Nazi era, and purchased paintings in Nazi-occupied France, many of them stolen from their original owners, for Hitler's planned Führermuseum and for himself. He also inherited family artworks from both his father and his sister, an accomplished artist in her own right. Following World War II and the denazification process he became Director of the Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, until his death in a car accident at the age of 61.
context_section_description: Far from being mostly lost in the war as Gurlitt had claimed, around 1,500 artworks remained in Gurlitt's possession at the time of his death, passing to his wife Helene and thence to their son Cornelius (with some to his sister Renate) following her own death in 1964. They remained in the younger generation of Gurlitts' possession for over four decades out of public knowledge, although Cornelius is known to have sold eleven works via the Galerie Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland, in 1988, and possibly four others in 1990, as well as Max Beckmann's The Lion Tamer which sold at auction in 2011, with the proceeds split between Cornelius and a relative of the painting's original Jewish owners. Helene had earlier sold three paintings, including Picasso's Portrait of a Woman with Two Noses, via the auction house of Ketterer in Stuttgart in 1960, plus offered Bar, Brown by Max Beckmann, which failed to sell; Cornelius later subsequently sold the same painting via Ketterer again in 1972. In 2007, August Macke's Woman with a Parrot, also with a Hildebrand Gurlitt provenance, was sold in Berlin via the auction house Villa Grisebach for €2 million; the seller was an unnamed German collector, suspected by investigative author Catherine Hickey to have been Cornelius' sister Renate (Benita).
  On 22 September 2010, German customs officials at the German–Switzerland border found Cornelius, by then aged 77, to be carrying €9,000 in cash which he explained was money from the previous sale of a painting, which led to a search warrant in 2011 for his apartment in Schwabing, Munich. On 28 February 2012 officials from the Augsburg Prosecutors Office discovered found 1,406 artworks, the bulk of Hildebrand's original collection, with a reported estimated worth (subsequently found to be greatly exaggerated) of one billion Euros (approx. $1.3 billion), which they then confiscated. Authorities initially banned reporting on the raid, which only came to light in 2013. Subsequently Cornelius' legally appointed custodian obtained an agreement that the collection be returned since there was no evidence that Cornelius had broken any German laws, however nothing had been returned by the time of Cornelius' death. An additional portion of the collection was disclosed by Cornelius to his court-appointed lawyer to be stored at his residence in Salzburg, Austria, where he officially resided and was registered for tax purposes; these items remained in Cornelius' possession since the German authorities had no jurisdiction there. Cornelius, apparently aggrieved at the treatment he had received from the German authorities, bequeathed the entire collection on his death in 2014 to a small museum in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, who in November 2014 agreed to accept the bequest, minus any works for which the possible status as wartime looted art was still in question. Exhibitions of some of the works from the collection went on show in November 2017.
caption: Max Liebermann's Two Riders On The Beach in the Gurlitt collection and now passed on to the descendants of the original Jewish owner
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