Reclusive German art collector
Cornelius Gurlitt
has agreed to return paintings stolen by the Nazis from their Jewish owners and hoarded for decades by his family.
The first work likely to be returned is the Matisse painting Seated Woman , once owned by Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg and sought for decades by his granddaughter Anne Sinclair, former wife of disgraced ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
News of the restitution is the latest twist in a drama that began with a spot check by customs officers on a German train in 2010 and lead to a raid on Mr Gurlitt’s Munich flat.
There police discovered some 1,400 artworks collected by Mr Gurlitt's father, art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, who was given a licence by the Nazis to deal in modern art they dubbed "degenerate".
At some point, the dealer began retaining rather than selling the artworks. After the war, he said the collection had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.
Instead Mr Gurlitt, and later his son, kept the works hidden in a Munich apartment, with another 238 works held in a house in Salzburg.
The Gurlitt collection is comprised largely of prints and sketches, though it also includes some valuable oil paintings presumed lost since 1945.
The Salzburg find includes a 1903 Monet painting of London's Tower Bridge, a bronze sculpture by Auguste Renoir and drawings by Gauguin, Cezanne and Picasso.
Cache
The total cache, with an estimated value of well over €1 billion, was seized by police to allow researchers determine the works' provenance and rightful owners.
When news of the find leaked last year, Mr Gurlitt insisted the works were rightfully his and vowed to fight any restitution in the courts. After suffering a heart attack, however, he appears to have had a change of mind.
‘‘If there are works under justified suspicion of being stolen art, then please give them back to their Jewish owners,” Mr Gurlitt told his lawyers.
In line with his wishes, lawyer Christoph Edel has promised to publish a catalogue of all the works in the collection and has established contact with one-time owners of several works.
“We expect to be returning additional works in the coming weeks,” said Mr Edel, insisting the works discovered in Salzburg belonged to his client’s artist grandfather, Louis Gurlitt.
The Matisse was one of 162 works Mr Rosenberg left in a safe in 1940 before he fled France to New York. The works were seized by the Nazis for the planned "Führermuseum" in the Austrian city of Linz, where the chief curator was Hildebrand Gurlitt. The museum was never built and the Rosenberg collection vanished.
When the Matisse reappeared in the Gurlitt collection, Ms Sinclair and other Rosenberg heirs vowed to sue unless it was handed over.
