Hildebrand Gurlitt (15 September 1895 – 9 November 1956) was a German art dealer and art historian who traded in "degenerate art" during the Nazi era.[1] His collection of 1,406 works (by Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, among others) was confiscated in 2012 by Bavarian authorities from the apartment of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt.[2][3]

Early life

Gurlitt was born into an artistic family in Dresden in 1895. His father Cornelius Gurlitt was an architect and art historian, his brother Willibald a musicologist, his sister Cornelia a painter and his cousin Wolfgang was an art dealer as well. His grandmother Elisabeth Gurlitt was Jewish, which would prove problematic under Nazi rule: he was considered a "quarter-Jew" under the Nuremberg laws.

Gurlitt had a close relationship to his sister Cornelia (born 1890), who was an expressionist painter and was in contact with Chagall. She served in the First World War as a nurse and moved to Berlin shortly after the war. The lack of artistic recognition and depression led to her suicide in 1919; Gurlitt took care of her works, but part of it was destroyed by their mother after the death of their father.

In 1923 he married the ballet dancer Helene Hanke who had trained under expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. They had two children: Cornelius (1932–2014) and Renate (1935–2012).

Early career

After Gurlitt's graduation, he became the first director of the König Albert museum in Zwickau in 1925. One of the first exhibitions he organized at Zwickau was the October 1925 exhibition of Max Pechstein. Financially it was a success, but it generated a lot of hostility from local conservatives. In 1926 he contracted the Bauhaus Dessau for the design and decoration of the museum. Later on he continued exhibiting contemporary art: in 1926 Käthe Kollwitz and a special exhibition on contemporary art in Dresden (Das junge Dresden), in 1927 Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and in 1928 Emil Nolde. A collection of his letters shows that he was personally well acquainted with modern artists at the time, and he acquired and exhibited works by many of them, including Barlach, Feininger, Hofer, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Lissitzky, Marc, and Munch. Gurlitt's work was appreciated by the national press and his peers, but the local press was less impressed. The city's financial difficulties and press campaigns against him led to his dismissal in 1930.

Following his dismissal Gurlitt moved to Hamburg, where he became the curator and managing director of the Kunstverein (Art Association) until he and the board members were forced to resign by the Nazis, in 1933.

Nazi era

While he had been fired for exhibiting "degenerate art" he was still appointed as a dealer for the Führermuseum in Linz and he continued to trade in modern art, this time under orders from the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda led by Joseph Goebbels.

He was one of the four dealers appointed by the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art (together with Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller and Bernhard Böhmer) to market confiscated works of art abroad. Some 16,000 so-called "degenerate" artworks had been removed from museums and confiscated all over Germany. Some of these works were exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. A trading room was set up in Schönhausen Palace outside Berlin. The four dealers were allowed to buy pieces and sell them abroad, which they did not always report to the commission. Gurlitt's name appears against many of the entries on a listing compiled by the Ministry of Propaganda and now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum that provides details of the fate of each object, including whether it was exchanged, sold or destroyed.

Focus magazine estimated that Gurlitt had established a personal trading collection of up to 1,500 pieces. Gurlitt used his position to sell art to domestic collectors as well, most notably to Bernhard Sprengel whose collection forms the core of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. In 1936 Gurlitt was visited in Hamburg by Samuel Beckett.

Following the fall of France, Hermann Goering appointed a series of Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce approved dealers, including Gurlitt, to liquidate French art assets and then pass the funds to swell Goering's personal art collection.

Purchase and hiding of art works

Sworn statement by Hildebrand Gurlitt dated 1945 Max Liebermann's Two Riders On The Beach in the Gurlitt collection and subject to a claim by the descendants of the original jewish owner

Gurlitt was arrested by the Allies near Bamberg in 1945, hiding in the castle of Baron von Pollnitz. He turned down an offer from the baron to hide his art collection in a new secret place. Or so he let a writer know. What we now know is that he did successfully hide more than 1,000 paintings—or his teenage son did. It is possible they were cached in France. Gurlitt's chief job on the Confiscation Committee was to work in Paris during the war, where he lived from 1941 to 1945 in the Hotel de Jersey. He had two ways of collecting for Hitler's Fuehrermuseum. One was to visit abandoned Jewish homes and remove their artworks; his licence was a Nazi law declaring that French nationals who had fled had lost French citizenship. The other was to spend Reichsmarks at the Drouot auction house in Paris, where distress sales were big business. Gurlitt was no small buyer. He paid more than one million French francs for the four most expensive paintings in the highest-value Paris sale of the war—the Georges Viau Impressionists auctioned by Etienne Ader between 11 and 14 December 1942, which fetched £922,000 in wartime values (equivalent to approximately £37493.3 million in 2014). The sale's top price of 5m francs was paid by Gurlitt for Cezanne's Vallee de l'Arc et Mont Sainte Victoire. It demonstrated Nazi purchasing power. Unfortunately the tiny painting, for which Gurlitt gave 94 times the then record for a Cezanne, proved to be a fake. Post-war

Under interrogation after capture, Gurlitt and his mother told United States Army authorities that in the February 1945 fire bombing of Dresden, his collection and his documentation of art transactions had been largely destroyed at his home in Kaitzer Strasse.[19] One hundred fifteen pieces in the custody of American and German authorities were returned to him after he convinced them that he had acquired them legally. Among those were Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann and Self-Portrait by Otto Dix, which he apparently passed on to his son Cornelius. Assessed as a victim of Nazi persecution due to his Jewish heritage, he was released and continued trading art works until his death in a car crash in 1956.

Looted art

On 22 September 2010, German customs officials at the German–Switzerland border found €9,000 in cash on his son Cornelius Gurlitt, which led to a search warrant in 2011 for his apartment in Schwabing, Munich. On 28 February 2012 they found 1,406 artworks, with a present estimated worth of one billion Euros (approx. $1.3 billion). Initial reports by the German magazine Focus and others stated that the discovery happened early 2011, but customs officials corrected that during a press conference. Presently being cataloged in a secure warehouse in Garching, 300 of the works were exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 in Munich. Cornelius Gurlitt sold Lion Tamer at an auction in Cologne shortly before the collection was seized. Authorities initially banned reporting on the raid, which only came to light in 2013.

Hildebrand Gurlitt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Born 15 September 1895
• Dresden, German Empire
• Died 9 November 1956 (aged 61)
• Düsseldorf, West Germany
• Nationality German
• Occupation Art dealer and historian
• Known for Art dealer during the Nazi era, war profiteering
• Spouse(s) Helene Hanke
• Children
• Cornelius Gurlitt
• Renate Gurlitt
• Parent(s)
• Cornelius Gurlitt
• Marie Gurlitt
• Relatives
• Wilibald Gurlitt (brother)
• Cornelia Gurlitt (sister)
• Wolfgang Gurlitt (cousin)

Hildebrand Gurlitt (15 September 1895 – 9 November 1956) was a German art dealer, art historian and war profiteer, who traded in "degenerate art" during the Nazi era.[1] His collection of 1,406 works (by Marc Chagall, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Franz Marc and Toulouse-Lautrec among others) was confiscated in 2012 by Bavarian authorities from the apartment of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt.[2][3]

Early life

Gurlitt was born into an artistic family in Dresden in 1895. His father Cornelius Gurlitt was an architect and art historian, his brother Willibald a musicologist, his sister Cornelia a painter and his cousin Wolfgang was an art dealer as well. His grandmother Elisabeth Gurlitt was Jewish, which would prove problematic under Nazi rule: he was considered a "quarter-Jew" under the Nuremberg laws.

Gurlitt had a close relationship with his sister Cornelia (born 1890), who was an expressionist painter and was in contact with Chagall. She served in the First World War as a nurse and moved to Berlin shortly after the war. The lack of artistic recognition and depression led to her suicide in 1919; Gurlitt took care of her works, but part of it was destroyed by their mother after the death of their father.

In 1923 he married the ballet dancer Helene Hanke who was trained under expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. They had two children: Cornelius (1932–2014) and Renate (1935–2012)