Nearly 60 more artworks have been found at the Austrian home of Cornelius Gurlitt, a German recluse whose art hoard is suspected to contain Nazi-looted works. In November, it was reported that in 2012, more than 1,400 artworks were uncovered in Gurlitt’s dilapidated Munich apartment. The latest pieces, including works by Monet, Renoir and Picasso, were found at his Salzburg property. An initial inspection indicates that there is no Nazi loot in the latest trove.
Gurlitt, 81, is the son of the art dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt, who reportedly acquired the works in the late 1930s and 1940s. Gurlitt’s father had been put in charge of selling the stolen artworks abroad by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, but secretly hoarded many of them and later claimed that they were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. Gurlitt sold a number of the paintings over the years and lived off of the profits.
The task force in charge of researching the origins of the nearly 1,400 works discovered in Munich, has said that approximately 590 of them are suspected to have been looted or extorted by the Nazis from Jewish collectors. Authorities are in the process of locating the works’ rightful owners and publishing images of the paintings on www.lostart.de.
