Nazis for the day

Andrew Higgins and Katrin Bennhold have an article in The New York Times about the recent art find in Germany:

As an expert in works of art that the Nazis called “degenerate” and in the dealers who traded them during World War Two, 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, 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 a billion dollars— stashed in 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 Gurlitt paced restlessly around his previously inviolable domain, muttering over and over to himself: “'Now they are taking everything from me',” recalled Voigt, who was present. “He was mortified,” she said.
In an interview, his first, Gurlitt, eighty, 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, 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 of 2012, 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 Two 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, 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 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 Gurlitt broke any laws.
When asked if he had ever been in love with a fellow human, he giggled and said, “Oh, no.” 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 Gurlitt lives, said: “He wasn’t just weird these last few years; he’s always been that way.” She never saw anyone enter 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 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.”
Gurlitt’s apartment was not the home of a collector, said 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, 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 €9,000, just below the legal limit.
His excessively shy manner nonetheless set off alarm bells. Their volume increased when investigators discovered later that 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 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. 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 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 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.
Bahlmann said she found 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 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 in so-called degenerate art during the War.
As Allied forces advanced and German defenses crumbled, the elder 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 already retreating deep into his own world.
“Even then, he was considered an eccentric fellow,” recalled Karl-Heinz Hering, whom the elder Gurlitt had hired to work as his assistant at the Düsseldorf Kunstverein, the region’s leading art museum. 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 that 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. Gurlitt replied that all her husband’s records and artworks had been “incinerated” when the Allies bombed Dresden in February of 1945.
The search of Cornelius’ apartment last year proved this to be a deception: investigators found not only paintings, but also record books kept by his father.

Rico says it's good that it's so painful for this schmuck to lose all his paintings... (Though there's undoubtedly a place reserved in Gehenna for him.)