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German Government Begins to List Looted Nazi Artwork

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The 1919 painting
The 1919 painting
Officials in Germany have released an additional 54 images of artworks that were recovered from the Munich apartment where an art dealer was recently revealed to be hiding a stash of more than 1,400 pieces. This preliminary list of the missing artwork was compiled by Germany following international pressure.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that authorities began publishing an online roster of the works found in the apartment. The partial list of just 25 works was published on the site Lost Art Database last Tuesday, but the site has been experiencing technical difficulties due to high traffic, said the paper.

Meanwhile, the German recluse who hid the paintings believed to have been looted by the Nazis in has said he will fight for his right to keep the works, eliminating hope for a fast resolution. An estimated 970 of the 1,400 works of art discovered in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt were stolen from Jews during the Third Reich.

“I will not give anything back voluntarily,” Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, told a reporter last week. “I hope this gets resolved soon and I finally get my pictures back.”

He said he had never committed a crime “and even if I did, it would be covered by the statute of limitations”.

Gurlitt’s father was the art dealer Hildebrande Gurlitt, who sold confiscated, looted and extorted works for the Nazi’s.

The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, said the aim by prosecutors to give back some 300 works as early as next week was an irresponsible choice.

“After the whole thing was handled over 18 months nearly conspiratorially, the hasty reaction for a general return is certainly also the wrong one,” he told the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, stressing that the case had a “moral and historical dimension”.

The prosecutor who is investigating Gurlitt for tax evasion, acknowledged last week that many of the hundreds of works confiscated from his home in the February 2012 raid did belong to Gurlitt clearly belonged to him outright.

Prosecutor Reinhard Nemetz said he had asked a task force working on the spectacular find to identify such paintings “as soon as possible”.

Still, World Jewish Congress leader Ronald S. Lauder told AFP recently that the decision to quickly return works to Gurlitt before progressing on the provenance of the stolen art in the stash was “outrageous.”

German authorities claim to have been quiet about the discovery because they did not want to trigger any fraudulent ownership claims for the art, which includes works by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Renoir and Delacroix.

Authorities have declined to estimate the collection’s market value. Experts expect the process of authenticating the works recovered from Gurlitt’s apartment to take years.

Among the works listed on the Lost Art Database website are: “Moorish Conversation on a Terrace” by Eugene Delacroix, “Riders on the Beach” by Max Liebermann, “Seated Woman / Woman Sitting in Armchair” by Henri Matisse, “Allegory/Allegorical Scene” by Marc Chagall, and “Study of a Woman Nude, Standing, Arms Raised, Hands Crossed Above Head” by Auguste Rodin.

The Lost Art Database is an official German site that lists cultural objects that were seized during World War II and the Holocaust, particularly from Jewish owners. Officials are expected to update the list of works recovered from Gurlitt’s apartment on an ongoing basis.

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