The Persistent Crime of Nazi-Looted Art
The discovery of more than 1,500 artworks in a flat in Munich serves as an inconvenient reminder of one of the unresolved wrongs of the Third Reich.
The cash itself wasn’t a crime; Gurlitt had reportedly visited Switzerland to sell a picture to a gallery in Bern. But the strangeness of the situation led to further investigation of Gurlitt’s finances, and a search warrant for his Munich apartment that in February 2012 uncovered one of the most extraordinary stashes of art since the end of World War II. Inside a small flat in a boxy white building, hidden in filing cabinets and suitcases, investigators found more than 1,500 works by artists including Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Liebermann, Chagall, Durer, and Delacroix. The German authorities were investigating Gurlitt for tax evasion; what they found instead was an amassment of art that was immediately, incontrovertibly suspicious.
Source: The Atlantic
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