Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive octogenarian hoarder of art whose father was a prominent art trader during the Third Reich, said through his lawyers that he would return paintings in his trove to their Jewish owners or their descendants if the art works had been looted by the Nazis.
Gurlitt’s lawyers are currently in talks to return 'Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in Armchair' to the descendants of Paul Rosenberg, a French art dealer whose family recognized the work when it was made public last year. “The agreement is not yet signed, but it will certainly happen,” Gurlitt spokesman Stephan Holzinger said.
Christoph Edel, a lawyer appointed by a Munich court to handle Gurlitt’s health, financial and legal affairs, told the German TV station ARD that more deals were to be concluded. The 81-year-old Gurlitt, who has heart problems, underwent surgery recently and has been slow to recover, leading the court to appoint a legal guardian.
“Mr. Gurlitt has given us free rein to return those pictures that belonged to Jews to their previous owners or their descendants,” Edel was quoted by media as saying.
A catalog of suspected looted art from the collection kept by Gurlitt at his Munich apartment was to be published shortly, and a restitution program was being prepared in accordance with the Washington Principles that called for a just solution for victims of Nazi art plunder and their heirs, Edel said in his statement. Only a small percentage of the collection owned by Gurlitt was suspected of having been stolen, he added.
The Gurlitt affairs has triggered an intensive debate in Germany about the issue of Nazi-looted art, and after pressure from Jewish groups, including the World Jewish Congress, a team of international experts was formed to evaluate the 1,280 works in Gurlitt's collection.
Those works are currently in the possession of the German authorities who seized them from Gurlitt’s apartment in Munich in 2011, but the full extent of the collection is unknown. Experts sent last month to Gurlitt’s second home in Salzburg, Austria, found 60 more pieces, and two more trips to the house turned up 178 works. Among the 39 oil and watercolor paintings are works by some of the biggest names in modern art: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Nolde and Liebermann.
The next step would be to examine the provenance of the works in the Salzburg collection, and any found to have been looted will be returned to their rightful owners, Edel said.
