Cornelius Gurlitt, a reclusive German collector whose long-secret hoard of well over 1,000 artworks triggered an international uproar over the fate of art looted by the Nazis, died on Monday aged 81.
Gurlitt's spokesman Stephan Holzinger said that the collector died at his apartment in Munich, where he had asked to return after being hospitalized for major heart surgery. He was "in nursing care and taken care of in recent weeks around the clock," Holzinger said.
Gurlitt was thrust into the public spotlight in November when authorities, following a report by German magazine Focus, disclosed that they had seized 1,280 works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall from the Munich apartment more than a year earlier. They had discovered the works while investigating a tax case after Gurlitt aroused their suspicions during a customs check on a Zurich-Munich train in September 2010.
In April, prosecutors said there had been new findings in the investigation and the works would be returned to Gurlitt, who had agreed to let art experts investigate them and return any looted ones to their rightful owners.
