A Look At The Gurlitt Family And Their Past
The Gurlitt family genealogy is of crucial importance when discussing its art collection, as the art collections is a direct reflection of the different family members’ actions. While the art collection was found in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt in 2010, it is his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, who collected the works. Hildebrand Gurlitt was born in 1895 and died at the age of 61 in a car accident in 1956. After his death, his wife, Helene Gurlitt (1895-1968) took charge of the collection, which was later inherited by their children, Cornelius Gurlitt and his sister Benita.
Hildebrand lived through four different governments in Germany. As a child, he lived during Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II; as an adolescent, he lived during the Weimar Republic and, as an adult, he lived during the Nazi Regime. Finally, he spent his last years in the Federal Republic of Germany.1 Records of diary entries of Hildebrand, found in the Gurlitt Collection, indicate that he always struggled with the world and its realities, leading him to develop some emotional issues like feelings of fear.
He grew up in a family that was highly patriotic. Under the influence of his father, Cornelius Gustav Gurlitt (1850-1938) — who served during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 — Hildebrand grew up seeing the army as an opportunity to show his love for his fatherland. Therefore, at the age of 19, Hildebrand volunteered to serve at the Western Front in Belgium and France, where, for the first time, he faced the true brutality of war. While this cannot be supported with direct evidence, it is very likely that Hildebrand was not in a position to express his fears to his father, who brought him up as a loyal Reich-German.2
After suffering two injuries during his service, Hildebrand, afflicted with shell shock, was removed from active service in 1917. He was later sent to Lithuania, where he soon became head of the art division of the Supreme Command of German Forces in the East. His new position required that he “share” with locals — including Lithuanians, Poles, Byelorussians, Latvians and Estonians, many among them Jewish — the benefits that this region would receive thanks to the advancement of German culture. It was a position that allowed him to spread German propaganda through “culture” in preparation for future German settlement. This was also the first time that Hildebrand felt capable of successfully accomplishing a task and proving to be efficient at working for his country by spreading the message of Germany’s domination through art.
When Hildebrand moved to Lithuania, his sister, Cornelia (1890-1919) had already been living there since 1915, working at the Vilnius-Antokol hospital. She introduced Hildebrand to artists she had met while serving there, which he enjoyed very much. However, as stated in his correspondence, Hildebrand did not see art as being something purely aesthetic and pleasurable. He wanted to use art as a vessel towards social revolution, introducing art to the everyday man. These socio-political intentions persisted when he later moved back to Dresden, Germany, his hometown, where he soon met members of the Dresden Secession Group 1919, including Otto Dix.3 In 1925, Hildebrand became the director of the König-Albert-Museum in Zwickau, Germany. At that point, he exhibited Expressionist artists who later became known as degenerate artists by the Nazis. Prior to 1933, conservative groups already frowned upon contemporary modern art, which caused Hildebrand to be fired from his position at Zwickau in 1930. Just a year later, he became the new head of the Hamburg Kunstverein. As in his previous position, Hildebrand, as director of the Kunstverein, promoted the contemporary art of his time, showcasing, what he thought, to be the voice of Germany. In 1933, however, Hildebrand was once again asked to leave because of the growing negative opinions of this type of art expressed by organizations such as the Kampfbund f ür deutsche Kultur (Nazi Militant League for German Culture), which pressured the public to persecute those supporting modern art.4 In 1935, Hildebrand founded his own gallery, Kunstkabinett Dr H. Gurlitt, which was put into his wife’s name two years later due to the fact that, according to the new Nuremberg Laws of 1935, he was regarded as a “Mishling zweiten Grades,” which referred to his being a “quarter-Jew.” Until that time, it would be fair to say that Hildebrand was quite progressive in his taste for modern art and dedicated in his attempts to promote it.
In 1938, his life took a different course. For the first time, Hildebrand voluntarily offered his art historical expertise to the NS Party by applying for a position at the Propaganda Ministry. It was a strategic move that reflected his knowledge of the kind of art that the Nazi Regime was confiscating. In opposition to his history of supporting works labeled as degenerate, Hildebrand served the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in removing modern art from German museums. He facilitated lucrative deals with art dealers and gallery owners to sell works abroad in exchange for foreign currency. In the successive years, Hildebrand’s purchasing power grew substantially. He later became the head buyer of the Linz Commission in 1943, which dealt with works of art intended for Hitler’s private museum. Just as he had in his first post in Lithuania, Hildebrand secured himself a position that enabled him to spread his nationalistic beliefs, including the German idea of “Volksgemeinshaft,” which translated into the promised social mobility of the lower classes of society. His position as director underscored his desire to connect the "German Volk” with the German nation through art. On the other hand, his private collection of works — acquired thanks to his work for the Nazi Regime — continued to show his love for modern art regardless of the moral and ethical boundaries of the time.
After the war, Hildebrand Gurlitt was asked to defend himself twice at denazification tribunals that took place at the Bamberg Land tribunal. In both instances, in 1947 and 1948, Hildebrand portrayed himself successfully as a victim and was exonerated both times. Having witnessed the outcomes of the Nuremberg trials shortly beforehand, from 1945 to 1946, Hildebrand was aware of the testimonies that had been given by NS party members and Nazi war criminals. In his testimonies, Hildebrand listed the injustices he had suffered at the hands of the NS party: his firing in 1930 as a director in Zwickau because of his support of modern art, his dismissal in Hamburg for allegedly removing the flagpole from the roof of the Kunstverein so that the swastika flag could not be placed there, and his supposed friendship with Arnold Vieth von Glossenau, who was a leading communist writer, and his Jewish grandmother. Making sure to reiterate these specific points, both in writing and during the hearings at the tribunal, helped him to escape unscathed, which was also due in part to the fact that the denazification tribunals did not focus on degenerate art or on the art dealers involved in the sale and removal of art from public institutions in Germany.
During his second trial, Hildebrand was accused of being a “profiteer” when it came out that he had lied during his first hearing about his income by giving lower numbers. As stated by the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism of 1946, the term “profiteer” was defined as, “anyone who, at the expense of those persecuted for political, religious or racial reasons, directly or indirectly gained, or strove for, excessive advantages for himself or others, especially in connection with expropriations, forced sales or similar dealings.”5 He had repeated multiple times to the American allies conducting the questioning related to his collection found in Asschbach, Germany that he had never hidden any artworks and that he had very few paintings and that none of the pictures had been owned by Jews or came from abroad.6 In 1948, Hildebrand sent a statement that confirmed he had acquired all his works between 1942 and 1944 and that all traces of provenance had been destroyed during the Dresden bombing. In fact, he could not remember anything about their provenance.7 However, he did remember details about his former colleagues and willingly testified against them to the Americans. After avoiding punishment, he became the director of the Kunstverein f ür die Rheinlande und Westfalen in 1949.
Out of all of the individuals who dealt with Nazi art between 1933 and 1945, Hildebrand Gurlitt should have been one of the most suspicious. His life was a prime example of how someone could benefit by closely collaborating with the NS party. In fact, while he was not a member of the NS party, Hildebrand’s role in helping the NS parry was outsized both in the number of works he acquired and the numerous connections he formed with Nazi officials, including Hermann Voss, the second director of the Linz F ührermuseum. As stated in an essay on Hildebrand Gurlitt by Johannes Gramlich, research associate for Modern and Contemporary History at the Universities of Cologne and Munich, and Meike Hop, research associate at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich, “it is particularly in view of this activity that he is described today as ‘one of the most important and active art dealers and agents’ of the Nazi period, even though scholars ‘hardly know anything to date about the extent of his agency and purchasing activity’.”8 It was Hildebrand’s ability to hide behind various facades — including his wife’s non-Jewish relations, his obscured records of his collection, and his identity as someone who worked for the NS Party without having declared himself a Nazi — that allowed him to escape immediate scrutiny.
The Cousin of Hildebrand Gurlitt
For generations, the Gurlitt family had been very involved with the arts. Among its members were painters, musicians, dancers, art historians and art dealers. One of them was Wolfgang Gurlitt, cousin of Hildebrand. Like Hildebrand, he was involved in the art trade both during and after the war Wolfgang Gurlitt was born in 1888 in Berlin and died in 1965 in Munich. From a young age, Wolfgang was exposed to the art world through his father Fritz Gurlitt, who was a famous gallery owner in Germany. Among his bigger achievements was his contribution towards making Edvard Munch well known as an artist. After the death of his father, Wolfgang inherited the gallery where he himself became a renowned collector of avant-garde artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Alfred Kubin.9 Not unlike Hildebrand, after 1933, Wolfgang profited from the Nazi regime as he worked for the campaign against degenerate art and later joined the Special Commission Linz. When the war was over, Wolfgang moved to Austria where he co-founded and was director of a new modern art museum, the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz -Sammlung Wolfgang Gurlitt, known today as the LENTOS Museum. By 1953, the city of Linz, Austria had acquired the entire Wolfgang Gurlitt collection, which included a substantial number of works from artists like Egon Schiele, Emil Nolde, Gustav Klimt, Max Pechstein and many others.10 The LENTOS Museum has since restituted numerous works from the Wolfgang Gurlitt Collection based on Austria’s restitution laws of 1998.
The decision of Wolfgang to “give” and sell his collection — amounting to hundreds of paintings and works on paper — to the LENTOS museum was in part due to his bankruptcy in the late 1920s. He continued to loan works for temporary exhibitions at different museums throughout the 1950s, both in Austria and abroad, including an exhibition on Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt in 1949 in Zurich, Switzerland. Wolfgang had obtained Austrian citizenship by the end of World War II, and, like his cousin Hildebrand, he had managed to avoid further questioning by the U.S. Art Looting Investigation Unit by stating that all of his documents had been destroyed during the Allied bombing of Germany, making it impossible to trace the provenance of the works in his collection.
These lies later caught up with Wolfgang, as genuine doubts regarding his collection became more evident, leading to his dismissal as director of the LENTOS museum in 1956. The museum went a step further in 1960 when the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz -Sammlung Wolfgang Gurlitt removed his name and began calling the museum simply Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz. Wolfgang filed a lawsuit against this decision and won the claim to restore the original museum name in 1963. However, he passed away two years later. The museum’s new name was finalized in 2003 with the addition of a new building to the museum.11 Due to his continued international business relations in the art world after the war, many of the details of the transactions of his collection still remain a mystery and deserve closer inspection. While Austrian museum experts agree that these transactions should be thoroughly evaluated, the lack of restitution laws regarding private individuals maintains a regrettable status quo.
The Tragic Life Of Cornelia Gurlitt
While Cornelia Gurlitt’s uncle Wilhelm had a long-lasting career as a landscape painter, she did not live long enough to see her art appreciated by an audience. Born in 1890, sister of Hildebrand Gurlitt, she took her own life in 1919 before her ambitions as a painter came to full fruition. While some of her work was shown in small gallery exhibits in Germany before her death, Cornelia was a hospital nurse in Wilna at the Antokol Hospital in Lithuania for most of her life. As one of the cities in Lithuania that suffered some of the most frightful numbers of casualties during the war, Wilna lost almost half of its population, among them many Jews.12 Deeply troubled and torn by her civil duty as a nurse and her inability to put painting aside, Cornelia wrote frequently to her brothers, including Hildebrand, explaining her struggles. In 1918, Cornelia decided to move back to her hometown —Dresden, Germany — to pursue a career as a painter, but she was ultimately unable to sustain herself as an artist. After her death, Hildebrand took care of her artistic legacy.
Among works found in the Gurlitt Collection were numerous paintings and drawings by Cornelia dedicated to different family members. Inspired greatly by German Expressionism and artists like Marc Chagall, she touches upon topics of motherhood, death, seclusion and family in her work. Her father’s lack of support for her aspirations during her lifetime and the destruction of her works by her own mother after her suicide are symptomatic of the complicated relationships within the Gurlitt family. Over time, many of the Gurlitt family members proved to be, in one way or another, involved in the arts, making them –- from as early as in the 18th century –- an influential German family. This all ended quite dramatically with the deaths of Cornelia and Hildebrand Gurlitt.
The Little Mentioned Sister Of Cornelius Gurlitt
When the “Gurlitt Affair” was made public, the attention of most scholars, the media and the public alike was focused on Cornelius Gurlitt and his father Hildebrand Gurlitt. Several months after, Wolfgang Gurlitt and the sister of Cornelius Gurlitt, Renate (Benita) Gurlitt, came under scrutiny as well. Little is known of the less prominent members of the family even though it is believed that they knew the problematic history of their collection. Renate was born in 1935 and, as the younger sister of Cornelius, she also received some pieces from their father’s art collection.
Numerous letters were found in the Gurlitt Collection highlighting Renate’s awareness and discomfort regarding inheriting part of the art collection from her father. In a letter dated 1964, Renate described these unsettling feelings to her brother:
And what became of his [Hildebrand Gurlitt’s] Collection? Do you ever enjoy what you have of it in Salzburg? For us I sometimes think, his most personal and most valuable legacy has turned into the darkest burden. I tremble with fear every time I think of it. What we have is locked away in the graphics cabinet or kept behind pinned-up curtains – no one sees it, no one enjoys it. When we think of it we think of tax inspections, war and its dangers, family rows – not as a living memento and symbol of Daddy’s life’s work, or how proud he was of it, and how much more it meant to him than its monetary value. That has all gone to the grave with him, so to speak. It had to be that way, it couldn’t be altered.”13
Other manuscripts found in the Gurlitt estate, including letter translations from 1962, confirm that Renate definitely knew about the origins of some specific works of art, and she knew that they had come from persecuted individuals.14 It was a secret that was kept by Hildebrand and one that his wife and children continued to be keep.
Renate died shortly after the customs raid of her brother’s apartment in Munich in 2012. At the time, she possessed eighteen pieces from her father’s collection, four of which have been restituted since then to the rightful Jewish heirs.15 These four works were included in the provenance research conducted by the German government and the German Lost Art Foundation, which was published on their database in 2017. A private collector, who was the current owner of these works, came forth highlighting the need for restitution on the basis of the Washington Principles. This decision to restitute the artworks was publicly praised by the German State Minister of Culture Monika Gr ütters. In this instance, the Washington Principles — which focus on public institutions –- were applied to a private owner, an act that had not occurred frequently in the past. In a public statement, Gr ütters explains the significance of this act: “
[…] I am also very grateful to the owner of the pieces for adhering to the Washington Principles as a private person and agreeing to the restitution of Nazi-confiscated art. It is an important step toward coming to terms with the NS art theft that private persons also accept their responsibility and have their collections examined.”16
As the above quote suggests, the Gurlitt family, much like Hildebrand Gurlitt himself, did nothing to help clarify the provenances of works in their possession after the war. By reinventing Hildebrand Gurlitt as a victim of the Nazi regime after the Bamberg Trials, misrepresenting business records, and declaring themselves unaware of the disturbing history, the family, whether actively or not, helped stymie the restitution of artworks over all these years.
An Interview With Someone Who Knew Him
For all the publicity that Cornelius Gurlitt has received over the past ten years, few truths are known about him. Cornelius was born in 1932 and died in 2014 in the midst of the "Gurlitt Affair.” He was a reclusive man who lived alone in his apartment in Munich. With no apparent job or source of income, Cornelius regularly sold part of his father’s collection that was hidden in his Munich apartment and home in Salzburg in order to sustain his very modest life. In addition to having had no apparent steady employment, Cornelius also never opened any official bank account, bought no insurance of any kind, and was a so-called “stranger” to German tax authorities and social services. When the Gurlitt Collection came to light after the raid, only a few people came forward to say they had had contact with him prior to his death. Among these few individuals were journalists, his lawyers, authors and members of the Schwabinger Taskforce.
During his lifetime, Cornelius often sold works to some of his “regular” auction houses, including contacts in Switzerland, which suggests part of his reasoning for selecting Switzerland as the home for his collection. Among these auction houses is the Swiss auction house Kornfeld in Bern. In an interview held in Bern in 2015, Eberhard W. Kornfeld, who has been working at the auction house since 1945, briefly explained his relationship with Cornelius. While Kornfeld knew and met Cornelius’s father Hildebrand, he did not have many exchanges with the man. Moreover, he considered Cornelius just one of numerous clients.17 Kornfeld describes the behavior of Cornelius around his father’s collection as secretive due to the fact that Cornelius worried about maybe having a couple “black sheep” in the collection.18 When responding to a question regarding a visit he once took with Cornelius in the eighties to the Kunstmuseum Bern — a trip he said he did not remember — he alluded to the fact that he would not have taken this visit were it not for Cornelius requesting it. Kornfeld additionally states that the anger of Cornelius towards Germany and the German authorities surely played a role in Cornelius’s decision to give his collection to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. According to Kornfeld, “The whole story about Gurlitt is a judicial scandal. With which authorization did one confiscate the collection?”19
While the reasons as to why Cornelius made the decision to give the collection to Bern will never be known, this incident provides a unique opportunity for the German authorities, the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Swiss government to promote a conversation on provenance research. It should also allow them to be transparent about the slow progress of restitution claims and the means needed for responding to these claims. It is also quite evident by now that the Swiss government did not have any prior knowledge of the will of Cornelius Gurlitt. As the Kunstmuseum Bern has recently begun the required provenance research for their collection, the Swiss government has been made aware of the financial investments needed for researching collections in the country’s museums.
The accusations against Cornelius Gurlitt are the result of the generational history of the Gurlitt family as a whole. The activities of his family in Germany during both World Wars, the various art collections accumulated over the decades, and the clear coverups by family members were all exposed with the “Gurlitt Affair” in 2010. With the passing of Cornelius Gurlitt and his sister Renate, a family legacy comes to an end and. However, at the same time, this moment also serves as the beginning of future global discussions about provenance research.