Provenance Research And The Many Chasms:

The Schwabinger Taskforce

The charges brought against Cornelius Gurlitt in 2010 when he was on a train from Zürich, Switzerland to Munich, Germany by German customs officials initiated the entire “Gurlitt Affair” and were the beginning of the investigation into the Gurlitt Collection. Based on a charge of potential tax evasion, Cornelius Gurlitt, who was 79 years old, was stopped on the train. He had just short of 10,000 euros on him, and because of this, the Department of Public Prosecution in Bavaria opened an investigation. This controversial procedure was later on debated among lawyers, as it is legal in most European countries to travel with an amount up to 10,000 Euro without declaration. The arrest was also controversial because Germany — since the end of the war and to this day — does not have any binding law that obliges private individuals to return Nazi-looted art. In fact, the restitution laws that were put in place just after World War II are no longer useful because the statute of limitations has long passed.⁵

After the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt was searched by German customs in 2012, no one but the German authorities were aware of the collection of artworks found until November 2013 when the public was made aware of it by a misleading article in the German magazine Focus. Soon to follow were other German magazines like Der Spiegel, which obtained its first story by having one of their journalists follow Cornelius Gurlitt on one of his visits to his doctor, capturing photos of the man on their mobile phones for the front cover of the magazine, with apparently no permission given by the man in the picture.⁶ As of late 2013, Germany was under worldwide scrutiny — as stated by Andrea Baresel-Brand, head of the Schwabigner Taskforce and the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project — based largely on the reports in the media. Due to the pressure, the German federal and Bavarian state governments quickly created the Schwabinger Taskforce in November 2013.⁷ The reality of how Germany had dealt with looted art during the war had been hidden behind years of bureaucratic excuses since World War II. The new revelations about the country’s poor handling of the matter justified the urgent need for a new official approach.

The Schwabinger Taskforce was originally set up by the German government for the sole purpose of examining the artworks using scholarly resources, so they had no additional responsibility to search for heirs or conduct restitutions. The investigating authority, the public prosecutor’s office in Augsburg, began placing works of art that were suspected by experts to have been looted by the Nazis on the Lost Art Database, which was created and launched by the Stiftung Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste in Magdeburg in 2000. The Taskforce included members such as Bénédicte Savoy, Yehudit Shendar and Shlomit Steinberg. Both Shendar and Steinberg represented Jerusalem in their respective positions. Shendar was the Deputy Director and Senior Art Curator Museum Division at Yad Vashem, and Steinberg was the Hans Dichand Curator of European Art at the Israel Museum. Out of the approximately fourteen members of the Schwabinger Taskforce, about five did not represent or work for Germany.⁸ In 2016, the Schwabinger Taskforce published its final report on its research findings in German. The Schwabinger Taskforce’s final report was intended to be an interim report to be used for continued research. Perceived a little as a convenient safeguard catalogue, the final report included fact sheets and statistics about artworks in the researched Gurlitt Collection, which — as the research went forward — changed substantially. Additionally, the final report mentioned early on that the Taskforce and its research were not intended to provide a legal basis for the actions of customs regarding the accusation of tax evasion towards Cornelius Gurlitt, nor to the complex issue of how Cornelius Gurlitt — a private person — should be treated for matters of restitution in Germany.⁹ While the final report and the Taskforce had the backing of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Monika Grütters, it is difficult to understand the role of the Taskforce as a government-funded entity in charge of the Gurlitt Collection when the Taskforce was arguing at the same time that it was quite powerless. This confounding power dynamic persisted after the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland took over the collection in 2014, following the directions in the will of Cornelius Gurlitt, even as the Taskforce was still in charge of the provenance research of the collection until 2015, as stipulated in an agreement with the German government.

The final report also provided statistics of the number of answered letters by the Taskforce to potential claimants. The Taskforce argued that it was unable to answer some of these requests because of the limited time provided to them — just as it had stated about the number of inquiries in the final report. According to the report, 115 inquiries contained questions on whether certain works were to be found in the collection, of which 105 inquiries were answered, and 10 could only be answered upon further research. Furthermore, 62 inquiries contained questions regarding whether certain works came from historical art collections and specific families. Of these inquiries, 51 were answered ,and 11 could only be answered upon further research. The report also stated that 23 claim inquiries were received by the Taskforce, which contained 118 claims on 104 works. This meant that some of the 23 individual inquiries included claims on multiple works. Of these inquiries, 62 claims were cleared, even though the report states that not all of these had gone through a review process, and 56 claims were not completed as the research at that time was not yet finished.¹⁰ Additional information on the above-mentioned statistics was not presented in a final report by the research groups, resulting in a nontransparent situation concerning the ongoing claims and research into some of the inquiries.

Gurlitt Provenance Research, the successor to the Schwabinger Taskforce , was to begin work in 2016. According to the general principles agreed on for the project, Germany stated that the Joint Declaration of 1999, based on the Washington Principles, would define the structure of the research. In an effort to systemically assess each of the art objects in the Gurlitt Collection, the photographs and documentation of these works were categorized with an internal checklist known as the Object Record. The below set of steps stating the methodology of the Gurlitt Provenance Research was published by the German Lost Art Foundation:

1. Listing in an inventory and documentation;
2. Basic Check (creation of an Object Record);
3. Establishing the identity of the work;
4. Provenance research by external provenance researchers and creation of a research report;
5. Approval of research report by project management;
6. Inspection of research report by independent, voluntary review experts;
7. Creation of a closure note;
8. Approval of closure note by the project body’s managing board;
9. Categorization in accordance with the agreement;
10. Creation of an Object Record Excerpt (ORE): a summary of the definitive research results.¹¹

After the Gurlitt Provenance Research project ended in 2017, the Reviews, Documentation and claims related research for the Gurlitt art fund — the final research project division — began in January 2018 and was to be concluded by the end of that year. Research has continued past 2018, including provenance research conducted by the Kunstmuseum Bern, which is planning on submitting their completed research results online and in print by 2021.¹²

The Agreement

In 2014, an agreement was signed between Cornelius Gurlitt and the Free State of Bavaria and the Federal Republic of Germany, establishing that Cornelius, as a private citizen, had declared himself willing to give back works of art to their rightful owners in cases where they were Nazi-confiscated art. This allowed for research to continue after the death of Cornelius Gurlitt in May 2014. It remains unclear to this day why Cornelius Gurlitt decided to pass on his art collection to the Kunstmuseum Bern. It has been speculated that his years-long business relations with galleries such as Kornfeld as well as auction houses in Switzerland account for part of his unexpected decision. The Swiss museum had approximately half a year to decide whether or not to accept the will of Cornelius Gurlitt. The collection was accepted in November 2014 by the Kunstmuseum Bern with the museum and the German government initially agreeing that only works that have been definitively proven not to be looted art could be included. An almost two-year-long battle spearheaded by Uta Werner, Cornelius Gurlitt’s cousin, called into question whether the Kunstmuseum Bern would actually become the inheritor of the collection. In an attempt to inherit the collection, family members of Cornelius Gurlitt argued in court and lodged an appeal stating that Cornelius had not been in the right state of mind to make the Kunstmuseum Bern the inheritor of the collection. In December 2016, the Regional Appeals Court in Munich decided in favor of the Kunstmuseum Bern.

The Approaches Of Bonn And Bern

Because of this decision, works of the collection were to be shown in a setting outside of the tabloids for the first time since the “Gurlitt Affair” became a public sensation in 2013. The Kunstmuseum Bern and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany held a dual exhibition that ran from November 2017 until March 2018 featuring two distinct narratives in each location. In addition to the Gurlitt Status Report, a combined publication from both museums, the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Bundeskunsthalle also published accompanying press releases. While both documents were expansive in content, the Bundeskunsthalle used this opportunity to delve deeply into the historical context of the collection related to Hildebrand Gurlitt, while the Kunstmuseum Bern focused on the Gurlitt Collection in general. This difference set the tone for both exhibitions and was a point of friction, as personal interviews for the purpose of this thesis indicated.

This tension reflected differences between the countries and their positions toward the subject of Nazi Germany. The slightly sentimentalized tone of the Bundeskunsthalle in regard to the mission of the exhibitions was removed completely from the didactic report of the Kunstmuseum Bern. The internal discord between the museums speaks to the countries' still standing rivalry since World War II. The arrangements of the two exhibitions set viewers up to follow narratives that spoke to each country’s position: Switzerland as a neutral nation that detached itself from both World Wars and Germany as a country seeking salvation after the defeat of the Nazi regime. Visitors — who were seeing the Gurlitt Collection for the first time —were immersed in two very distinct worlds that subtly narrated a story of the Gurlitt family in both the past and present reflecting nationalistic and socioplitical differences. The patrons of the exhibitions included Germany’s Minister of State Monika Grütters and Switzerland’s Federal Councilor Alain Berset.

Degenerate Art – confiscated and sold, the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern, focused on two themes: the Gurlitt Art Trove and degenerate art. The exhibition was curated by the director of the Kunstmuseum Bern, Nina Zimmer; director of collections at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Matthias Frehner; head of provenance research at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Nikola Doll and Swiss historian Georg Kreis. The collection of works that was showcased in Switzerland was mostly made up of the modernist works of the Gurlitt Collection. These works, regarded as the “better" works of the collection and whose provenance had been cleared at the time of the exhibition, included works by the artist group Die Brücke and artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann. Many of the works were restored by a conservation team, Atelier Gurlitt, at the Kunstmuseum Bern, which additionally served as an aid in the continued provenance research of this set of works.¹³ Many members of the Bundeskunsthalle regarded this group of exhibited works as less important art historically.

The exhibition addressed the term “degenerate art” by placing it in the context of past regimes at large that had used art as a political instrument. Within this curated context, the exhibition focused largely on the lives of the artists who were also affected by the state-organized looting of art and religious persecutions. It was the museum’s goal to showcase the aesthetic value of the artworks so that it would not be overshadowed by the historic contextualization, while at the same time providing enough provenance information to address the historical relevance of the collection.¹⁴

The exhibition titled Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences at the Bundeskunsthalle, in contrast to Kunstmuseum Bern, showcased the works of art from the Gurlitt Collection that were directly affected by Nazi art looting. This meant that many of the works on view in Germany for the exhibition, which encompassed approximately 250 works, did not have fully established provenances. The exhibition used a chronological framework. The works of the Gurlitt Collection were placed next to descriptions of historical events and biographical studies of artists, collectors and art dealers who were primarily Jewish, among them Fritz Salo Glaser and Ismar Littmann.¹⁵ The exhibition was curated by the director of the Bundeskunsthalle, Rein Wolfs; curator and head of exhibitions, Agniezka Lulińska; and assistant curator Lukas Bächer. Separated into thematic chapters, the exhibition juxtaposed the life of Hildebrand Gurlitt in the time before WWI with the experience of Germany after Hitler took power, the time during WWII in Germany and its occupied territories, and the immediate post-war period — all the while including details of the provenance research. The topic of the Gurlitt Art Trove specifically was covered in a "special room” that was devoted, according to the Bundeskunsthalle, to ongoing discussions of the Gurlitt Collection by specialists in the field of looted art.¹⁶

Both the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Bundeskunsthalle were candid about their uncertainty about how most of the works from the collection arrived in the hands of Hildebrand Gurlitt and why Cornelius Gurlitt chose the Kunstmuseum Bern as the sole inheritor of the collection in his will. While both of these questions can lead to numerous speculations, it can be argued that the Gurlitt Collection was used by some involved in the case as a means to convey a veiled agenda. The exhibitions themselves revealed some historically valuable biographical information. Fritz Salo Glaser and Ismar Littmann, mentioned in the paragraph above, were both Jewish collectors and lawyers who, due to new laws set in place by the Nazi regime against Jews in 1933, were no longer allowed to practice law and were thus robbed of their livelihood. Hildebrand Gurlitt was known to frequent Glaser’s home as a guest who admired his private collection. Three works found in the Gurlitt Collection, shown at the Bundeskunsthalle exhibition, were once part of Glaser’s collection. In the Bundeskunsthalle’s description of one of these works by Wilhelm Lachnit, it says, “When and under what circumstances it came into Gurlitt’s possession remain unclear.”¹⁷ In the case of Littmann, many of the works from the Littmann collection were seized and destroyed by the Nazi Party. Two works by Otto Dix shown at the Bundeskunsthalle exhibition have provenances that could not be established conclusively at the time of the exhibition, but according to the Bundeskunsthalle, they “may have been part of the Littmann collection.”¹⁸ Returning to the initial unanswered questions posed at the beginning of this paragraph, provenance descriptions such as those related to Glaser and Littmann highlight further the suspicions about Gurlitt's opaque and questionable business practices.

The After Effects Of The Gurlitt Collection

Following the dual exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum and the Bundeskunsthalle, subsequent exhibitions including works from the Gurlitt Collection were held. One of the largest and most significant — due in large part to its location — was an exhibition entitled Fateful Choices: Art from the Gurlitt Trove at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The exhibition ran from September 2019 to January 2020 and was curated by Shlomit Steinberg, who was a member of the Schwabinger Taskforce and a member of the Advisory Board monitoring the Gurlitt: Status Report exhibitions in Bern and Bonn. The exhibition at the Israel Museum showcased approximately 100 artworks from the Gurlitt Collection, including German Expressionist works by Max Beckmann and Georg Grosz, Dutch 17^th century paintings, French 18^th century Rococo pastels, and portraits from the 19^th century. The Israel Museum collaborated with the Kunstmuseum Bern for this exhibition and gave credit to the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn for their continued research on the collection. At a panel discussion held at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich in August 2019, Steinberg participated as one of the lead panelists. She described the planned exhibition at the Israel Museum as having two major “trends.”

The first trend was degenerate art and the second was focused on Hildebrand Gurlitt’s work as an in-house gallerist for impressionist art, drawings on paper and “mediocre” art from the 15th and 16th centuries.¹⁹ Steinberg wanted to show the gap — or, better said, to find the gap — between Hildebrand’s identity as an art connoisseur and his later identity as a “low-key merchant.”²⁰ According to Steinberg, Hildebrand Gurlitt was unaware of what he was buying and that there are “even … a few forgeries … which is really great”.²¹ The exhibition was not intended to create a monument to Hildebrand Gurlitt, but more to look at what can happen to a person during and after war. The decision by Steinberg to showcase part of the collection at the Israel Museum was also, as she put it, “a warning, to take stock of what we are doing,” regarding restitutions of art seized from 1933-1945.²² During the panel discussion, Steinberg also mentioned the fact that the works that were to be shown at the Israel Museum had been in four previous exhibitions and that they were showing the provenance research that had been done previously. Many of the pieces that Steinberg requested for the exhibition were not lent by the conservators at the Kunstmuseum Bern, a decision that Steinberg said she respected, and she did not pressure the museum further for the works. Steinberg also asked Israel’s government, which agreed, for “Immunity from Seizure” for the Gurlitt Collection, an official agreement of protection for cultural objects on loan.

In spite of this immunity, there was the fear that some art pieces would not be returned and that the Kunstmuseum Bern’s ownership might be challenged in court. Steinberg stressed during the panel discussion that the loans of objects from the Gurlitt Collection to the Israel Museum were temporary, stating that she does not believe Israel is the right long-term place for the Gurlitt Collection to be held, as others had suggested. She made clear that countries should do their due diligence on restitution and provenance research, especially as many affected family members are dying, to determine what happened to families and their art collections during the war, acknowledging both that this would take time and that it was necessary to act fast. Through interviews conducted for the purpose of this thesis, the decision to exhibit works of the Gurlitt Collection in Israel was not appreciated by all. While Steinberg did not intend the exhibition to put Hildebrand Gurlitt on display to be admired, some experts involved in the “Gurlitt Affair” considered the location inappropriate, sending the wrong message to the public. Showcasing both the art and the historical context of looted art and restitution in general proved to be a difficult balance to find. Instead of attempting to include a multitude of perspectives in one exhibition, future exhibitions of the Gurlitt Collection might instead consider centering on one single focus, reserving art historical praise for shows that concentrate exclusively on the art itself and highlighting the history of looted art from 1933-1945 in exhibitions that focus on the persecution of Jewish families during the Nazi Regime.

Another exhibition took place in Linz, Austria from October 2019 to January 2020 at the LENTOS Kunstmuseum, which showcased a collection of works owned by Hildebrand Gurlitt’s cousin, Wolfgang Gurlitt, the founder of the LENTOS Kunstmuseum. The exhibition titled Wolfgang Gurlitt. Fairy Prince was curated by Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller, who, while not directly involved with the Gurlitt Collection, had been in contact with members of the Schwabinger Taskforce, including Meike Hoffmann. While Hildebrand Gurlitt was mentioned in the exhibition, it was not in the context of the “Gurlitt Affair,” but instead in relation to the life of Wolfgang. Nowak-Thaller described it as a collection of works both brilliant and problematic in legacy, and the museum has restituted 13 works from its collection since 1999.²³ In the exhibition, these works are accompanied by historical details of Wolfgang Gurlitt's life as both an art dealer and later director of the museum. While the exhibition does not directly reference the Gurlitt Collection, it is of great significance in the context of understanding who the Gurlitt family was. With some family members dedicated to producing art, others to selling art, others to collecting art and others to exhibiting art, it was a family that was highly involved in the arts. This involvement through generations makes it even less likely that the family was unaware of the Nazi party’s dealings within the art world during 1933-1945. Their likely awareness of this reality is further indicated in correspondence between family members and in the collection of works found at the homes of Cornelius Gurlitt and his sister Renate.

Considering the different restitution laws and guidelines globally, the fact that the LENTOS Kunstmuseum returned works of art prior to becoming the subject of any media attention highlights once more the hesitant behavior of Germany regarding the Gurlitt Collection. One of the most common reasons given by experts in the field for Germany’s slow and unstructured restitution process is the fact that it would be too complicated to establish a legal basis for it. Austria's experience suggests otherwise. The “Gurlitt Affair” shone a light on this lack of a structural system for returning Nazi-looted art held in private German collections, including auction houses and galleries, and it also underscored the need for a solution to deal with the vast inventory of stolen works still undiscovered. Thankfully, it is a changing landscape, as Germany has increased funding and online representation with the Lost Art Database. Still, the need for greater transparency, long-term public access to cultural objects of unclear provenance, and binding legal frameworks remain the ultimate objectives. The discussion of restitution must move away from intellectual debates and aim to achieve actionable rectification.