Media Coverage And Frenzy
Connecting the dots along the timeline of when the Gurlitt Collection was first discovered in 2010 to when the Gurlitt Collection was ‘discovered’ in 2013 by the public, it is difficult not to imagine the different outcomes and potentially disclosed information that would not have reached the limelight. Per the Washington Principles, one of the recommendations states that every effort should be made to publicize art that has been confiscated by the NS Party. When the Gurlitt Collection was first inventoried by Germany, it was not yet known which works were looted based on Nazi persecutions, however the publication of an inventory list is a crucial point in order to reach potential claimants. No complete inventory list was made publicly available of the Gurlitt Collection at any point. The media largely drove the story beginning with the exaggerated and false Focus article in 2013. Receiving global attention from one day to the next, the Gurlitt Collection was soon labeled as the greatest discovery of Nazi looted art since the end of the war and worth billions. Following this article, German newspapers such as The Frankfurter and Tagesspiegel published multiple articles on a daily basis on new alleged developments of the collection. Due to the privacy, or better said, silence of Germany when the collection first became public knowledge, what was written in the news was what people thought to be true, including professionals in the field who did not have a direct contact with the agencies who held the collection. The same pictures were used over and over again, creating a narrative of who Cornelius Gurlitt was, imprinting quite literally the photograph of an old man trying to buy his groceries in the mind of the readers. It is not unreasonable to go as far as saying that the death of Cornelius Gurlitt in 2014 was due in part to his bad health and in part due to the journalists and individuals looking to find answers by tracking his every move, doctor appointments, following him to the hospital until the very day he passed away. With documentaries, theater plays, fiction-documentaries, books, podcasts et cetera, the Gurlitt Collection still now changes in substance and importance depending on the platform and author behind it.
News
- March, 2020: Swiss Museum Settles Claim Over Art Trove Acquired in Nazi Era
- February, 2020: Museums step up efforts to return Nazi-era spoliated art
- January, 2020: Germany returns Nazi art from Gurlitt trove to French family
- January, 2020: Sotheby's to auction three Nazi-looted works restituted to Jewish collector's heirs
The news articles represented in this graphic have been collected by me and do not show the entirety of the media coverage surrounding the Gurlitt Collection but instead a curated selection
Hover over bars to reveal total articles published in that month
Click on bars to examine articles released for that month