“What would have happened if the family had not identified it?” Webber asked. Heirs of the original owner somehow got wind of the auction, claimed the painting as theirs and reached a settlement with the auction house, which proceeded with the sale, Webber said. “The Lion Tamer” was not listed in the Art Loss Register”s database. In one instance, he was able to put a painting by German Expressionist Max Beckmann up for sale at an auction months after his apartment had been raided. Prosecutors could reveal more details in a media briefing Tuesday.įocus said that Gurlitt sold off individual pieces when he needed money. The German government said Monday that it was helping Bavarian officials with their investigation. Many of those original owners could turn out to be Jewish families who saw their belongings confiscated by the Nazis or who sold them at knock-down prices in their desperation to flee Europe and avoid deportation to the extermination camps.įocus reported that 200 of the works taken from Gurlitt”s home had international warrants on them.

German officials kept mum about the raid on Gurlitt”s home as they moved the art into safe storage outside Munich and started untangling the tricky knot of issues surrounding their provenance and whether - and how - to return them to their rightful owners. The apartment belonged to Cornelius Gurlitt, the 80-year-old son of a well-known Nazi-era art dealer.

The find did not become public until an article about it was published this week in the German news magazine Focus (link in German).

More than 1,500 pieces of priceless art by such artists as Picasso, Chagall, Matisse and Klee were found crammed next to piles of canned food in a messy apartment in Munich, Germany, in early 2011. … To find one on this scale is exceptional.” “Two years ago we found a dealer who had two stolen pictures in his safe when he died, and we thought that was pretty shocking because he had actually been put in jail by the French in 1946 for being part of the Holocaust looting. “It is the largest cache held by a private individual illegally by miles,” Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register in London, which tracks vanished works of art, said Monday. LONDON - A $1.3-billion trove of art, some or all of which was looted by the Nazis more than 70 years ago, appears to be without parallel in the annals of stolen art, experts say.

San leonardo art trove looted art