The creepy man with the trove of Nazi Painting won't return any voluntarily

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Nazi art trove: Reclusive owner won't return 'loved' paintings voluntarily

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In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel, 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt was quoted saying he had legally inherited the collection from his father.

He told the magazine he hid the 1,400 pieces of valuable art in his Munich apartment for half a century because he wanted to protect the collection.

“Voluntarily I am not going to return anything,” he said, according to the magazine.

But several heirs of Holocaust survivors have already come forward to claim some of the 1,406 works whose existence was revealed by German magazine Focus two weeks ago, The Associated Press reported.

“I did not love anything more than the pictures,” Cornelius Gurlitt said in the Spiegel interview.

Focus also reported that the German chancellery, and Bavarian justice authorities, want to convince Gurlitt to voluntarily hand over the paintings to the government in return for legal proceedings being dropped.

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http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/17/21505387-nazi-art-trove-reclusive-owner-wont-return-loved-paintings-voluntarily?lite


For Son of a Nazi-Era Dealer, a Private Life Amid a Tainted Trove of Art

MUNICH — As an expert in works of art that the Nazis called “degenerate” and in the dealers who traded them during World War II, Vanessa Voigt often wondered what had become of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a prominent Nazi-era art dealer and a figure she had come to view as a “phantom.”

Early last year, Ms. Voigt finally came face to face with the elusive man who kept popping up vaguely in her research. German customs officers had just stumbled on some 1,280 paintings and drawings — masterworks possibly worth more than $1 billion — stashed in Mr. Gurlitt’s Munich apartment, and they turned to her to help them understand what was going on.

As the customs officers confiscated the works, a distressed Mr. Gurlitt paced restlessly around his previously inviolable domain, muttering over and over to himself, “Now they are taking everything from me,” recalled Ms. Voigt, who was present. “He was mortified,” she said.

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Indeed, for more than a half-century, Mr. Gurlitt’s only true companions were a vast menagerie of vibrant, multicolored images created by Picasso, Chagall, Gauguin and a host of other modern masters. He inherited the works from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, an exuberant Nazi-era art dealer, partly Jewish, who at times worked in the service of the Third Reich but also counted artists disliked by the Nazis among his friends.

The collection was so valuable and, perhaps, its provenance so tainted by the family’s association with the Nazis, that the desire to keep it secure compelled Mr. Gurlitt to live a strange, Gollum-like existence behind permanently drawn blinds, obscuring not only the works but also the man himself.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/world/europe/a-private-life-amid-a-tainted-trove-of-art.html?pagewanted=2