The secret hoard and the ignored clues

The discovery of hundreds of priceless paintings and drawings within has raised questions about how a man with such a red-flag surname — Cornelius Gurlitt — kept his secret for so long while selling works on the market.

Interviews with relatives,dealers,lawyers and art experts show he moved freely for decades between Germany,Austria and Switzerland to sell from his hoard of Modernist and Renaissance masterpieces. They were not locked in a vault,but stacked in his flat,hiding in plain sight.

In the art world,which thrives on discretion,it appears to have been an open secret that Cornelius was sitting on at least part of the collection of his father Hildebrand,who worked for the Nazis selling art branded “degenerate” that was taken from museums or stolen or extorted from Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

To everyone else — including,apparently,the Gurlitt clan — it was a shock when authorities reluctantly confirmed a magazine report that a routine Customs check had uncovered 1,406 works with a value up to 1 billion euros.

“I had no idea that such a collection existed,” said Dietrich Gurlitt,a 94-year-old cousin.

Cornelius Gurlitt sat quietly while officers suspecting tax fraud stumbled across racks and drawers containing 121 framed and 1,285 unframed pieces. He has since vanished. The 79-year-old currently faces no charges.

It was almost by accident that his private “collection” was discovered. German Customs police routinely check trains from Zurich,looking for potential tax evaders bringing in cash from secret Swiss bank accounts. On a night in September 2010,officers patrolling the last train from Zurich spoke to an elderly man who grew agitated when questioned. He showed officers about 9,000 euros in cash,which was within the legal limit. But something didn’t feel right.

Cornelius was not registered with the municipal authorities and had no tax number — enough to start a probe. Prosecutors got a warrant to search his home.

On February 28,2012,they rang the bell marked Gurlitt. The officials immediately recognised the significance of what they had discovered. Contradicting early reports of priceless oils stashed among tins of fruit,Siegfried Kloeble of the Munich Customs police said it was all stored professionally.

In early 2012,the Munich authorities informed the federal government of their find and asked for expert assistance. Meike Hoffmann,an academic specialising in modernist art targeted by the Nazis,worked for 18 months before news of the spectacular find came under the unwelcome glare of the media.

A few months earlier,Gurlitt had sold a pastel by German Expressionist Max Beckmann for 864,000 euros,via auction house Lempertz. They describe it as a “normal” transaction but recognised at the time that there was a “restitution problem” — a euphemism for a likely claim from Jewish owners from the Nazi era.

The Gurlitt name was guaranteed to arouse gallery interest. Hildebrand and his brother Wilibald were scions of a German family that included a distinguished composer and a famous architect. But the brothers were also a quarter Jewish.

With the rise of the Nazis,this cost Hildebrand his job as director of a museum in Zwickau and Wilibald his post as professor of musicology in Freiburg in 1937.

It did not stop Hitler’s propaganda minister,Joseph Goebbels,from hiring Hildebrand to sell off the “degenerate” art that the Nazis had stripped from museum walls.

The work took Gurlitt to Paris,where he took the opportunity to collect for himself,obtaining works such as a Matisse belonging to prominent French Jewish collector Paul Rosenberg. Seized by the Nazis in 1942 from a bank vault,it turned up 70 years later in his son’s flat in Munich.

Hildebrand was arrested for his Nazi collaboration at the end of the war and 100 of his works were siezed. But his Jewish heritage got him freed. His property was also returned to him in 1950. It included works by Edgar Degas,Marc Chagall and Beckmann.

Hildebrand’s widow had told authorities that all the art work went up in flames in the bombing of Dresden. “Hildebrand tried to keep it quiet that he had worked for the Nazis,” said Dietrich.

Dietrich’s father Wilibald died in 1963 and his branch of the family has had no contact with Cornelius. “I can’t understand why Cornelius didn’t declare the art works,” he said. “They were just lying there in drawers where nobody could see them.”

For the time being,the “collection” still belongs to Cornelius Gurlitt and could be returned to him once the laborious process of cataloguing it is complete.

“I’m really disappointed my father isn’t alive to see this,because he was the one that suffered,” said Michael Hulton,whose great-uncle Alfred Flechtheim,a prominent patron of Modernist art,died in poverty in London in 1937.