How the collection had ended up in Cornelius Gurli

How the collection had ended up in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment is a tragic saga, which begins in 1892 with the publication of the physician and social critic Max Nordau’s book Entartung (Degeneration). In it, he postulated that some of the new art and literature that was appearing in fin de siècle Europe was the product of diseased minds. As examples of this degeneracy, Nordau singled out some of his personal bêtes noires: the Parnassians, the Symbolists, and the followers of Ibsen, Wilde, Tolstoy, and Zola.

The son of a Budapest rabbi, Nordau saw the alarming rise in anti-Semitism as another indication that European society was degenerating, a point that seems to have been lost on Hitler, whose racist ideology was influenced by Nordau’s writings. As Hitler came to power, in 1933, he declared “merciless war” on “cultural disintegration.” He ordered an aesthetic purge of the entartete Künstler, the “degenerate artists,” and their work, which to him included anything that deviated from classic representationalism: not only the new Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Fauvism, futurism, and objective realism, but the salon-acceptable Impressionism of van Gogh and Cézanne and Matisse and the dreamy abstracts of Kandinsky. It was all Jewish Bolshevik art. Even though much of it was not actually made by Jews, it was still, to Hitler, subversive-Jewish-Bolshevik in sensibility and intent and corrosive to the moral fiber of Germany. The artists were culturally Judeo-Bolshevik, and the whole modern-art scene was dominated by Jewish dealers, gallery owners, and collectors. So it had to be eliminated to get Germany back on the right track.

Maybe there was an element of revenge in the way Hitler—whose dream of becoming an artist had gone nowhere—destroyed the lives and careers of the successful artists of his day. But all forms were targeted in his aesthetic cleansing campaign. Expressionist and other avant-garde films were banned—sparking an exodus to Hollywood by filmmakers Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and others. “Un-German” books like the works of Kafka, Freud, Marx, and H. G. Wells were burned; jazz and other atonal music was verboten, although this was less rigidly enforced. Writers Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and others went into exile. This creative pogrom helped spawn the Weltanschauung that made the racial one possible.

The Degenerate Art Show

The Gurlitts were a distinguished family of assimilated German Jews, with generations of artists and people in the arts going back to the early 19th century. Cornelius was actually the third Cornelius, after his composer great-great-uncle and his grandfather, a Baroque-art and architectural historian who wrote nearly 100 books and was the father of his father, Hildebrand. By the time Hitler came to power, Hildebrand had already been fired as the curator and director of two art institutions: an art museum in Zwickau, for “pursuing an artistic policy affronting the healthy folk feelings of Germany” by exhibiting some controversial modern artists, and the Kunstverein, in Hamburg, not only for his taste in art but because he had a Jewish grandmother. As Hildebrand wrote in an essay 22 years later, he started to fear for his life. Remaining in Hamburg, he opened a gallery that stuck to older, more traditional and safe art. But he was also quietly acquiring forbidden art at bargain prices from Jews fleeing the country or needing money to pay the devastating capital-flight tax and, later, the Jewish wealth levy.

In 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, seeing the opportunity “to make some money from this garbage,” created a commission to confiscate degenerate art from both public institutions and private collections. The commission’s work culminated in the “Degenerate Art” show that year, which opened in Munich a day after “The Great German Art Exhibition” of approved “blood and soil” pictures that inaugurated the monumental, new House of German Art, on Prinzregentenstrasse. “What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent,” Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, in Munich, and curator of the “Degenerate Art” show, said at its opening. The show got two million visitors—an average of 20,000 people a day—and more than four times the number that came to “The Great German Art Exhibition.”

A pamphlet put out by the Ministry for Education and Science in 1937, to coincide with the “Degenerate Art” show, declared, “Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, and the other isms are the poisonous flower of a Jewish parasitical plant, grown on German soil. . . . Examples of these will be the strongest proof for the necessity of a radical solution to the Jewish question.”

A year later, Goebbels formed the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art. Hildebrand, despite his Jewish heritage, was appointed to the four-person commission because of his expertise and art-world contacts outside Germany. It was the commission’s job to sell the degenerate art abroad, which could be used for worthy purposes like acquiring old masters for the huge museum—it was going to be the biggest in the world—the Führer was planning to build in Linz, Austria. Hildebrand was permitted to acquire degenerate works himself, as long as he paid for them in hard foreign currency, an opportunity that he took full advantage of. Over the next few years, he would acquire more than 300 pieces of degenerate art for next to nothing. Hermann Göring, a notorious looter, would end up with 1,500 pieces of Raubkunst—including works by van Gogh, Munch, Gauguin, and Cézanne—valued at about $200 million after the war.

The Greatest Art Theft in History

As reported in Der Spiegel, after France fell, in 1940, Hildebrand went frequently to Paris, leaving his wife, Helene, and children—Cornelius, then eight, and his sister, Benita, who was two years younger—in Hamburg and taking up residence in the Hotel de Jersey or at the apartment of a mistress. He began a complicated and dangerous game of survival and self-enrichment in which he played everybody: his wife, the Nazis, the Allies, the Jewish artists, dealers, and owners of the paintings, all in the name of allegedly helping them escape and saving their work. He got involved in all kinds of high-risk, high-reward wheeling and dealing, like the wealthy dealer in Paris buying art from fleeing Jews whom Alain Delon played in the 1976 movie Monsieur Klein.

Hildebrand also entered the abandoned homes of rich Jewish collectors and carted off their pictures. He acquired one masterpiece—Matisse’s Seated Woman (1921)—that Paul Rosenberg, the friend and dealer of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, had left in a bank vault in Libourne, near Bordeaux, before he fled to America, in 1940. Other works Hildebrand picked up at distress sales at the Drouot auction house, in Paris.

With carte blanche from Goebbels, Hildebrand was flying high. He may have agreed to his deal with the Devil because, as he later claimed, he had no choice if he wanted to stay alive, and then he was gradually corrupted by the money and the treasures he was accumulating—a common enough trajectory. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that he was leading a double life: giving the Nazis what they wanted, and doing what he could to save the art he loved and his fellow Jews. Or a triple life, because at the same time he was also amassing a fortune in artworks. It is easy for a modern person to condemn the sellouts in a world that was so inconceivably compromised and horrible.

In 1943, Hildebrand became one of the major buyers for Hitler’s future museum in Linz. The works that were suitable to the Führer’s taste were shipped to Germany. These included not only paintings but tapestries and furniture. Hildebrand got a 5 percent commission on each transaction. A shrewd, inscrutable man, he was always welcome at the table, because he had millions of reichsmarks from Goebbels to spend.

From March 1941 to July 1944, 29 large shipments including 137 freight cars filled with 4,174 crates containing 21,903 art objects of all kinds went to Germany. Altogether, about 100,000 works were looted by the Nazis from Jews in France alone. The total number of works plundered has been estimated at around 650,000. It was the greatest art theft in history.