Gurlitt Art Collection: WSJ: 'Germany Plans to Publish List of Nazi-Looted Works in Art Trove'

Pierre Ciric, a lawyer in New York, just brought our attention to a story this afternoon in the Wall Street Journal: "BREAKING: GERMANY TO PUBLISH LIST OF 590 GURLITT ARTWORKS STARTING NEXT WEEK."

Mr. Ciric's law firm co-sponsored with Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) the October Art Law CLE symposium "Due Diligence in Cultural Heritage Litigation: Is There A Minimum Threshold?"

According to the WSJ article reported by Mary M. Lane in Berlin, a German task force -- a six-person committee of German and international experts to be created to research the provenance of all 1,400 works -- will begin by publishing the 590 Nazi-era suspected looted artworks on the German government's Lost Art Internet Database (www.lostart.de).

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Gurlitt Art Collection, Munich: Artworks posted on the Lost Art Internet Database

To get to the list of artworks of the Gurlitt Collection posted on www.Lostart.de, go to the left-hand side of the website, and click on "Schwabinger Kunstfund" (thank you, Martin Terraszas, for the instructions). I had a difficult time searching for the information because I was looking for "Gurlitt", not for an art collection named after the district where Cornelius Gurlitt resided.

According to my Google Translation of the introduction:

In spring 2012, an extensive art collection was confiscated in Munich. As part of the subsequent research was a first, time-consuming step is to identify the seized paintings. 

Less confiscated items that are clearly not related to the so-called "degenerate art" or "Nazi-looted art," were and are about 970 works to check. Approx. 380 of these works could be assigned to the Beschlagnahmegut the so-called "degenerate art", ie objects that were confiscated in 1937 by the Nazis as part of the so-called "degenerate art action". 

In view of the further work is to assess in particular whether they are those in which a Nazi-confiscated by (so-called "Nazi-looted art") is present. Against this background, a study on such a Nazi-related withdrawal was started out at about 590 works. 

In doing so far resulted in the following 25 properties reasonable suspicion of Nazi-related withdrawal:

Each of the 25 images of the artworks includes a title, an artist, a description, and any provenance information. For example, the Marc Chagall Allegorical Scene is undated, a painting, 48 cm tall and 36 cm wide, gouache: paper mounted on cardboard; signed. Provenance information is "Riga/Latvia?"

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