‘There’s a lot of Nazi-looted art in Switzerland’

The author of a book about the more than 1,200 works of art found in a Munich flat in 2012 tells swissinfo.ch about the “web of deceit and silence” surrounding the collection, the legal and moral situation of looted art and Switzerland’s “mixed record”.  The Munich Art Hoard by Catherine Hickley, a Berlin-based arts journalist, tells the extraordinary story of the “Gurlitt collection”. This began in 2010, when German pensioner Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of one of Hitler’s official art dealers, was randomly stopped on a train from Switzerland and found to be carrying thousands of euros (see timeline below).  The German authorities, suspecting he was a tax dodger, entered his flat and were stunned to find it full of masterpieces by artists such as Picasso, Renoir and Matisse whose value has been estimated at several hundred million francs.  When the discovery was made public in 2013, it made headlines around the world – especially when it later emerged that … Show more
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Culture
– SWI swissinfo.ch