A Matisse painting found among a huge trove of art amassed by the son of a Nazi art dealer is the first painting to be confirmed as looted.
The task force investigating the hoard says the piece belongs to the family of a Paris art dealer.
Femme Assise [Seated Woman] was in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, who died last month aged 81.
It is one of more than 1,000 Gurlitt pieces under investigation.
"Even though it could not be documented with absolute certainty how the work came into Hildebrand Gurlitt's possession, the task force has concluded that the work is Nazi loot and was taken from its rightful owner Paul Rosenberg," Ingeborg Bergreen-Merkel, the head of the task force, said in a statement.
The priceless collection was confiscated in 2012 by Bavarian authorities from Gurlitt's apartment.
Gurlitt's father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, was ordered by Adolf Hitler to deal in works that had been seized from Jewish families, or which the Nazis considered "degenerate" and had been removed from German museums in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Matisse was taken from a Jewish art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, in Paris in 1941.
Cornelius Gurlitt had agreed to help authorities discover which works had been stolen
The family had been searching for it until it turned up in Gurlitt's flat in Munich. The task force has now said the Matisse should be returned to the Rosenbergs.
Intense legal and investigative work remains to be done on the rest of the estimated 1,280 paintings,
The German government had tasked the experts with settling a dispute over ownership of the Matisse between the Rosenberg heirs and a second party, whose identity has not been revealed.
0 comments:
Post a Comment