More entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) stolen by the Nazis during WW2 turns up

If any lost heirs are missing their Matisses, Picassos, Chagalls, or other entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art), you may want to check with Gurlitt who has revealed a second trove of art confiscated from Jews by the Nazis. Now is probably a good time to make a claim. Slides of about 25 pieces of art here. Many of the artists are easily recognized while the work itself is not.

These pieces of art have a story to tell!

Germany announced it would form a task force to investigate works of art seized from a reclusive collector who is thought to have inherited a trove of works lost during the Nazi era. Officials seized the 1406 works from Cornelius Gurlitt (above), who was spotted over the weekend going shopping in his local supermarket in Munich, as part of a tax investigation. Under international pressure, the authorities have now said they will examine claims from former owners of the masterpieces.

Slides of 25 or so very familiar looking art most of us have probably never seen:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/10443926/In-pictures-Germany-begins-publishing-list-of-works-found-in-Nazi-art-stash.html?frame=2731686

So now there is a second trove discovered. First in Munich last November, and now in Saltzburg:

More masterpieces found in German's 'Nazi art trove'
The new Salzburg find, which contains works by Monet, Renoir and Picasso, may be more valuable than the cache found in Munich

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10631981/More-masterpieces-found-in-Germans-Nazi-art-trove.html

Cornelius Gurlitt's flat looks meagre in photographs. It is located in an apartment block in Munich that, from the outside, appears to have seen better days. Yet in that flat lay secrets of the Third Reich only now accidentally uncovered. Intrigued by Gurlitt's lack of German identity documents and odd behaviour while crossing the border on a trip to Switzerland, police raided his home and found a hoard of more than 1,500 works of art including pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. The understandably reclusive Gurlitt turned out to be the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who played a key role in the Nazi roundup of "degenerate art". Although half-Jewish, and the cousin of the "degenerate" composer Manfred Gurlitt, the Nazis considered him a useful expert. This is not just any haul of stolen goods: it may turn out to be one the most important recoveries of lost art ever. For it takes us to the heart of the cultural policies and crimes of the Third Reich.

It raises massive questions about the fate of art in and after the second world war. As the allies entered Germany in the last phase of the war they took with them experts, nicknamed the "monuments men", whose job was to find out where the Nazis had stashed looted works of art. For it was not just modern art the Nazis abused. All over Europe, they seized the best masterpieces from the finest museums. Many of these, including such treasures as Titian's Danae and Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece, were found stashed in mountain tunnels and mines. Others, including many of the works of art shown in the Degenerate Art exhibit, are believed lost for ever. Paintings such as Van Gogh's The Painter on his Way to Work and 14 masterpieces by Gustav Klimt are written off as destroyed. But is it possible a Nazi network preserved a secret world of stolen art after 1945? Is it even possible such art was used to fund neo-Nazi activities or maintain war criminals in quiet comfort?

To put it another way: were Hildebrand Gurlitt and his son unique, or is the find in Munich a clue to some larger network of Nazi art hoarders sitting on secret treasures all this time in postwar Europe, living off occasional covert sales of the Picassos that they keep among the canned foods in their anonymous flats?

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/04/munich-hoard-lost-art-nazis

Here's a piece of footage from the National Archive of the discovery of a trove of stolen art right after WW2. It's a rather fascinating look the Army's discovery of a cache of paintings taken by the Germans from Florence and stashed in Leonhard a rustic German alpine village.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/04/munich-hoard-lost-art-nazis