Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies: Introduction

In early 2012 German officials investigating violations of tax law discovered a trove of mainly nineteenth-and early twentieth-century European paintings and drawings in the Munich apartment and Salzburg house of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of the prominent art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt.The elder Gurlitt had worked for the Nazis but also counted a number of artists despised by them among his friends.Since then, the story of the Gurlitt collection has made headlines worldwide.Beyond the bizarre obsession of the aging son, who lived with and for his artworks hidden from public view, the case raises fundamental questions about the role of art dealers during and after the Third Reich, the mechanics of a largely secretive and insufficiently documented market in looted art, the complicity of art historians and business associations, the shortcomings of postwar denazification, the failure of courts and governments to adjudicate claims, and the unwillingness of museums to determine the provenance not just of Cornelius Gurlitt's holdings but of New German Critique 130, Vol.44, No.