by Susan Ronald
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Gurlitt received the first direct shipment of his collection in 1950.5 A total of eighty-one paintings and thirty-seven drawings were returned to him. Among the haul were Max Beckmann’s The Lion Tamer, Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach and Wagon on the Dunes, and a self-portrait by Otto Dix. Withheld from the first shipment were two paintings—Chagall’s Allegorical Scene (sometimes called Mythological Scene) and Picasso’s Woman with Two Noses—since both were still pending further investigation subject to a French counterclaim. Worse, three artworks had gone missing, the Rodin drawing of Atlas among them.
With Bormann’s disappearance unresolved, much of his capital tied up in looted art, and an overpowering desire to get “back into the game,” Gurlitt lost patience. Finally, he turned to his friendly anthroposophist Karl Ballmer, the Swiss artist, writer, and publisher, to help him on the tricky matter concerning the provenance of his Chagall and Picasso. Ballmer was only too happy to comply, and immediately penned a letter attesting to his having given both to Gurlitt. On January 9, 1951, William G. Daniels, from the US Office of Economic Affairs, Property Division, wrote to Gurlitt that he accepted Ballmer’s statement and that the two paintings would be shipped to him shortly.
Despite the successful claim of three other artworks by the French Monuments Men and Women against Gurlitt, they appear to have not been consulted in the matter. That Gurlitt had begun his story about the two paintings with the yarn that Chagall had given the painting to his sister, just as Picasso had given him the Woman with Two Noses, did not seem to matter either. No further comments or questions were noted in the file.
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The past would be the past. It was time to relaunch his life and show the world he was unsinkable. It was time for a great exhibition; time to bring out his Beckmann paintings—along with those once owned by others. Only then could he begin to establish a proper provenance for them. Did it matter that he hadn’t heard from the likes of Bormann, Speer, or others? Life had moved on.
Gurlitt decided to put on a Max Beckmann exhibition. While he hadn’t written to Beckmann during the war, he now renewed contact with the aging artist, advising him of his future plans. He also thanked Beckmann for his adequate—if stiffly worded—character reference. Of course Beckmann would be his guest of honor, Gurlitt concluded. Beckmann declined, sending his son Peter as his representative instead.
The exhibition was a tremendous success. Yet from Peter’s letters to his father, it is obvious that neither one liked Gurlitt. Similarly, both Beckmanns seemed genuinely fond of Munich art dealer Günther Franke. Unlike Gurlitt, Franke had been in close contact with Beckmann during his exile in Holland. Beckmann’s son was simply appalled by the way Gurlitt swanned around the room unctuously greeting people. “Gurlitt was overly pleasant, brimming over with enthusiasm about how amazing I was for having transported your pictures … like the Sphinx.”6 By this, Beckmann implied that Gurlitt wanted to know his secret in bringing art across borders without paying duty.
Notwithstanding his distaste for Gurlitt’s behavior, Peter Beckmann admitted that it was a “heavenly exhibition.” Their friend Franke showed extreme forbearance and did not complain, even though twenty-seven of the paintings on show were his. At some point, Franke collared Beckmann, mischievously dreaming up another, bigger, brighter exhibition, in Venice, for his twenty-seven paintings, which would put Gurlitt’s show to shame. “That soothes him obviously over this ghoul of a sanctimonious Gurlitt treading on him with his unsettling monopoly on everything,” Peter wrote indulgently.7
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During the next few years, Nazis convicted of crimes against humanity began to trickle out of German prisons. Karl Rasche, an SS officer and former spokesman of Dresdner Bank, was released from Landsberg in August 1950. He died the following year on a commuter train in Basel, aged fifty-nine. Emil Puhl, the economist well known to Gurlitt as Schacht’s successor and the man responsible for nonmonetary gold from concentration-camp victims, was released in 1951.8 He settled back in Hamburg. Lutz von Krosigk, finance minister and the only minister to serve during the whole of the Third Reich, was granted an amnesty in 1951. Settling in Essen, he worked as an author and publicist after the war. His boss, the icy-eyed Hans-Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, whom Hitler had ordered to be shot for his support of Göring, had become a witness for the prosecution and was released in 1952. Lammers would make Düsseldorf his new home.
As the 1950s progressed, so did the amnesties, and the senselessness of denazification. Only Hess, Speer, and Baldur von Schirach remained incarcerated.* Time marched on, and by 1954 Gurlitt was once again in the swing of things. He traveled to Brazil on business and certainly kept in touch with Buchholz, who had recently emigrated to Colombia.
His children were grown, and while Cornelius was extremely bright, he had not attained the full potential Hildebrand had expected. Was his disappointment redolent of his own father’s toward him? In any event, Cornelius had no university degree, nor was he regularly employed. Aged twenty-one, Cornelius seemed unable to make friends easily. Yet he was a very talented painter, with many of the portraits of his beloved sister demonstrating his abilities to great effect.9 Cornelius’s extreme shyness was most likely a great frustration for Hildebrand, who saw himself as a man who could easily charm people. Still, Cornelius was his son, and Hildebrand and Helene had resolved that he would be the main heir to their fortune and custodian of their collection. Cornelius would slowly be taken into the world of art dealing—if it could possibly be achieved. There would be plenty of time in the years to come to groom him to carry out this crucial task.
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The following year, Gurlitt became a major lender to a groundbreaking exhibition entitled German Watercolors, Drawings and Prints 1905–1955, A Mid-Century Review, which toured the United States. It was sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany and circulated by the American Federation of the Arts. “Among the many lenders whose names are listed separately, and who all merit our sincerest thanks,” Dr. Leonie Reygers, director of Museum an Ostwall, Dortmund, wrote, “Dr. H. Gurlitt, Director of the Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia is the major contributor to the exhibition which, owing to his generosity could be planned on an impressive scale.”10
There were 112 pictures in all, with Gurlitt contributing twenty-two works from his “personal collection.”11 Among them were The Lion Tamer and Zandvoort by Max Beckmann. These would find their way onto the Lost Art Database in 2013.12
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If Peter Beckmann’s and Günther Franke’s impressions of Gurlitt were widely shared in the art community, he must have been an insufferable man with whom to conduct business. Privately, it is easy to suppose that Alex Vömel may have not have been particularly welcoming to Gurlitt either. After all, it was a revitalized Gurlitt who was casually laundering his looted art in the open market. Certainly Erhard Goepel must have felt aggrieved that he was unable to obtain a position in a museum or art association while Gurlitt had succeeded.13 Given the secrecy and jealousies of the art world, it is a highly plausible supposition.
Still, there would have been other people trickling back into the community in the 1950s who had reason to deeply resent Gurlitt’s complete rehabilitation in the Federal Republic of Germany. Lammers in Düsseldorf, Krosigk in Essen, and Puhl in Hamburg are just three examples. Whether Bormann was still alive to wield a Nazi knife against Gurlitt is a matter of pure conjecture. Then there was Carl Neumann, who had bought the sensational fake Cézanne acquired by Gurlitt at the Viau auction, too.14 Ferdinand Möller had died that January, Karl Haberstock in August. His victims numbered in the hundreds, his true friends were only his wife and brother. In his inexorable rise, Gurlitt had trod on many toes.
When Hildebrand Gurlitt was driving along the autobahn near Düsseldorf on the evening of November 9, 1956—that very special day in the Nazi calendar—he plowed into the back of a truck. His brakes had “failed.” Gurlitt wa
s killed instantly. His family was notified of the accident and Helene was called upon to identify the body. Did she ever once doubt its nature? Had she seen the irony of failing brakes and Gurlitt’s thirty-year relationship with the king of brake manufacture in Germany, Kirchbach? Had she linked it to her husband’s enemies or the date? Despite my asking for the police report of the accident, the authorities have not responded to my queries.15
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Although Hildebrand Gurlitt had undoubtedly looted millions in plundered art throughout the war, he hadn’t finished the work of educating his wife, his son, or his daughter in how to convert the hidden assets into cash. The man who wanted to be remembered for the false image of “saving degenerate art” would have his epitaph eventually rewritten by his untimely death.
30
AFTERMATH AND MUNICH
If his lips are silent … betrayal oozes out of his every pore.
—SIGMUND FREUD
Long before Helene Gurlitt moved to Munich, in 1961, she had undertaken the laundering of her husband’s booty. In the twelve years between Hildebrand’s death and her own, she continued to share her version of the truth about the war years with her children—a version that would paint their father in the best possible light. When Hildebrand died, the “children,” Cornelius and Benita, were twenty-three and twenty-one, respectively.
It was, however, nothing more than the familiar children’s fairy tale “Hildebrand the Superhero of the Art World,” which had been spun for them for as long as they could recall. The dizzying life they’d led throughout the war with a mostly absentee father had been the stuff of legend. The characterization of a latter-day elusive Scarlet Pimpernel “They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek him everywhere” could have applied to Hildebrand as he rattled through Europe amassing endangered art from the forces of evil. His escapades in the Great War were embellished, too, enhancing the fable.
Surrounded by great men of the art establishment in Germany in those heady days of the Third Reich, Cornelius, as son and heir, would have had no reason to question his father’s crucial role in saving Europe’s art from the horrid Nazis. His father had been privately lavish with his criticism of the regime. Even the term “house arrest” became something of a moving feast in the children’s eyes while Hildebrand “helped the Allies with their inquiries,” as they say in police dramas. Gurlitt and his wife were determined to keep the children as shielded as possible from the whole story, as any good parent would hope to do. The only problem with the myth was that it took over their lives, skewed reality, and made them all prisoners to the deep secret of their fabulous ill-gotten wealth.
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It would have been unlike Hildebrand Gurlitt if he had not thought up a plan to launder the looted art. He would also have been remiss if he hadn’t noticed any ill will within the surviving Nazi or art communities. His oft-repeated argument that he had been made a victim of the regime as a Mischling had been recited so often that he believed it, and expected others to do the same. That men like Lammers had spent five years in prison would have been offset in Gurlitt’s mind by his own term of three years under house arrest and the need to split up his family and send the children to the Steiner/Waldorf Odenwaldschule.1
Yet, with Hildebrand’s sudden death, his work was left unfinished. Helene did not have the credibility within the art world to pull off his amazing feats of magic by slipping in a looted painting here, or a plundered drawing there. Nor was she capable of re-creating provenances that were credible. She could not insert art into exhibitions that would add to their provenance and value, as her husband had done. Instead, she was left with the pure and simple task of laundering the art as and when her cash reserves began to dwindle. It was a method she would pass on to Cornelius and Benita.
Periodically, Helene would sell a painting—effectively testing the market, seeing if any alarm bells sounded. The cash would be held in Switzerland, where the proceeds remained a secret—undeclared or underdeclared on her German income tax. Whether it was in a bank account or a safe deposit box was immaterial. The Swiss secrecy laws in those days were impenetrable for any reason whatsoever.2
Such was the case with Max Beckmann’s Bar, Brun when it was first seen publicly in the Stuttgart gallery of Roman Norbert Ketterer in 1959. It had, however, previously appeared on the inventory list made at the Wiesbaden Collecting Point as In the Bar and it was returned to Gurlitt in 1950.3 During his interrogations, Gurlitt had declared that the painting had been a gift from Beckmann and that he had “visited” Beckmann along with Erhard Goepel on September 13–14, 1944.4
This was Gurlitt’s “Pimpernel Period,” when he was desperately searching for the remainders of art left on the fringes of the crumbling Third Reich. Would Beckmann have “gifted” this to him when everyone in Holland was aware that freedom was around the corner? Was it a “thank you for your help,” and if it was, was it for Goepel or Gurlitt or both? It is difficult to imagine, given Beckmann’s later attitude, that the painting had been intended for Gurlitt.
Ketterer put the painting up for auction in 1960. It did not sell, according to the 1976 catalogue raisonné of Beckmann’s work.5 Nor did it sell during subsequent auctions in Helene Gurlitt’s lifetime.
It is a rather mysterious painting, Bar, Brun. Beckmann painted it during his exile in Amsterdam. Although he had been outlawed by the Germans, he became part of a thriving expatriate community of Germans—even Jewish Germans of the museum world—living and working in the city under the Third Reich.* It was also an extremely prolific period for Beckmann, with many portraits painted of the people he met. Intriguingly, during this book’s research some experts expressed a belief that these portraits represented “fellow members” of the Dutch resistance, while others—who should be equally in the know—claim that the portraits were of Dutch collaborators. Either story gives rise to further questions and interest in the painting.
Among the living, Helene and Goepel alone might have known the truth behind the painting’s provenance. Helene must have despaired when it didn’t sell in 1960 or at subsequent auctions. The question is, why was Helene in need of capital at this time? Had she run out of cash? Had the political climate regarding looted and modern art changed?
Other mysteries surround the move to Munich. In Cornelius Gurlitt’s 2013 interview with Der Spiegel, he stated that he lived with his mother in the hundred-meter2 (1,076-square-foot) apartment. Was he confused or dissembling? Since his Salzburg home had not as yet been discovered by investigators, it seems more than likely that it was the latter.
Some explanations can be found in the Munich city archives. On April 13, 1961, Helene moved from the Rotterdamer Strasse home in Düsseldorf to the now notorious fifth-floor flat at Artur-Kutscher-Platz, number 1, in Munich’s Schwabing district. When she moved, she registered with the city authorities in accordance with the law. On the registration form, an entry indicated that Cornelius “lives in Salzburg.” Benita’s address is redacted from the document.6
So, Helene had decided to move to Munich—why? To be closer to friends like Erhard Goepel and Hermann Voss? According to a statement made by Cornelius in Der Spiegel, he never understood why his mother chose to move there, other than perhaps for her love of the bohemian reputation of the Schwabing district: “She had dreamed of a Bohemian lifestyle, and of affluent people who weren’t interested in other people’s money.” Therein is the truth. In Düsseldorf, Helene felt exposed to public scrutiny. In Munich, she could blend in.
Or had that been the story that she chose to tell her son and daughter? Kirchbach lived in Düsseldorf and had remained the surrogate father of Hildebrand until the end. Still, his feelings about Hildebrand’s sudden death or how he intended to support Helene from 1956 remain cloaked in forgotten memories. By the time Hildebrand had been released from his delightful idyll in Aschbach, Kirchbach had grown his business to DM 1 million and had 376 employees.7 In 1950, he had two fellow shareholders and none of them had any child
ren or heirs. Gurlitt could never run a brake-linings business, nor would he have been competent to do so. In 1953, it was a natural progression for the three aging shareholders to sell the entire business to their nearest competitor, Krupp AG.* A year later, the company was incorporated into the Krupp works in Hamburg.
From the moment Kirchbach sold his business, he split his time between Basel and Düsseldorf. The suspicion that he had sheltered his wealth in Switzerland was ever-present. Perhaps he also helped Helene once Hildebrand had died, perhaps not.8 Nevertheless, Kirchbach’s own actions might well have become a blueprint for Helene, who was learning to handle the treasure trove on the hoof.
* * *
Helene had only seven years of her new life. Although Cornelius was aged twenty-eight at the time of the move, it was evident that he was a man who did as he was told. Helene made all the family decisions—for them both. Benita had by this time married Dr. Nikolaus Frässle of Kornwestheim, near Stuttgart, and it is possible that Helene described her motive for the move as being closer to her daughter.
Whatever the truth, Cornelius shied away from the public’s gaze, unlike his father. He was no man of action, but rather someone who had been taught to listen to his mother and trusted her to lead him. Another mystery surrounds the Munich address: Cornelius told Der Spiegel that his mother had bought two apartments on Artur-Kutscher-Platz. Yet none appears to have been sold and only one remained in 2013 when Cornelius became an international phantasmagorical man of mystery.
* * *
On January 31, 1968, Helene Gurlitt died in a private clinic in Munich. She was cremated five days later and buried in cemetery plot Wald NT 11.00.9 Cornelius was alone, save for his sister and brother-in-law. He seemed at a loss for what to do next. He didn’t like Munich, since it was where Nazism had begun. Yet, he felt unable to pack up and move to his home in Salzburg. He had already tried to live with his sister temporarily and failed, before coming to stay with his mother. Cornelius had become stuck in a time warp. Unable to break with Munich and his mother’s apartment, he began to periodically fetch artworks from the various caches and bring them to what had become, reluctantly for him, his home. When money was needed, he would sell one of the artworks to pay his bills—in cash.