2012 Munich artworks discovery

In February 2012, the District Prosecutor of Augsburg confiscated 121 framed and 1,285 unframed artworks found in an apartment in Schwabing, Munich in the course of an investigation into possible tax evasion. The apartment was rented to Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of celebrated art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, and grandson of the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt. Some of the paintings were immediately suspected of having been looted by the Nazis during the Second World War. The collection is largely undamaged and of remarkable quality. It contains Old Masters as well as Impressionist, Cubist, and Expressionist paintings by artists including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, and Max Liebermann, among many others. Although German authorities seized the entire collection, Gurlitt was not detained. Not until 3 November 2013 did the magazine Focus report the find. News of this extraordinary discovery provoked a worldwide sensation.

Gurlitt initially refused to cooperate with German investigators. He retained several dozen additional suspect paintings, kept not in Munich but in his home in Salzburg, Austria. On 7 April 2014, an agreement was finally reached whereby the collection confiscated in Munich was to be returned to Gurlitt in exchange for his co-operation with a government-led task force charged with determining which of the pieces had been stolen and returning them to the rightful heirs. However, Gurlitt died only a month later, on 6 May 2014. In his will, he bequeathed all his possessions to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland, with the museum to inherit his collection after all legitimate claims of ownership against it had been evaluated.

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