Degenerate Art and the Jewish Grandmother

Early in November, a major sensation erupted when it was reported that some 1,400 highly valuable works of art, most of them unseen for decades, had been discovered hidden in an apartment in Munich, Germany.

The apartment’s owner, Cornelius Gurlitt, is an eighty-year-old art dealer and recluse whose father, Hildebrand, was one of four dealers commissioned by the Nazis to sell their looted art abroad in exchange for much-needed foreign currency. Many of the works in the Gurlitt apartment appear to belong to this category of art works stolen from their owners by the Nazi regime, while others may have been consigned to the elder Gurlitt by Jews and others fleeing Hitler’s Germany while they could. A significant number are by artists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, officially condemned by the Nazis as “degenerate.”

Many thousands of such works remain unrecovered to this day. Nor have directors of the museums where some of them ended up in the postwar years been noticeably eager to cooperate with efforts to restore them to their original owners or their heirs.