Hildebrand Gurlitt (15 September 1895 – 9 November 1956) was a German art historian and art gallery director who dealt in Nazi-looted art as one of Hitler's and Goering's four authorized dealers for "degenerate art".
A Nazi-associated art dealer and war profiteer, during the Nazi era Gurlitt traded in "degenerate art", purchasing paintings in Nazi-occupied France, many of them stolen, for Hitler's planned Führermuseum (which was never built) and for himself. He also inherited family artworks from both his father and his sister, an accomplished artist in her own right. Following World War II and the denazification process he became Director of the Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, until his death in a car accident at the age of 61. His personal collection of over 1,500 artworks by Impressionist, Cubist, and Expressionist artists and Old Masters, remained virtually unknown until it was brought to public attention in 2013 following its confiscation from the possession of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, who, although never reunited with the collection, bequeathed it upon his death in 2014 to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland.
Early life Gurlitt was born into an artistic family in Dresden in 1895. His father Cornelius Gurlitt (senior) was an architect and art historian, his brother Willibald a musicologist, his sister Cornelia a painter, and his cousin Wolfgang was an art dealer as well. His grandmother Elisabeth Gurlitt was Jewish, which would prove problematic under Nazi rule: he was considered a "quarter-Jew" under the Nuremberg laws. After completing his schooling, he showed an interest in art history and registered to study this subject at the Dresden Technical School, where his father was Chancellor; however, in 1914 World War I commenced and both Hildebrand and his elder brother Wilibald volunteered to join the German army of the day. Hildebrand served and was wounded at both the Somme and in Champagne, and later served as an army press officer in Vilnius and Kaunas in Lithuania, where he remained until 1919. Returning to a shattered Germany after demobilization, he was disillusioned with all aspects of war and politics and vowed henceforth to devote himself to art alone as an escape from politics, an irony which has not escaped subsequent biographers.Hickley, 2015: pp. 28-30.
Gurlitt had a close relationship with his sister Cornelia (born 1890), who was an expressionist painter and was in contact with Marc Chagall. She also served in the First World War as a nurse and moved to Berlin shortly after the war. The lack of artistic recognition and depression led to her suicide in 1919; Gurlitt took care of her works, but part of it was destroyed by their mother after the death of their father.
Following the end of the war, Gurlitt resumed his studies in art history, first in Frankfurt, then Berlin, then in 1921 once again in Frankfurt, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1924 for a thesis on the Gothic architecture of St. Catherine's Church in Oppenheim. In 1923 he had married the ballet dancer Helene Hanke who was trained under expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. They later had two children, Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius, known as Cornelius (junior) (1932–2014) and Nicoline Benita Renate (originally known as Renate, later as Benita) (1935–2012).
Early career
Between 1921 and 1924, Gurlitt contributed articles on art for newspapers, and following his graduation, he became the first director of the König Albert museum in Zwickau in 1925. One of the first exhibitions he organized at Zwickau was the October 1925 exhibition of Max Pechstein. Financially it was a success, but it generated a lot of hostility from local conservatives. In 1926 he contracted the Bauhaus Dessau for the design and decoration of the museum. Later on, he continued exhibiting contemporary art: in 1926 Käthe Kollwitz and a special exhibition on contemporary art in Dresden (Das junge Dresden), in 1927 Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and in 1928 Emil Nolde. A collection of his letters shows that he was personally well acquainted with modern artists at the time, and he acquired and exhibited works by many of them, including Barlach, Feininger, Hofer, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Lissitzky, Marc, and Munch. Gurlitt's work was appreciated by the national press and his peers, but the local press was less impressed. The city's financial difficulties and press campaigns against him led to his dismissal in 1930.
Following his dismissal Gurlitt moved to Hamburg, where he became the curator and managing director of the Kunstverein (Art Association) until he and the board members were forced to resign by the Nazis in 1933.
Nazi era From the mid 1930s onwards, Gurlitt purchased and, in some cases, onsold artworks, often bought for low prices, from private individuals, including Jewish owners who were under duress to pay extortionate taxes, or were otherwise liquidating assets in order to flee the country. On the one hand, he claimed he was helping the owners in their predicament since there were few dealers who were prepared to undertake such transactions. On the other hand, he was not averse to enriching himself in the process, nor was he averse to not supporting post-war claimants seeking to reclaim or obtain compensation for such works sold under duress.Hickley, 2015: pp. 46-47, 128-129.
Gurlitt was one of the four dealers appointed by the Nazi Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art (together with Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller, and Bernhard Böhmer) to market confiscated works of art abroad. Some 16,000 so-called "degenerate" artworks had been removed from museums and confiscated all over Germany. Some of these works were exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. A trading room was set up in Schönhausen Palace outside Berlin. The four dealers were allowed to buy pieces and sell them abroad, which they did not always report to the commission. Gurlitt's name appears against many of the entries on a listing compiled by the Ministry of Propaganda and now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum that provides details of the fate of each object, including whether it was exchanged, sold or destroyed.Victoria and Albert Museum (2014). "Entartete" Kunst: digital reproduction of a typescript inventory prepared by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, ca. 1941/1942. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. (V&A NAL MSL/1996/7) http://www.vam.ac.uk/entartetekunst
Gurlitt used his position to sell art to domestic collectors as well, most notably to Bernhard Sprengel whose collection forms the core of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. In 1936 Gurlitt was visited in Hamburg by Samuel Beckett.
During the Nazi occupation of France, Hermann Göring appointed a series of Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce approved dealers, including Gurlitt, to acquire French art assets for Hitler's planned Führermuseum which he wanted to build in Linz; some of the works also went to swell Göring's personal art collection. In early 1943, Hermann Voss, director of Hitler's planned Führermuseum in Linz, named Gurlitt his official purchasing agent. Gurlitt, who had already embarked on purchasing trips to Paris on behalf of German Museums, purchased around 200 works in Paris and the Netherlands between 1943 and 1944, not including works acquired for his own collection, of which 168 were intended for the Führermuseum.Hickley, 2015: pp. 78-85 Gurlitt undoubtedly used his thus "officially sanctioned" purchasing trips to Paris, which was at that time awash with artworks including old masters, of dubious provenance and including items now recognised as being looted, to further enrich his own holdings, and also became very wealthy from commissions on the enormous amounts of money being paid by Hitler's regime for artworks at that time. Gurlitt was, according to Dr. Katja Terlau, "one of the most important and active art dealers during the Nazi era."
Post-war
Gurlitt was captured with his wife and twenty boxes of art in Aschbach (Schlüsselfeld) in June 1945. Under interrogation after capture, Gurlitt and his wife told United States Army authorities that in the fire bombing of Dresden of February 1945 much of his collection and his documentation of art transactions had been destroyed at his home in Kaitzer Strasse. One hundred and fifteen pieces taken from him by American and German authorities were returned to him after he had convinced them that he had acquired them lawfully. Among those were Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann and Self-Portrait by Otto Dix, which Gurlitt passed on to his son Cornelius. Gurlitt successfully presented himself to his assessors as a victim of Nazi persecution due to his Jewish heritage, and negotiated the release of his possessions. Whether or not portions of his collection and records of business transactions were destroyed in Dresden as Gurlitt claimed, additional portions apparently had been successfully hidden in Franconia, Saxony, and Paris, from which they were retrieved after the war.Hickley, 2015: pp. 112, 117.
By 1947, Gurlitt had resumed trading in art works and eventually in 1948–49 took up a position as Director of the Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, based in Düsseldorf, which in 1949 was allocated space in the Düsseldorf art gallery in which to stage exhibitions. Over the next five years he staged over 70 exhibitions of leading modern artists and brokered the sale of paintings with at least some of the proceeds going to the Association, while at the same time dealing privately and purchasing works for his own collection, including Courbet's Village Girl with Goat for which he paid the then very large sum of 480,000 French Francs.Hickley, 2015: pp. 125–127. He also lent works from his collection for several travelling exhibitions: one such show, "German Watercolors, Drawings and Prints: A Mid-Century Review" included 23 works from Hildebrand's collection and toured the United States up to and beyond his premature death at age 61 in a car crash in 1956.Hickley, 2015: pp. 127–128. A year before his death, he prepared a six page manuscript preface for an exhibition catalogue which was, however, never printed; with one crucial page missing (covering his work for the Nazis), it survives in a Düsseldorf archive and provides a heavily sanitised personal review of his career to date and on some aspects of the history of his collection.
Reputation and reappraisal