(Q60547891)
Statements
Cornelius Wasn’t the Only Gurlitt Sibling to Inherit Nazi-Looted Art (English)
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In a 1964 letter addressed to her older brother Cornelius, she wrote, “I sometimes think his most personal and most valuable legacy has turned into the darkest burden. What we have is locked away in the graphics cabinet or kept behind pinned-up curtains. … I tremble with fear every time I even think about it.” The “burden” Benita refers to—a trove of roughly 1,500 modern art masterpieces largely confiscated from their Jewish owners by representatives of the Third Reich—remained the Gurlitt family secret for nearly 50 years (English)
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According to an inventory of her estate, Benita, who died just months after the 2012 raid, possessed 18 pieces from her father’s collection. Now, four of these works of art—two drawings by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen, Augustin de Saint Aubin’s “Portrait of a Lady in Profile” and a self-portrait by Anne Vallayer-Coster—have been traced back to their original Jewish owner, a French industrialist named Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe. (English)
1 reference
According to an inventory of her estate, Benita, who died just months after the 2012 raid, possessed 18 pieces from her father’s collection. Now, four of these works of art—two drawings by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen, Augustin de Saint Aubin’s “Portrait of a Lady in Profile” and a self-portrait by Anne Vallayer-Coster—have been traced back to their original Jewish owner, a French industrialist named Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe. Rea notes that Deutsch de la Meurthe’s heirs descend from the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust, a daughter named Georgette. As Deutsche Welle explains, the family’s Parisian home and all of its contents were confiscated during the Nazi occupation of France.Following the war, the family filed a loss report detailing the looted drawings and other stolen belongings. The listing was included in the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project and published in July 2017 on the public database of missing art run by the German Lost Art Foundation: (English)