“Hildebrand Gurlitt”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Hildebrand Gurlitt (15 September 1895 – 9 November 1956) was a German art dealer, art historian and war profiteer, who traded in "degenerate art" during the Nazi era, and purchased paintings in Nazi-occupied France, many of them stolen from their original owners, for Hitler's planned Führermuseum (which was never built) and for himself;^[1] he also inherited family artworks from both his father and his sister, an accomplished artist in her own right. His collection of over 1,500 items, including works by Marc Chagall, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Franz Marc and Toulouse-Lautrec among many others, was brought to public attention in 2012 in the possession of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt,^[2]^[3] who 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 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.^[4]

Gurlitt had a close relationship with his sister Cornelia (born 1890), who was an expressionist painter and was in contact with Chagall. She 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.^[5]^[6]

In 1923 he married the ballet dancer Helene Hanke who was trained under expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. They had two children: Cornelius (1932–2014) and Renate (1935–2012).^[7]^[8]

Early career

After Gurlitt's 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.^[9] 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.^[1]^[10]^[11]

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.^[12]^[13]

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 could have claimed he was helping the owners in their predicament, since there were few dealers who were prepared to undertake such transactions, but on the other he was not averse to enriching himself in the process, as well as providing no cooperation to post-war claimants seeking to reclaim or obtain compensation for such works sold under duress.^[14]

Gurlitt was one of the four dealers appointed by the 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.^[1] 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.^[15]

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.^[16] In 1936 Gurlitt was visited in Hamburg by Samuel Beckett.^[17]

Following the fall 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.^[18] 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.^[19] 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.

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.^[20] 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.^[21]

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.^[22] 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.^[23] 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.^[24]

Reputation and reappraisal

Gurlitt was generally successful at ridding himself of Nazi-associated "taint" after the war and went on to build a respectable career in Germany as an art association director and exhibition manager, art dealer and collector. Upon his death, he was celebrated in German newspaper articles and speeches for his championing of modern art and its creators, and even had a street named after him in Düsseldorf.^[25] More recent appraisals have veered, sometimes violently, to the other extreme, denouncing him as "Hitler's art dealer" and a Nazi collaborator and profiteer, with no empathy for the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime from whom many of the artworks originated, whether procured for himself, traded, or purchased for his Nazi masters' collections. Gurlitt himself offered the partial explanation that he had "saved" many of the works from destruction, either by the Nazis, by allied bombardment or confiscation, or by further looting by the Soviets following the Allied liberation of Europe; although there is an element of truth in this, another driver was clearly his own personal enrichment, as well as ensuring his and his family's survival during the Nazi era and a desire to avoid military service. For critic James McAuley, writing in "Even" magazine after viewing the two recent public exhibitions of selected works from the collection, Gurlitt was a morally bankrupt and "dreadfully mediocre art dealer whose animating principle seems to have been profit and professional advancement" who "made his career in the arts, but without any real distinction", "swindled them all" and went on to state: "The art in Bonn and Bern adds up to a collection of no particular distinction, larded with trite, second-tier works on paper by artists of middling distinction, and the real, unexpected achievement of "Status Report" is that it exposes the truth about Hildebrand Gurlitt — his mediocrity, his uncomplicated interiority, his utter predictability",^[26] although other commentators are much less dismissive about the collection's quality (see note).{{efn|McAuley's argument is a little difficult to follow: if, for example, Gurlitt's collection had contained more "masterworks" in place of the many claimed "second-tier works on paper by artists of middling distinction", would that have made his acquisitions more or less culpable? In any case, other commentators were much less dismissive of the works contained, for example the artworks by his little known but talented sister Cornelia, together with "unexpected delights" by artists such as Heinrich Campendonk, Rolf Grossman and Max Liebermann,^[27] in addition to the more significant items in the collection.}}

Author Catherine Hickey offered her own assessment of Gurlitt's actions in 2015:

Survival of art collection

Far from being mostly lost in the war as Gurlitt had claimed, around 1,500 artworks remained in Gurlitt's possession at the time of his death, passing to his wife Helene and thence to their son Cornelius (with some to his sister Renate) following her own death in 1964. They remained quietly in the younger generation of Gurlitts' possession for over four decades out of public knowledge, although Cornelius is known to have sold eleven works via the Galerie Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland, in 1988, and possibly four others in 1990,^[30] as well as Max Beckmann's The Lion Tamer which sold at auction in 2011, with the proceeds split between Cornelius and a relative of the painting's original Jewish owners. Helene had earlier sold three paintings, including Picasso's Portrait of a Woman with Two Noses, via the auction house of Ketterer in Stuttgart in 1960, plus offered Bar, Brown by Max Beckmann, which failed to sell; Cornelius later subsequently sold the same painting via Ketterer again in 1972.^[31] In 2007, August Macke's Woman with a Parrot, also with a Hildebrand Gurlitt provenance, was sold in Berlin via the auction house Villa Grisebach for €2 million;^[32] the seller was an unnamed German collector, suspected by investigative author Catherine Hickey to have been Cornelius' sister Renate (Benita).^[33]

On 22 September 2010, German customs officials at the German–Switzerland border found Cornelius, by then aged 77, to be carrying €9,000 in cash which he explained was money from the previous sale of a painting, which led to a search warrant in 2011 for his apartment in Schwabing, Munich.^[20] On 28 February 2012 officials from the Augsburg Prosecutors Office discovered found 1,406 artworks, the bulk of Hildebrand's original collection, with a reported estimated worth (subsequently found to be greatly exaggerated) of one billion Euros (approx. $1.3 billion), which they then confiscated.^[2] Authorities initially banned reporting on the raid, which only came to light in 2013.^[2]^[34]^[35] Subsequently Cornelius' legally appointed custodian obtained an agreement that the collection be returned since there was no evidence that Cornelius had broken any German laws, however nothing had been returned by the time of Cornelius' death. An additional portion of the collection was disclosed by Cornelius to his court-appointed lawyer to be stored at his residence in Salzburg, Austria, where he officially resided and was registered for tax purposes; these items remained in Cornelius' possession since the German authorities had no jurisdiction there. Cornelius, apparently aggrieved at the treatment he had received from the German authorities, bequeathed the entire collection on his death in 2014 to a small museum in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, who in November 2014 agreed to accept the bequest, minus any works for which the possible status as wartime looted art was still in question.^[36] Exhibitions of some of the works from the collection went on show in November 2017.^[37]^[38]^[39]

List of Publications by Hildebrand Gurlitt

Notes

References

1. ^¹²{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-fo7jn3WTDsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false | title=The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War | publisher=Random House LLC | author=Nicholas, Lynn H. | date=22 December 2009 | pages=24 | isbn=9780307739728}}
2. ^¹²{{cite news | url=https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/05/picasso-matisse-nazi-art-munich | title=Picasso, Matisse and Dix among works found in Munich's Nazi art stash | work=The Guardian | date=5 November 2013 | accessdate=6 November 2013 | author=Oltermann, Philip}}
3. ^{{cite news | url=http://www.focus.de/kultur/kunst/1500-werke-von-picasso-bis-chagall-zollfahnder-entdecken-sensationellen-kunstschatz-in-muenchen_aid_1147066.html | title=Sensationeller Kunstschatz in München | work=Focus | date=3 November 2013 | accessdate=3 November 2013 | language=German}}
4. ^{{cite news | url=http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2013/12/degenerate-art-and-the-jewish-grandmother/ | title=Degenerate Art and the Jewish Grandmother | work=Mosaic | date=5 December 2013 | accessdate=7 December 2013 | author=Laqueur, Walter}}
5. ^{{cite news | url=http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunstmarkt/graphik-von-frauen-muse-modell-und-malerin-11993678.html | title=Muse, Modell und – Malerin | work=Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung | date=16 December 2012 | accessdate=14 November 2013 | author=Karich, Swantje | language=German}}
6. ^{{cite web | url=http://www.galerie-fach.de/index.php/en/gurlitt-cornelia | title=Cornelia Gurlitt | publisher=Galerie Joseph Fach | date=14 November 2013 | accessdate=14 November 2013 | language = German}}
7. ^{{cite book | title=Hamburger Kunst im 'Drittem Reich' | publisher=Dölling und Galitz | author=Bruhns, Maike | year=2001 | location=Hamburg | isbn=3933374944 |language=German}}
8. ^{{cite web | url=http://www.fold3.com/image/232052947/ | title=Restitution Claim Records – Gurlitt, Hildebrand | work=Records Concerning the Central Collecting Points ("Ardelia Hall Collection"): Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point, 1945–1952 | date=1945–1948 | accessdate=9 November 2013 | pages=31 | language=German}}
9. ^{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZFFU2L9hdVEC&pg=PA258 | title=Max Pechstein: The Rise and Fall of Expressionism | publisher=Walter de Gruyter |author1=Fulda, Bernhard |author2=Soika, Aya | year=2012 | pages=258 | isbn=9783110282085}}
10. ^{{cite web | url=http://www.kunstsammlungen-zwickau.de/kunstsammlungen-zwickau/geschichte.htm | title=Kunstsammlungen Zwickau | accessdate=3 November 2013 | deadurl=yes | archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20131106215745/http://www.kunstsammlungen-zwickau.de/kunstsammlungen-zwickau/geschichte.htm | archivedate=6 November 2013 | df=dmy-all }}
11. ^{{cite web | url=http://www.zwickau2000.de/z5/stadt/museum_zwickau.html | title=Städtisches Museum Zwickau | accessdate=3 November 2013}}
12. ^{{cite news | url=http://www.freiepresse.de/NACHRICHTEN/TOP-THEMA/Hildebrand-Gurlitt-der-Sachse-hinter-dem-Muenchner-Kunstschatz-artikel8592544.php | title=Hildebrand Gurlitt – der Sachse hinter dem Münchner Kunstschatz | work=Freie Presse | date=5 November 2013 | accessdate=6 November 2013 | language=German}}
13. ^{{cite web | url=http://kunstverein.de/englisch/thekunstverein/history/ | title=The Kunstverein – History | publisher=Der Kunstverein | accessdate=3 November 2013}}
14. ^Hickley, 2015: pp. 46-47, 128-129.
15. ^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
16. ^{{cite news | url=http://derstandard.at/1216918696497/Entartete--Kunstgeschaefte | title="Entartete" Kunstgeschäfte | work=Der Standard | date=6 August 2008 | accessdate=3 November 2013 | language = German}}
17. ^{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2APoLTdCFJoC&pg=PA213 | title=Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936–1937 | publisher=Continuum | year=2011 | pages=212 | isbn=9781441152589 | editor=Nixon, Mark}}
18. ^{{cite web | url=http://www.bonjourparis.com/story/the-lost-museum/ | title=The Lost Museum | work=Bonjour Paris | year=1998 | accessdate=4 November 2013 | author=Feliciano, Hector}}
19. ^Hickley, 2015: pp. 78-85
20. ^¹{{cite web|last=Eddy|first=Melissa|title=German Officials Provide Details on Looted Art Trove |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/arts/design/german-officials-provide-details-on-looted-art-trove.html |work=The New York Times |accessdate=5 November 2013}}
21. ^Hickley, 2015: pp. 112, 117.
22. ^Hickley, 2015: pp. 125-127.
23. ^Hickley, 2015: pp. 127-128.
24. ^'A Kind of Fief': Munich Art Hoarder's Father in His Own Words
25. ^Hickley, 2015, p. 130.
26. ^Love and Theft by James McAuley
27. ^[https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/art-list_the-hidden-truths-of-the-gurlitt-collection/41140660 Laird, Michèle: The hidden truths of the Gurlitt collection]
28. ^[https://hyperallergic.com/463728/gurlitt-status-report-an-art-dealer-in-nazi-germany/ Rebecca O'Dwyer: How Should We Look at Cornelius Gurlitt’s Trove of Nazi-Looted Art?]
29. ^Hickley, 2015, p. 130-131.
30. ^Hickley, 2015, p. 156.
31. ^Hickley, 2015, pp. 150-151.
32. ^Strong German Auctions Reflect Vibrancy of European Art Market
33. ^Hickley, 2015, p. 165.
34. ^{{cite news | url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2486251/Discovered-Billion-pound-art-collection-seized-Nazis-ordered-destroyed-discovered-rotting-food-dishevelled-Munich-apartment.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490 | title=Nazi art treasure trove valued at £1BILLION is found in shabby Munich apartment | work=Daily Mail | date=3 November 2013 | accessdate=3 November 2013 | author=Hall, Allan}}
35. ^{{cite news | url=http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/11/03/artworks-worth-1-6-billion-stolen-by-nazis-discovered-in-german-apartment/ | title=Artworks Worth $1.6 Billion, Stolen by Nazis, Discovered in German Apartment | work=the algemeiner | date=3 November 2013 | accessdate=3 November 2013 | author=Pontz, Zach}}
36. ^[https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/gurlitt-collection_bern-museum-accepts-controversial-art-hoard/41129776 Bern museum accepts controversial art hoard]
37. ^[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/27/works-hoarded-by-son-of-nazi-art-dealer-cornelius-gurlitt-to-go-on-public-display Works hoarded by son of Nazi art dealer to go on public display]
38. ^[https://www.theartnewspaper.com/preview/cornelius-gurlitts-hoard-finally-gets-first-public-showing Cornelius Gurlitt's art hoard finally gets first public showing]
39. ^[https://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch/en/service/media/archive-media-releases/media-releases-2017/01-11-17-gurlitt-status-report-1821.html Exhibition Gurlitt: Status Report «Degenerate Art» – confiscated and sold]