BERLIN - Germany on Wednesday returned
three art works to a descendant of a Jewish French collector who
owned them until his death in 1941 in Nazi-occupied France.
Two of the pictures came from a trove of works held by
Cornelius Gurlitt, which was discovered in 2012 by German tax
inspectors in Munich. His father had been an art dealer and sold
what the Nazis dismissed as "degenerate" art.
At a ceremony in Berlin, culture minister Monika Gruetters
said the return of the pictures was a small but important step.
"We Germans know of our wrongdoing and know that we can
never put right the misery. But at least returning these kinds
of art works are small but important and necessary steps towards
justice in one small area," she said.
A great niece of the pictures' owner, Parisian lawyer and
art collector Armand Dorville, said she was very touched by
their return.
"If pictures could speak, if they could tell us their
journey, they would tell us an incredible amount about robbery,
theft, fraudulent sales and what we can learn from that," she
said at the ceremony, asking not to be identified.
She thanked the German government for its efforts to
discover the provenance of artwork and return them where
possible, especially 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.
"You are fulfilling the obligation to keep alive the memory
and that this is taking place today on the 75th anniversary of
the liberation of Auschwitz is ... a symbol," she said.
The two pictures from the Gurlitt collection were a
watercolour entitled "Lady in an Evening Dress" and an oil
painting "Portrait of a Lady" by Jean-Louis Forain. The third
work, "Amazonian on Rearing Horse", was a drawing by Constantin
Guys which had been in private ownership.
All three had belonged to Dorville, who sought refuge at his
estate in the Dordogne in unoccupied France in June 1940, where
he died about a year later. Other members of his family perished
at the Auschwitz death camp.
When anti-Semitic legislation was imposed in German-occupied
France, Dorville's heirs decided to sell the pictures at auction
in Nice in 1942. It was not clear who bought them, but the
family were not allowed to use the proceeds, which instead went
to the Vichy government.
Gurlitt inherited the art works from his father and stored
them in his Munich apartment for decades. Switzerland's Kunst
Museum Bern learned in 2014, the day after Gurlitt's death, that
it had been named as the sole heir to 1,500 works, including
paintings by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
The German government said 13 art works had now been
returned to their lawful owners after being identified as looted
art.