Full Name: Gurlitt, Hildebrand
Other Names:
- Hildebrand Gurlitt
Gender: male
Date Born: 15 September 1895
Date Died: 09 November 1956
Place Born: Dresden, Saxony, Germany
Place Died: Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): Modernist
Career(s): art dealers and art historians
Overview
Art historian, art gallery director and infamous dealer in looted art for the Nazi’s in World War II. Gurlitt’s father, Cornelius Gurlitt, was an architect and art historian. His artistic family also included a musicologist brother, Willibald Gurlitt (1889-1963), and an Expressionist painter sister, Cornelia Gurlitt (1890-1919) as well as a cousin, Wolfgang Gurlitt (1888-1965) also an art dealer.
Gurlitt was schooled in Dresden and then entered the Dresden Technische Hochschule (Technical School), (today the Technische Universität Dresden) to study art history, where his father was Chancellor. When Germany declared war in 1914 both Hildebrand and his brother Wilibald joined the German army. Hildebrand was wounded at both the bloody Battle in Champagne (1915) and the first battle of the Somme (1916). He completed his military career as an army press officer in Vilnius and Kaunas in Lithuania. He returned to Germany in 1919.
Gurlitt resumed his studies in art history in Frankfurt, briefly in Berlin and returning to Frankfurt 1921. Among the eminent art historians he set out to meet was Wilhelm Pinder, the nemesis of his father, Cornelius. He married a ballet dancer Helene “Lena” Hanke (1895-1968) in 1923. His doctorate, granted the following year, was titled Die Katharinenkirche in Oppenheim a. Rh. (The Gothic architecture of St. Catherine’s Church in Oppenheim), was published 1927.
He was named the first director of the König Albert Museum in Zwickau in 1925. Interested in modernist art, he organized shows for the art of Max Pechstein (one of Pechstein’s earliest) and enlisted Bauhaus Dessau in 1926 to design exhibitions for the museum. Other modernist art exhibited under his direction included Käthe Kollwitz (1926), Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in 1927, and Emil Nolde in 1928. A champion of modernism, his museum acquisitions included nearly all major Expressionists, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Marc, and Munch. Although Gurlitt’s work received praise nationally, financial problems with the museum and the ire of the conservative Zwickau town resulted in his dismissal in 1930. Gurlitt was appointed curator and managing director of the Hamburg Kunstverein (Art Association), another pro-modernist organization. The Nazi ascension to the government in 1933 forced Gurlitt and his board to resign. Gurlitt acted as an independent art dealer from 1935, buying and selling art in his Kunstkabinett Dr. H. Gurlitt. Many of his acquisitions were from Jewish collectors who were selling to earn enough money to flee Germany or pay the exorbitant Judenvermögensabgabe (Jewish Capital Levy taxes), a predicament he found to his advantage.
In 1936, Expressionist art was labeled degenerate art (“Entartete Kunst”) by the Nazis. Gurlitt with his dealer experience and knowledge of art history and modernism, was appointed by the Kommission zur Verwertung der Produkte entarteter Kunst (Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art) in the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda to sell the art. One of four dealers–and the only art historian–the others were Karl Buchholz (1901-1992), Ferdinand Möller (1882-1956), and Bernhard Böhmer (1892-1945), all commissioned to sell works removed from German (and German-held) art museums. He contributed to the famous Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1936. When France fell under Nazi rule in 1940, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (1893-1946) appointed a small task force to confiscate French art assets for the (planned) Führermuseum in Linz and himself. Gurlitt was again chosen for his reputation and art history knowledge. Many of the work Gurlitt chose he kept for himself. The Schönhausen Palace (Berlin area) was used as an art clearing house. He was named (again, by Göring) as part of the elite Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the taskforce to select art from occupied countries for Germany. When art historian Hermann Voss assumed the collection development of the Führermuseum, Gurlitt was appointed his official art agent. He purchased over 200 works from Paris and the Netherlands between 1943 and 1944.
Gurlitt and his wife were captured in June, 1945 by the United States army, with twenty boxes of art in Aschbach (north of Königsberg). Gurlitt claimed that documentation of his art transactions was destroyed during the saturation bombing of Dresden. The army returned his collection to him after determining they were acquired legally. He stated that he was a victim of the Nazi’s because of his Jewish extraction. More art belonging to Gurlitt was subsequently found hidden in Franconia (German Saxony) and Paris.
He resumed dealing in 1947. In 1949 he was named Director of the Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia in Düsseldorf, and set about exhibiting modernist art as well as continuing to buy and sell art himself. In 1950 Gurlitt petitioned the Wiesbaden Collecting Point to recover his collection, providing documentation in support of his claim. The collection was returned to him the same year. His collection toured countries including the United States. He was killed in an auto accident in 1956. His collection passed to his son, also named Cornelius Gurlitt (1932-2014), who kept the collection of 1500 objects out of public knowledge until 2013 when it was confiscated. He bequeathed it after his death to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland.
The ironies of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s career were many. His grandmother, Elisabeth Lewald Gurlitt (1847–1897) was Jewish, which the Nazi’s would have considered him “quarter-Jew” under the Nuremberg laws. Yet he was trusted by the top Reich leaders. He began his career by heralding Expressionist art and the Bauhaus but switched completely to the Nazi view of them as degenerate, even contributing to the famous exhibition in 1936. After the war he convinced army investigators that he was persecuted for being Jewish and was exonerated from post-war escaped punishment, dealing again in the very art he aided in persecuting. Scholars have characterized him as perhaps the most important art dealers of the Nazi era (Terlau).
Selected Bibliography
- “Die Baugeschichte der Katharinenkirche in Oppenheim a. Rh.” Oberrheinische Kunst 1 (1925/1926): 157-197;
- Die Katharinenkirche in Oppenheim a. Rh. Freiburg i. Br.: Urban-Verl., 1930.
- “Neue englische Malerei.” Die neue Stadt. 6 (1932/33): 186-189. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/neue_stadt1932_1933/0225
- “Museen und Ausstellungen in mittleren Industrie-Städten.” [from the essay series]: “die Meinung des Kunsthistorikers.” Das neue Frankfurt 4 (1930): 146-147.https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/neue_frankfurt1930/0226/image,info
- German Watercolors, Drawings and Prints: a Mid-century Review with Loans from German Museums and Galleries and from the Collection Dr. H. Gurlitt, Duesseldorf. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1956
Sources
- German Lost Art Foundation (website) https://kulturgutverluste.de/en/contexts/nazi-looted-cultural-property
- Löffler, Michael. Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956): Erster Zwickauer Museumsdirektor. Zwickau, Germany: Städtisches Museum, 1995;
- Terlau, Katje. “Hildebrand Gurlitt and the Art Trade during the Nazi Period.” Vitalizing Memory: International Perspectives on Provenance Research. Washington, DC: American Museum Association, pp. 163-171 https://www.lootedart.com/web_images/pdf2013/Vitalizing%20Memory%20-%20International%20Persepctives%20on%20Provenance%20Research.pdf
- “Gurlitt, Hildebrand (EN)”. AGORHA https://agorha.inha.fr/detail/945;
- Ronald, Susan. Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015 p. 104 ff.
- Hickley, Catherine. The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler’s Dealer and his Secret Legacy. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015.
-
Petropoulos, Jonathan. Goering’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World. New Haven: Yale, 2021;
- Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2023
Contributors: Lee Sorensen