OGRAS DE ARTE REGRESARAN A CASA ROBOS

Mujer, Matisse

Otto Dix, in a half-light, glowers from a self-portrait, jaw set, puffing on a cigar, looking infuriated.
They keep coming back, these works of art lost to the Nazis, like bottles washed ashore. Three years ago, a small stash of sculptures turned up when a front-loader was digging a new subway station in Berlin.
Now some 1,500 pictures, an almost unfathomable trove, have surfaced; some were revealed in a news conference on Tuesday in Augsburg, Germany. From the first few blurry online reproductions they seem to include paintings by Matisse and Courbet, Franz Marc and Max Liebermann, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, discovered in the Munich apartment of an old man named Cornelius Gurlitt whose father, Hildebrand, a dealer during the Nazi era, assembled a collection of the Modernist art that Hitler called “degenerate.”
Among the very first goals of the Nazis was to purge German museums and ransack private collections. Perversely, they stockpiled the modern art they hated, some to sell abroad in exchange for hard currency. Hildebrand was one of the dealers whom Joseph Goebbels picked for this task. Some art they paraded in an exhibition of shame. The show ended up a blockbuster, infuriating the Führer. After that, thousands upon thousands of confiscated works disappeared.
But as the years have gone by, art continues to be found, refusing oblivion.

cortesia nyt.com