Cornelius Gurlitt, the art hermit of Munich, is so ready-made a fictional character that his story—perhaps a ghosted collaboration by Poe, Huysmans, and Kafka, if not something cheesy starring Vincent Price—just about tells itself. I pause to let you provide the crepuscular lighting, musty smells, and shuddery closeups, and the flashback studded with swastikas …. Now let’s get a grip.
Every journalistic account of Gurlitt’s inventory reflexively bandies the word “masterpieces” or, for variety, “masterworks” and cites a speculated market value of a billion dollars. From what I’ve seen of the photographic evidence, phooey. Aside from a lovely Matisse, there appear to be only minor works, mostly by middling German Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit painters, of a grade that museums might want but would usually keep in storage. In 2011, Gurlitt sold probably the jewel of his hoard, “The Lion Tamer,” by Max Beckmann, for a bit more than a million dollars—which he had to share with heirs of its Jewish original owner. (Why could he keep any of the money? The legal issues awaiting him now promise kudzu-like proliferation.)
Gurlitt is more interesting than the art he hid. It’s reported that, every evening, he took from a suitcase and savored, sheet by sheet, a particular stack of works on paper. That haunts. It evokes the classic caricature of a miser gloating over his gold, but with a gloss of spiritual refinement and passion. An ability to appreciate art hardly affords the right to own it; but it almost should, somehow. I think of the “judge-penitent” hero of Albert Camus’s novel “The Fall,” who generates a lot of cool philosophy around his criminal possession of a panel, “The Just Judges,” from the Ghent Altarpiece of Jan van Eyck. (Stolen in 1934, that sure-enough masterpiece is still missing.)
Gurlitt has been quoted as lamenting that people see “banknotes” in his cherished works on paper. Check. If it weren’t for a contact high from the lately intoxicated art market, and the Nazi angle, this whole affair would be back-page news. Without fancied high prices to qualify them as “masterworks,” what would the works be? Oh, I don’t know. Pictures.
Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty
