26 Facts About Hildebrand Gurlitt

Hildebrand Gurlitt was a German art historian and art gallery director who dealt in Nazi-looted art as one of Hitler's and Goering's four authorized dealers for "degenerate art".

Hildebrand Gurlitt inherited family artworks from both his father and his sister, an accomplished artist in her own right.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was born into an artistic family in Dresden in 1895.

Hildebrand Gurlitt's 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.

Hildebrand Gurlitt served and was wounded at both the Somme and in Champagne, and later served as an army press officer in Vilnius and Kaunas in Lithuania, where he remained until 1919.

Hildebrand Gurlitt 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; Hildebrand Gurlitt took care of her works, but part of it was destroyed by their mother after the death of their father.

Between 1921 and 1924, Hildebrand Gurlitt contributed articles on art for newspapers, and following his graduation, he became the first director of the Konig Albert museum in Zwickau in 1925.

Hildebrand Gurlitt's work was appreciated by the national press and his peers, but the local press was less impressed.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was one of the four dealers appointed by the Nazi Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art to market confiscated works of art abroad.

Hildebrand 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.

Hildebrand 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.

In 1936 Hildebrand Gurlitt was visited in Hamburg by Samuel Beckett.

Hildebrand 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 Fuhrermuseum.

Hildebrand 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 became very wealthy from commissions on the enormous amounts of money being paid by Hitler's regime for artworks at that time.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was captured with his wife and twenty boxes of art in Aschbach in June 1945.

Hildebrand 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 Hildebrand Gurlitt claimed, additional portions apparently had been successfully hidden in Franconia, Saxony, and Paris, from which they were retrieved after the war.

Hildebrand Gurlitt 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.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was generally successful at concealing his role in Nazi looting and ridding himself of Nazi-associated "taint" after the war.

In postwar Germany, along with other dealers of Nazi-looted art, Hildebrand Gurlitt built a respectable career as an art association director and exhibition manager, art dealer, and collector.

Hildebrand Gurlitt is viewed 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.

Hildebrand Gurlitt had claimed 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.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was a canny operator who, despite being part Jewish, managed not only to survive but to thrive in Nazi Germany.

Hildebrand Gurlitt achieved this through full cooperation: facilitating the sale of so-called "degenerate art" to foreign buyers to buoy the regime's coffers, while acquiring suitably volkisch art from Nazi-occupied countries for the planned Fuhrer Museum in Linz.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was an anti-Nazi who became corrupted by the regime he professed to hate; whose fear and ambition combined led him to compromise his own beliefs and, in the process, forfeit his integrity.