Website of the German Lost Art Foundation

last amended on 21. June 2018

Further Information

Gurlitt art find on Lost Art

Ob­jects from the Gurlitt art find or ‘art trove’ post­ed in the Lost Art database (in­cl. art­works and Hilde­brand Gurlitt’s busi­ness leg­ers)

Reg­u­lar up­dates are made to this re­port, but these are not an­nounced each time.If works are proven not to be sus­pi­cious dur­ing the course of the re­search and the sub­se­quent re­views, these are re­moved from the Lost Art Database How­ev­er, re­lat­ed doc­u­men­ta­tion in the form of Ob­ject Record Ex­cerpts (ORE) can be found here on the web­site.Works that are proven to be so-called “de­gen­er­ate art” dur­ing the course of the re­search are al­so re­moved from the Lost Art Database, pro­vid­ing that there is no sus­pi­cion that they were seized as a re­sult of per­se­cu­tion (e.g. a per­ma­nent loan or gift).

Writ­ten Lega­cy in the es­tate of Cor­nelius Gurlitt

Cor­nelius Gurlitt’s writ­ten lega­cy has been pro­fes­sion­al­ly reg­is­tered in an in­ven­to­ry and has re­ceived archive sig­na­tures in ac­cor­dance with the Fed­er­al Archives’ stan­dard. It con­tains ap­prox. 25,000 doc­u­ments of a busi­ness-re­lat­ed and pri­vate na­ture, e.g. busi­ness ledgers and ad­dress books, cat­a­logs and cor­re­spon­dence, as well as ap­prox. 2,400 pho­tographs of art­works and the fam­i­ly. These were sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly an­a­lyzed dur­ing the project pe­ri­od and the re­sults used for the prove­nance re­search in­to the art­works in the Gurlitt Art Trove. A com­pre­hen­sive “find­ing aid” has been cre­at­ed for a large part of the col­lec­tion. The doc­u­ments that are pre­dom­i­nant­ly of a com­mer­cial na­ture have been dig­i­tized in co­op­er­a­tion with the Fed­er­al Archives. The writ­ten lega­cy of Cor­nelius Gurlitt can be searched via the Fed­er­al Archives. (Link to Fed­er­al Archives).

Busi­ness records of Hilde­brand Gurlitt

2,400 dig­i­tized im­ages in the Bun­de­sarchiv

‘Schwabing Art Trove’ Task­force

Web­site of the ‘Schwabing Art Trove’ Task­force

Re­port on the work of the ‘Schwabing Art Trove’ Task­force (Ger­man ver­sion on­ly; fi­nal Re­port of 14 Jan­uary 2016)


Le­gal ba­sis

Agree­ment be­tween the Ger­man gov­ern­ment, Free State of Bavaria and Kun­st­mu­se­um Bern Foun­da­tion (Ger­man ver­sion on­ly)

Wash­ing­ton Prin­ci­ples

Joint Dec­la­ra­tion

Rec­om­men­da­tions (PDF, 2 MB) on the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the ‘Dec­la­ra­tion of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment, the Ger­man states (Län­der) and the cen­tral mu­nic­i­pal as­so­ci­a­tions (kom­mu­nale Spitzen­ver­bände) on the re­trieval and resti­tu­tion of Nazi-loot­ed art es­pe­cial­ly from Jew­ish prop­er­ty’ of De­cem­ber 1999