In Munich, found a half thousand "degenerate" art

[Valerit]

In a private apartment in Munich found about fifteen hundred paintings, which at the time of Nazi Germany were confiscated from owners as examples of "degenerate art" and has since considered lost . As reported by FOCUS, the cost of collection may reach a billion euros, and includes , in particular, the work of Pablo Picasso , Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall.

In addition , among the authors of the representatives of different fabrics such currents of modernism as Emil Nolde, Franz Marc , Max Beckmann , Paul Klee , Oskar Kokoschka , Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Liebermann . Also , along with the " degenerate " paintings , the collection includes works by Albrecht Durer. Works of art for decades kept in the dark and trashy room in your house in the Munich district of Schwabing , which is owned by 80 -year-old Cornelius Gurlitt - son of the famous in the past, the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt .

As it turns out , Gurlitt came under suspicion of the authorities of Germany in 2010, when the return to Germany from Switzerland to find him a large sum of cash. As a further investigation into his apartment in 2011 was searched , then, and have been found and confiscated paintings, however, the government kept the information about them in secret. Gurlitt , which was in no way known to the general public, was suspected of tax evasion : it is expected that it will eventually sold the paintings and lived on the money .

Meanwhile, the descendants of the former owners of the " degenerate " paintings are already saying to them their rights. Before these pictures are destroyed , as Hildebrand Gurlitt argued that collection was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden Allied forces in 1945. In the years of the Third Reich Gurlitt was dismissed from the post of Director of the Museum of partially Jewish ancestry , but the Nazis were instructed him to sell the paintings modernists abroad. After the Second World War, he said that he had helped to escape from Nazi Germany to Jewish collectors , and was recognized as a victim of repression.