![]() Interviewed by the Monuments Men at war's end, Hildebrand Gurlitt convinced them that he'd handed over all he had. The campaign quickly became one of confiscation as the focus shifted to the galleries and homes of Jewish collectors. Starting in 1938, Hildebrand purged what the Nazis termed "degenerate art" (almost all modern art) from German state collections and bought works, mainly old masters, for the Führermuseum, to be built in Hitler's adopted hometown of Linz, Austria. The case that everyone has come to hear about today, however, is that of 81-year-old Munich-based hermit, Cornelius Gurlitt, son of Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. His granddaughter is still trying to track down the 60-odd missing paintings that remain and has recently recovered, with the aid of Marinello, Monet's Waterlillies (1904) and Matisse's Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace (1937) from two separate museums, both of which had to be cajoled into giving them up even after being presented with irrefutable evidence, including papers signed by Herman Goering, claiming the Matisse for the Reich. He spent the rest of his life – as did thousands of other Jewish families – hunting for his treasures, originally bought for hundreds of dollars, today worth many millions. Forced to flee France by the Nazis, who stole the bulk of the Jewish art dealer's world-class collection (400 works), Rosenberg moved to New York. From 1911, at his gallery at 21 rue de la Boétie, Paul Rosenberg charmed wealthy French patrons into paying top dollar for the works of Delacroix, Rodin, Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Lautrec, Modigliani, Braque, Matisse and best friend Pablo Picasso, who lived next door. Rosenberg is the granddaughter of Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg and Marinello are at the heart of the fight to end the continuing trade in Nazi-looted art and are currently embroiled in what has become the most infamous stolen art case in history. The conference room is packed when Chris Marinello takes to the stage with Marianne Rosenberg, the star draw. In 2012, the Californian city of San Francisco hired an art detective to hunt for hundreds of items that had gone missing from its 4,000-piece public -collection. "After the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, guards performed an inventory of the Louvre and found another 323 paintings were missing." Magness-Gardiner confirms, shockingly, that this is still a common finding today. He agrees that poor security fuels thefts. Milton Esterow, 85 was, for 38 years, the owner of ARTnews, and has -covered countless art crimes. He is hunting artworks worth $500m stolen from the Gardner in 1990.Ī night shift security guard made "the most expensive private security error in history", according to Amore, when he buzzed in two men claiming to be police officers who made off with, among others, Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633) and Vermeer's The Concert (1664). Not surprisingly only about 10% of stolen art is recovered, and successful prosecution occurs even less frequently.Īnthony Amore, another former federal agent speaking at the conference, has been head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston since 2006. Worldwide, some 50,000-100,000 works of art are stolen each year. These figures are woefully inaccurate simply because we can't possibly know about every single illegal trade that takes place, with some stolen, looted or forged pieces being sold multiple times. In the UK, the value of art and antiques stolen each year is around £300m, second only to drug dealing and more costly than the theft of stolen vehicles. The amount of criminal income generated by art crime each year is thought to be $6-8 billion, according to the FBI. Thanks to lack of regulation accurate figures for the art market as a whole are impossible to ascertain, but Christie's and Sotheby's together turn over about $11-12 billion a year and a 2008 survey by ARTnews, the world's most widely circulated art magazine, estimated that annual private art sales amounted to $30 billion. He's the first to admit "it's a dismal effort". Blonde, mustachioed Bob, who left the FBI to become a lawyer for white-collar-crimes, is still passionate about recovering stolen art. Among the speakers at the conference are Bob Goldman and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, the Mulder and Scully of the FBI, in that they run a tiny, underfunded department (Art Theft) that no one else seems to believe in.
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