East Asian Art in the Gurlitt Collection: Tracing the Relationship of Objects and Actors

Abstract

For the so-called Gurlitt Collection, which was seized in the spring of 2012 at the home of Cornelius, son of the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt , research has been concluded after five years of intense work, an extensive exhibition catalog and four comprehensive publications on the collection and biography of Gurlitt. The research project , which expires at the end of 2018 and has the mission to determine the prior ownership of the works of art, underlies the Minister of Culture, and research results to all works from the holdings of Gurlitt are continuously published on the homepage www.lostart.de hosted by the DZK (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste).

According to his taste and strategies, the stock of the art historian and dealer Gurlitt holds today several hundreds of prints of so-called "de-generated art", as well as paintings, drawings and prints from the 16th to 19th centuries, from the hand of German, French as well as Dutch and Flemish artists. It might be less known that he also had a small number of East Asian arts among them, most of which come from Japan. The article reports on a selection of these art objects to present methods, resources, and some results.