The New York Times puts a face and story the abstract issue of Germany’s failure to address the legal issues surrounding the art works seized by the Nazis. They spoke to Wolfgang Buche, a curator who is frustrated by the situation:

“The legal situation is relatively obvious and clear,” said Mr. Büche, who oversees the collection at the Moritzburg Foundation in Halle. “With art taken from Jewish collectors, there are sometimes legal or at least moral circumstances under which they can seek to have their works restituted. We can only seek to buy them back.” […] Mr. Büche, the curator, would like his pictures back, too. Yet, in his three decades at the Moritzburg museum, he has been able to celebrate the return of just 16 prewar items, a tenth of a collection that once ranked among the most impressive in the country.

Some of the museum’s prewar works now hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York or at Harvard University after having been traded on the open market like many so-called degenerate works once confiscated by the Nazis.

Only occasionally do those works travel back to Halle on loan. Such special exhibitions are the biggest draw to the museum, which, despite a renovation in 2008, struggles to attract 60,000 to 70,000 visitors a year.
“We always try to buy back our works, when they turn up, but as a state-funded museum, we can’t compete against big bidders,” Mr. Büche said.

Enduring Nazi Law Impedes Recovery of Art (NYTimes)

Peter Schjeldahl pretty much gets to the heart of the matter on the Munich Hoard: Where did Focus magazine get that $1bn valuation?

Every journalistic account of Gurlitt’s inventory reflexively bandies the word “masterpieces” or, for variety, “masterworks” and cites a speculated market value of a billion dollars. From what I’ve seen of the photographic evidence, phooey. Aside from a lovely Matisse, there appear to be only minor works, mostly by middling German Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit painters, of a grade that museums might want but would usually keep in storage. In 2011, Gurlitt sold probably the jewel of his hoard, “The Lion Tamer,” by Max Beckmann, for a bit more than a million dollars—which he had to share with heirs of its Jewish original owner. […] Gurlitt has been quoted as lamenting that people see “banknotes” in his cherished works on paper. Check. If it weren’t for a contact high from the lately intoxicated art market, and the Nazi angle, this whole affair would be back-page news.

Cornelius Gurlitt, the Art Hermit (The New Yorker)

Spiegel’s original story from which most are quoting is now available in english and worth reading for the portrait it portrays of Cornelius Gurlitt. The story reminds us that the German laws governing the art, its ownership and the statute of limitations on when claims can be made against it is the real issue in the case:

He doesn’t understand what people want from him. He says the public prosecutor’s office has the pictures now, so people should go there if they want to see the works or find out something about them. He knows a lot about their origins, he says, but he prefers to keep that to himself — like a love affair that needs to be guarded. “And there is nothing I have loved more in my life than my pictures.” […]

Gurlitt has to answer so many questions for which he has no answers. “I never had anything to do with acquiring the pictures, only with saving them,” he says. He helped his father back in Dresden when they saved the works of art from the Russians. People should be thankful to him, he says. “My father knew the Russians were getting closer and closer.”

His father quickly organized a vehicle from the carpool in Dresden, he recalls, and father and son loaded the artwork into the car. His father then brought everything to a farmer near Dresden, and later to a castle in southern Germany. He says that his father knew people everywhere in Germany.

“People only see banknotes between these papers with paint — unfortunately,” he says. 

SPIEGEL Interview With Cornelius Gurlitt About Munich Art Find (SPIEGEL ONLINE)

The story of the Gurlitt family, their deceptions and obvious awareness that their art trove was no legitimately theirs seems to have turned their son into a real life Gollum:

Speaking to Der Spiegel last week, during a trip to an unidentified German town to see a doctor for a heart condition, Mr. Gurlitt said he had not watched television since 1963 and had never gone online, but did talk to his pictures. He kept his favorites, a collection of works on paper, in a small suitcase that he would unpack each evening to admire.

Until the raid in February 2012, Mr. Gurlitt had guarded his privacy zealously, refusing to open his door even to meter readers from the gas company. He rarely spoke to or even acknowledged his neighbors. He had no friends whom anyone ever saw. […] The collection was so valuable and, perhaps, its provenance so tainted by the family’s association with the Nazis, that the desire to keep it secure compelled Mr. Gurlitt to live a strange, Gollum-like existence behind permanently drawn blinds, obscuring not only the works but also the man himself. […] “People only see banknotes between these papers with paint, unfortunately,” he said. […]

Konrad O. Bernheimer, a prominent Munich art dealer, said he had never come across Mr. Gurlitt despite decades in the business. “The saddest part of this whole story is this man’s life,” he said. “He was locked up in the dark with all these wonderful paintings. He is a man in the shadows, a ghost who never came out.”

For Son of a Nazi-Era Dealer, a Private Life Amid a Tainted Trove of Art – NYTimes.com.