Ritrovate a Monaco 1500 opere confiscate da Hitler

Da Picasso a Renoir, un tesoro artistico stimato un miliardo

ansa/ Un tesoro di 1500 opere d'arte per un valore stimato di oltre un miliardo confiscato dai nazisti durante il Terzo Reich e che si riteneva fosse perduto è stato ritrovato in un appartamento a Monaco di Baviera. Lo riporta il Mail online, secondo cui si tratta di capolavori di artisti come Pablo Picasso, Renoir, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall. Gli esperti ritenevano che tutte quelle opere fossero andate perdute o distrutte sotto i bombardamenti.

E invece oggi è arrivata la notizia della sensazionale scoperta: i capolavori giacevano da ormai mezzo secolo accatastati dietro un muro di barattoli di fagioli e frutta nel decrepito appartamento di solitario Cornelius Gurlitt, figlio del gallerista Hildebrand Gurlitt nel sobborgo di Schwabing a Monaco. Ad anticipare il ritrovamento è stato il settimanale tedesco Focus.

MailOnline/ A treasure trove of artworks worth almost £1billion seized by the Nazis and reportedly destroyed in RAF bombing raids during WW2 has been found behind rotting food in shabby apartment in Munich.

Experts have hailed the discovery of the 1,500 pictures, thought to have been lost or bombed, as a sensational find.

The story of the lost masterpieces of such painters as Pablo Picasso, Renoir, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall is revealed in this week's edition of Germany's Focus magazine which broke the story of the incredible find by customs officials.

Art historians examining the collection claim up to 300 of the Gurlitt collection appeared in a Nazi exhibition called Degenerate Art - displaying what they deemed to be poor.

The rest were bought at 'shamefully' low prices from Jews in exchange for an escape route out of the country.

One of the paintings is a portrait of a woman by the French master Matisse that belonged in the collection of the Jewish connoisseur Paul Rosenberg, who had to leave behind his collection before his escape from Paris when the country fell in 1940.

His granddaughter Anne Sinclair, the wife of disgraced former top banker Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been fighting for decades for the return of his pictures stolen by the Nazis, but according to Focus she 'knew nothing' of the existence of this painting.

It was found, alongside around 1,500 other pieces, in the Aladdin's Cave behind a wall of tins of beans and fruit in the decrepit flat of loner Cornelius Gurlit in the Munich suburb of Schwabing.

This artwork by some of the giants of the 19th and 20th centuries was deemed 'degenerate' by the provincially-minded Nazi hierachy, stolen from collectors - many of them Jewish - and ordered to be shut away by Hitler and his henchmen.

Other works discovered in the flat are by Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Liebermann.

The astonishing story of their recovery is like the plot from a thriller.

Dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt had acquired the paintings and sketches in the 1930s and 40s for a pittance from terrified Jews and reported them all to be destroyed at the war's end during the ferocious bombing of Dresden.

Nothing was known about the collection until September 2010, almost 100 years later, when customs carried out a routine check on a train from Switzerland.

Stopping his sole surviving son - who had never worked and who had no visible means of income - they discovered he had an envelope containing 9,000 euros in cash, and a stash of empty envelopes.

Many wealthy Germans deposit money illegally in Switzerland to evade high taxation rates on their savings in their homeland and such checks on people are commonplace.