ART TROVE IN MUNICH WORTH 1.5 BILLION EUROS

It remains unclear how many of the works were originally looted by the Nazis or confiscated from national galleries as "degenerate art".

Rather than having vanished during the Nazi era, many of the artworks appear have to passed through the hands of allied forces, albeit temporarily. Some of the pictures in the Gurlitt collection were exhibited in New York and San Francisco in 1956, claims Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . The self-portrait by Otto Dix, meanwhile, which art historian Meike Hoffmann hailed as "unknown" earlier in the week, in fact appears on a property card in the National Archive in Washington.

In another development, police on Saturday confiscated a further 22 artworks from a flat near Stuttgart, owned by Nikolaus Frässle , a brother-in-law of Cornelius Gurlitt.

Germany will boost efforts to examine the ownership history of 1,406 artworks found in a Munich apartment and will publish details of art looted by the Nazis from Jews, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said.
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Seibert said the authorities need to balance the “justified interest of the international public” with the interests of the legal inquiry.
“We have to find a legal means of publicizing such artworks with dubious provenance independently from the ongoing criminal investigation,” he said.
Prosecutors projected a handful of the artworks in Gurlitt’s collection onto a screen at a press conference last week. The heirs of David Friedmann, a Jewish businessman who died in 1943, recognized “Riders on the Beach” by Max Liebermann as an artwork they have been seeking for years, and registered their claim with the prosecutor.

The heirs of Paul Rosenberg identified a Matisse painting they say belonged to the family and have requested its return. A third artwork, a drawing by Carl Spitzweg, may be a work sought by the heirs of Henri Hinrichsen, a Leipzig music publisher.
The authorities at last week’s meeting agreed to “push ahead at a considerably faster pace” in investigating the provenance of artworks in the collection, Seibert said.
Jewish groups and heirs’ representatives have expressed frustration that provenance researcher Meike Hoffmann of Berlin’s Free University is the only art historian investigating the haul since it was seized 18 months ago.

Any news of the Egan Schilles or Gustav Klimt's