NOTEWORTHY DEATHS

Keeper of art trove probed for Nazi link

BERLIN -- Cornelius Gurlitt, a reclusive German collector whose long-secret hoard of more than 1,000 artworks triggered an international uproar over the fate of art looted by the Nazis, died Tuesday. He was 81.

Gurlitt's spokesman, Stephan Holzinger, said the collector died at his apartment in Munich, where he had asked to return after being hospitalized for major heart surgery.

Gurlitt was thrust into the public spotlight in November when authorities, after a report by German magazine Focus, disclosed that they had seized 1,280 works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall from the Munich apartment more than a year earlier.

Gurlitt had inherited the collection of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who traded in works confiscated by the Nazis and who died in 1956.

German authorities, facing criticism from Jewish groups and art experts for keeping the hoard secret for so long, quickly moved to publicize details of paintings online and put together a task force to speed their identification; they said at least 458 of the works may have been stolen from their owners by the Nazis.

After much back and forth, Gurlitt eventually agreed last month to a deal with the German government, under which hundreds of works owned by the collector would be checked for a Nazi-era link while staying in government hands.

Metro on 05/07/2014

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