Famed Painting In Art Trove Was Looted By The Nazis

Unlikely Trove: A Munich man kept a billion-dollar trove of looted Jewish art in this apartment. Should authorities have done more to report the discovery? Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Researchers in Germany have identified another painting in the “Gurlitt Collection” as having been stolen by the Nazis.
The work by 19th-century French painter Thomas Couture had belonged to the Jewish politician Georges Mandel, and was identified due to a tiny hole in the canvas. Restitution to his heirs is in the works.
The “Portrait of a Sitting Young Woman” is one of some 1,400 works that German tax investigators found in 2012, stashed away in the Munich and Salzburg homes of Cornelius Gurlitt, who died two years later. He had inherited the collection from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, a collector whom the Nazis hired to buy art for its museums or to sell for profit.
The vast collection includes works by such famous artists as Picasso, Dürer, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Beckmann and Matisse. So far, a total of six works from the estate are suspected to have been looted by the Nazis. Last February, a drawing by Adolph von Menzel was returned to the descendants of Elsa Cohen, who had been forced to sell it under duress in 1938.
Andrea Baresel-Brand, head of the research group, told the DPA press agency that the case was “particularly exciting, because our most important clue was a tiny, repaired hole in the canvas. it is highly likely that the painting comes from the collection of the former French minister Georges Mandel, whose family has requested its return.”
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Fast Forward Suspected arsonist intended to beat Gov. Josh Shapiro with a sledgehammer, investigators say
- 4
Opinion My Jewish moms group ousted me because I work for J Street. Is this what communal life has come to?
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Yes, the attack on Gov. Shapiro was antisemitic. Here’s what the left should learn from it
-
News ‘Whose seat is now empty’: Remembering Hersh Goldberg-Polin at his family’s Passover retreat
-
Fast Forward Chicago man charged with hate crime for attack of two Jewish DePaul students
-
Fast Forward In the ashes of the governor’s mansion, clues to a mystery about Josh Shapiro’s Passover Seder
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.