“Cornelius Gurlitt and the Art Treasures Confiscated by the Nazis” will be the topic of a lecture Dr. Christoph Zuschlag will present at 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 3, in Room 106 of the Art Annex on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University.
Zuschlag, professor of art history at the Landau campus of the University of Klobenz/Landau, Germany, is instrumental in the on-going student exchange between his university and SFA, according to Jill Carrington, professor of art history at SFA.
One of Zuschlag’s interests is stolen art, such as the masterworks that were denounced by the Nazis as “degenerate art” yet also “collected” by the Nazis, meaning the works were typically stolen from the rightful owners, who, often being Jewish, became victims of the Holocaust.
Stolen art is not only the topic of a major book publication by Zuschlag, but remains a timely topic. The announcement of the discovery of a huge stash of such stolen art in the Munich apartment and Salzburg home of an apparently inconspicuous art collector, Cornelius Gurlitt, made headlines in 2013 and 2014. Gurlitt’s father was the art historian and dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, who collected art in the 1930s and 1940s and worked for the Nazi government to sell stolen works.
Among the artists whose works were discovered in this find were Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rembrandt van Rijn, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas Camille Pissarro, and many others.
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Carrington at (936) 468-4351.
