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C H R O N O F H O R S E . C O M FA L L 2 014 81 C H R O N O F H O R S E . C O M FA L L 2 014 81 O nce it finally broke, more than a year after the fact, the news of the stunning discovery swept across the globe in a manner of minutes: an art cache of nearly 1,300 missing masterworks worth more than a billion dollars in the Munich apartment of an elderly recluse named Cornelius Gurlitt. e son of art historian and Nazi- approved (despite being deemed a quarter Jewish) art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, the octogenarian Cornelius Gurlitt had long been rumored in the art community to be hiding a stash of paintings looted by the Nazis during World War II. But authorities never took note of Gurlitt until 2010, when his nervous behavior during a routine security check on a train from Zurich to Munich constituted a search that revealed 9,000 euros (about $12,000) in cash on his person. e amount was within legal lim- its for transport across the border, so Gurlitt wasn't detained. But his suspi- cious behavior that day set his eventual downfall in motion. German authorities later discov- ered, on inquiry into his records, that he'd paid no taxes, held no social security records, owned no bank accounts and had never worked. How could an elderly man with so little backing have lived for years in a million-dollar apartment in Schwabing, one of the city's most expensive neighborhoods? Surreptitious painting sales, it turned out, were Gurlitt's sustaining income. But when he quietly sold e Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann through an auc- tion house for $1.17 million in December of 2011, the authorities noticed. On Feb. 8, 2012, police finally raided his flat and began cataloging the stash of 1,280 works of art, which included pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Chagall and Franz Marc. Another 238 works were found in a second house of Gurlitt's in Salzburg, Austria. Since then, countless complex questions have con- tinued to arise over the works' provenance and future fate. And Gurlitt's death at the age of 81 in May of this year, just six months after the revelations came to light, has complicated matters even more. "Mr. Gurlitt died without known heirs," the New York Times noted in his May 6 obituary, "leaving behind a tangle of questions about what will become of the art, some of it in the custody of the German government, some of it still in his possession and some of it subject to restitution claims." Deemed Degenerate Among the few photographs provided to the public in the wake of the discovery were three equine works by modernist painters Max Liebermann, Marc Chagall and Franz Marc. e eye-catching Marc painting was the water- color Landscape with Horses, a charismatic piece in the German expressionist's quintessential style. e horses featured in it are rounded, gray masses full of energy, posed in a composition quite similar to two of Marc's other paintings, Little Yellow Horses and e Large Blue Horses. Marc was an avid horseman who painted equines often. A cavalryman in WWI, he and his horse were both killed when they were struck by shrapnel while on a reconnaissance mission in 1916. Oddly, Landscape with Horses wasn't the only miss- ing equine painting by Marc; his 6'7" x 4'3" Tower of Blue Horses hung for years in Germany's National Gallery but hasn't been seen since 1945. More Cubist in style, its equines stare eye-to-eye with the viewer Two Riders on the Beach by Max Liebermann had been missing for more than 70 years when it was unearthed in 2012, along with nearly 1,300 other works of art, in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt. Many of the pieces in Gurlitt's cache are believed to have been stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and David Toren, the great nephew of this painting's original owner, is now suing Germany for its return.

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