First Painting Restituted from Gurlitt Hoard Goes Up for Auction

A week after its restitution to the Rosenburg family, from the hoard of Cornelius Gurlitt, the sale of Max Lieberman’s Two Riders on a Beach (1901) has been announced, the BBC reports.

The painting will go on sale at Sotheby’s in London on June 24 and it is thought that it could fetch up to £500,000 ($850,000).

This was one of two of the first paintings to be restituted from the artworks found and seized from Gurlitt’s Munich apartment in 2012. The other painting, Matisse’s Woman with a Fan (1932), was also returned to the Rosenburg family last week (see Matisse From Gurlitt Trove Once Belonged to Paul Rosenberg and Germany Restitutes Matisse and Liebermann Artworks From Gurlitt Collection).

Cornelius Gurlitt inherited artworks from his father, Hilderbrand, who dealt in artwork confiscated by the Nazis and there was much speculation about what would happen to works leading up to, and after his death last year (see Gurlitt Gives German Task Force One Year to Research Provenance of Suspected Nazi Loot and Gurlitt Bequeathed Collection to Museum of Fine Arts Bern).

The restitution of these works has been hotly anticipated by the art world as many important artworks including paintings by Degas, Piscasso, Matisse, and Chagall (see Rodin and Degas Found in Gurlitt Apartment) were found in his now notorious Munich apartment.