ABSTRACT
Early in November, a major sensation erupted when it was reported that some 1,400 highly valuable works of art, most of them unseen for decades, had been discovered hidden in an apartment in Munich, Germany. The apartment's owner, Cornelius Gurlitt, is an eighty-year-old art dealer and recluse whose father, Hildebrand, was one of four dealers commissioned by the Nazis to sell their looted art abroad in exchange for much-needed foreign currency. In addition to products of German art, Jewish, and the Gurlitt collection also boasts works by such eminent non-German modernists as Picasso and Chagall, probably bought by German collectors before 1933 or seized in occupied France, perfectly respectable items of older vintage by the likes of Canaletto and Rodin. A poorly written and unlikely narrative entitled The Daughters of the General, it was the story of a young Jewish Communist who had an affair with the daughter of a German general.
