George Lindemann Journal
BERLIN—Police near Stuttgart took possession of artwork in a local residence on Saturday connected to Cornelius Gurlitt, the man at the center of an investigation into a cache of lost, Nazi-confiscated art, a police spokesman said.
According to photos and a report first published in the Sunday edition of German newspaper Bild, authorities collected 22 artworks wrapped in old newspapers, Bubble Wrap and duct tape and placed them into the back of a police car.
A huge cache of modern art found in the apartment of an elderly Munich man is in the hands of German officials - but what they are going to do with it is up in the air. Via WSJ's global news update The Foreign Bureau.
Nikolaus Fräßle, Mr. Gurlitt's brother-in-law, lives in the house, according to the paper. Mr. Fräßle, the widower of Mr. Gurilitt's deceased sister, didn't return calls to his house in the southern German town of Kornwestheim.
Police near Stuttgart took possession of artwork in a local residence connected to Cornelius Gurlitt, the man at the center of an investigation into a cache of lost, Nazi-confiscated art. Mary Lane reports. Photo: AP.
A police spokesman in Kornwestheim confirmed on Sunday that pictures in connection with the Gurlitt case were taken from a residence in the town but wouldn't say how many or from whom.
Mr. Fräßle contacted the police himself to ask them to come pick up the art because he was concerned about security, Bild reported.
The 1,400 works of art seized by German prosecutors from Mr. Gurlitt's Munich apartment in early 2012, a discovery made public last week, are believed to have been collected by his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt.
Augsburg prosecutors have declined to release a full list of the works in the trove, but among them are works on paper by Pablo Picasso, and works of unidentified material by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Rodin. Also found in the younger Mr. Gurlitt's apartment was an oil painting of a girl by Henri Matisse that was known to have been taken by the Nazis from prominent Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg.
The senior Mr. Gurlitt, now deceased, was a leading art dealer for the Nazis and was known to have sold Nazi-confiscated works labeled as "degenerate" by Adolf Hitler. Many so-called degenerate works are known to have been taken from Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis.
Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com