Fritz Salo Glaser was due to be among the last Jews deported out of Dresden on Feb. 16, 1945. Three days before, Allied fire bombs reduced the city to rubble and saved Glaser from Theresienstadt concentration camp.
For years, Glaser’s family wondered whether the inferno that spared his life had claimed his prize possessions: the hundreds of artworks he amassed as a well-to-do lawyer and sold during the Nazi era to stay alive. Now they have proof at least some survived -- in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of a Nazi art dealer. Gurlitt’s cache of 1,406 artworks worth about $1 billion was seized in 2012 in a tax inquiry.
The German government this week began publishing details of the artworks in the hoard that may have been seized by the Nazis or lost by Jewish collectors in forced sales. Of the first 25 to be registered on the database www.lostart.de 13 were listed as belonging to Glaser.
They are drawings, graphics and watercolors by the Dresden artists he socialized with -- Otto Griebel, Ludwig Godenschweg Erich Fraass, Christoph Voll, Conrad Felixmueller and Wilhelm Lachnit. Glaser also owned works by Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
“This is very exciting,” said Sabine Rudolph at CSC Rechtsanwaelte in Dresden. Rudolph is helping Glaser’s elderly daughter-in-law to recover the lost art. “We think there may be many more Glaser works in the hoard. This seems to be confirmed by the quantity of works already on the database.”
Lost Treasures
The discovery of Gurlitt’s art trove has raised many questions in Germany, as Jewish groups demand full transparency and restitution, art historians ask what else might be hidden in private collections, and families of those who lost treasures wonder why it has taken so long for the authorities to announce their find.
A lawyer who sympathized with communist ideology, Glaser loved the art of his time and acquired it with enthusiasm.
“I have always known your art has eternal value,” Glaser wrote in a 1924 letter to Otto Dix, whom he counted as a friend.
An accomplished accordion and violin player, Glaser entertained regularly with his wife Erna at their Dresden home during the inflationary 1920s, offering their bohemian friends music and dancing as well as lavish supplies of food and drink.