“We had no leads to Gurlitt, but we had a suspicion,” Rudolph said. “Gurlitt has to be at the back of your mind, because he was from Dresden.”
Art Question
The question now for Glaser’s daughter-in-law, who declined to be interviewed or identified by name, is whether she will get the artworks back. Under German law, Cornelius Gurlitt is the legal owner and civil court cases to recover art lost due to forced sales in the Nazi era rarely succeed.
Yet Rudolph is optimistic.
“The pressure from outside has led to success -- now the works will be published and provenance research will gain pace,” Rudolph said. “The German government is getting very involved in the case. Things have gone too far for it to withdraw and leave claimants on their own.”
After the war, Glaser had to continue working well past retirement age to feed his family. At 68, he took a post at the Justice Ministry in the state of Saxony, helping determine which of Hitler’s laws should be retained and which annulled.
He then resumed his work as a lawyer and died at about 80. His family sold some of the art he had saved from the fire to pay for their food and accommodation after his death.
Thanks to those sales, his legacy lives on in some of the most prestigious museums of the world. A 1921 portrait of Glaser by Otto Dix now hangs in the Neue Galerie in New York. A 1925 Dix portrait of Glaser with his family is one of the crown jewels of Dresden’s public art collection.