Whois Gurlitt.info?

By Irina Tarsis, Esq.

You know you are in need of a reputation management when the entire world knows your name and your address and nobody is thinking of sending you greeting cards. Also, reputation management might be a good idea when 1) your father was an art dealer connected to the Nazis, 2) you are caught hoarding  hundreds of valuable artworks of questionable provenance, and 3) you may or may not have been hiding Nazi-era looted art as well as avoiding paying income taxes.

Regardless of whether the Monuments Men-mania is dying down or not, Cornelius Gurlitt saga continues to unfold. With the German government contemplating changing its statute of limitations laws to allow for the recovery of looted art, and the international community is antsy to jump into the game of reviewing Gurlitt's trove. Countless headlines, tweets and posts have embarrassed the Bavarian authorities and prompted the creation of a special international task force to review provenance of paintings and works on paper taken from Gurlitt's apartment in Munich in 2012 and from his house in Salzburg in February 2014.