Nearly 1,500 paintings including works by Picasso and Matisse that were stolen by the Nazis have been discovered in a German flat, a newspaper reported Sunday, putting their total value at around a billion euros. German weekly Focus said the paintings were found in an apartment belonging to the octogenarian son of an art collector who had bought them during the 1930s and 1940s.
For nearly half a century, the artworks lay hidden in darkened rooms in the man's apartment in the southern German city of Munich, Focus said. He had sold a few over the course of the years, living off the proceeds, the paper reported.
The collection included many of the great masters of the 20th century, among them the German painters Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann and Max Liebermann.
Among the paintings discovered was one by Henri Matisse that had belonged to the Jewish collector Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg, who fled Paris leaving his collection behind, was the grandfather of Anne Sinclair, the former wife of the disgraced French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
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