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(P1683)
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"David Toren, a Holocaust survivor and patent lawyer who waged a single-minded quest to recover art looted from his family by the Nazis, died on April 19 at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.The cause was the novel coronavirus, his son, Peter Toren, said.Mr. Toren’s campaign to recover the stolen works drew headlines when a painting by Max Liebermann, “Two Riders on the Beach,” surfaced in the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, an elderly recluse. Mr. Gurlitt had hoarded the art he inherited from his father, a dealer for the Nazis, in his homes in Munich and Salzburg. Mr. Toren had been searching for the painting for years.Images of the work with other rediscovered paintings were displayed at a news conference given by the state prosecutor in Augsburg, Germany, in November 2013. By then Mr. Toren was blind, a consequence of a severe case of shingles, but he could remember last seeing the painting hanging in his great-uncle’s villa in Germany 75 years earlier — on Nov. 10, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht. The Gestapo eventually seized his great-uncle’s art collection, and “Two Riders” wound up in the hands of an unscrupulous museum director, who sold it to Mr. Gurlitt’s father." (language: en)
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