From the Guardian:

German police have confiscated about 1,500 modernist masterpieces thought to have been looted by the Nazis from the flat of an 80-year-old man from Munich, in what is being described as the biggest artistic find of the postwar era. 

The artworks, which could be worth as much as €1bn (£860m), are said to include pieces by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Max Beckman and Emil Nolde. They were looted by the Nazis and had been considered lost until now, according to a report in the German news weekly Focus. 

The works, which would originally have been confiscated as "degenerate art" by the Nazis or claimed from Jewish collectors in the 30s and 40s, had made their way into the hands of a German art collector, Hildebrand Gurlitt. When Gurlitt died, the artworks were passed down to his son, Cornelius -- all without the knowledge of the authorities.

The article says the paintings were banned because the Nazis considered them "unGerman" or Jewish. But the abstract expressionist Emil Nolde was Protestant. He created many paintings depicting scenes from the New Testament. 

Here's what I wrote about Nolde in Saving Leonardo:

Around World War I, expressionism grew much darker. The war was taken as an indictment of Western science and rationality. Technological progress had not created the promised paradise on earth. Instead it had created grotesquely efficient killing machines -- machine guns, tanks, bombs, poison gas. The resulting carnage was on a scale never witnessed before. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered sometimes in a single battle. "Reason had become irrational and inhuman -- soulless technique, technique without a conscience," Kuspit writes. It had also "become aggressively materialistic in this society, dehumanizing people and permitting the inhumanity that ran rampant in the First World War." . . .

Were these works beautiful? They were not intended to be. In the face of such cruelty and inhumanity, it seemed that one could create beautiful works of art only by indulging in Pollyanna sentimentality. "The Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty in art was only born out of a refusal to be honest," writes Gombrich. "It became almost a point of honour with them to avoid anything which smelt of prettiness and polish, and to shock the 'bourgeois' out of his real or imagined complacency." 

In spite of their sensitivity to suffering -- or perhaps because of it -- the expressionists remained open to the spiritual realm. "Man cries out for his soul," wrote art critic Hermann Bahr in 1916. "Art also cries out in the dark, calling for help, appealing to spirit: that is Expressionism." . . .

Many expressionists probed what the Christian gospel meant under such conditions. Emil Nolde was raised in a Protestant family that was intensely religious, but his mask-like faces and strident colors were too expressionistic for the Nazis. He was another painter denounced by the Nazi regime as "degenerate" and forbidden to paint any more. 

It will be exciting to see Nolde's missing paintings when they are released. Here is Nolde's Pentecost, from 1909. His harsh, intense colors were disturbing, yet Nolde said, "I was obeying an irresistible need to represent a deep spirituality." 

Also of Interest
Da Vinci Artwork Found in Italian Castle 
Pulp Nonfiction: Why Are Zombies Still Alive and Kicking? 
Controversy Over "Michelangelo" Sculpture