Updated Nov. 10, 2013 4:59 p.m. ET
BERLIN—Police near Stuttgart took possession of artwork in a local residence on Saturday connected to Cornelius Gurlitt, the man at the center of an investigation into a cache of lost, Nazi-confiscated art, a police spokesman said.
According to photos and a report first published in the Sunday edition of German newspaper Bild, authorities collected 22 artworks wrapped in old newspapers, Bubble Wrap and duct tape and placed them into the back of a police car.
Nikolaus Fräßle, Mr. Gurlitt's brother-in-law, lives in the house, according to the paper. Mr. Fräßle, the widower of Mr. Gurilitt's deceased sister, didn't return calls to his house in the southern German town of Kornwestheim.
A police spokesman in Kornwestheim confirmed on Sunday that pictures in connection with the Gurlitt case were taken from a residence in the town but wouldn't say how many or from whom.
Mr. Fräßle contacted the police himself to ask them to come pick up the art because he was concerned about security, Bild reported.
The 1,400 works of art seized by German prosecutors from Mr. Gurlitt's Munich apartment in early 2012, a discovery made public last week, are believed to have been collected by his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt.
Augsburg prosecutors have declined to release a full list of the works in the trove, but among them are works on paper by Pablo Picasso, and works of unidentified material by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Rodin. Also found in the younger Mr. Gurlitt's apartment was an oil painting of a girl by Henri Matisse that was known to have been taken by the Nazis from prominent Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg.
The senior Mr. Gurlitt, now deceased, was a leading art dealer for the Nazis and was known to have sold Nazi-confiscated works labeled as "degenerate" by Adolf Hitler. Many so-called degenerate works are known to have been taken from Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis.
The U.S. State Department has been pressuring the German government to take control of the case from local authorities in the state of Bavaria, arguing that the matter of investigating the recovered trove of art is an international one, officials said.
German foreign ministry officials on Thursday met with U.S. Embassy officials to discuss the matter, both countries confirmed. A person familiar with the talks said that in the meeting, State Department officials urged Germany to publish the list of works in Mr. Gurlitt's collection, knock down the country's 30-year statute of limitations for stolen art and establish a formal claims process for victims to recover their works.
The German government has cooperated with art-restitution cases in the past but has expressed hesitancy in this situation because of its concern about violations of Mr. Gurlitt's privacy, the person said. Mr. Gurlitt, believed to be about 80, is under investigation for tax evasion but hasn't been charged with any crime, prosecutors say.
U.S. officials have challenged the German government on whether Mr. Gurlitt's privacy should be its primary concern, given that his art collection could include works stolen from Holocaust victims, this person said.
It is still unclear how many of the works in Cornelius Gurlitt's roughly 1,400-piece collection were acquired by his father during or shortly after World War II and how many are ones he acquired in the years after the war before he died in a car crash in 1956.
Currently, internationally followed guidelines are in place to help restitute works confiscated by museums, though none exist formally for works confiscated by individuals. In Germany, the statute of limitations for art theft during World War II ran out decades ago, though Jewish families have recently successfully acquired works held in the collections of the Belvedere in Vienna and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
According to a report by the German finance ministry cited in Germany's Bild, Mr. Gurlitt wouldn't have to restitute confiscated works purchased by his father from museums during the war.
The Finance Ministry refused to either confirm or deny that report, directing all questions to the Augsburg prosecutor's office. That office couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
Germany's weekly Der Spiegel, meanwhile, published a letter it said it received from Cornelius Gurlitt asking the magazine to not print his family's surname, as it has in its recent coverage.
It is not clear how Der Spiegel authenticated the letter. Mr. Gurlitt couldn't be reached for comment.
The short letter, which appeared to have been written on a typewriter and dated Nov. 4, 2013, also criticized descriptions of Mr. Gurlitt's art-dealer father, Hildebrand, in media coverage of the recovered trove:
"One could get the impression that Dr. H. Gurlitt, who under the Nuremberg Laws was classified a second-degree half-breed, once wrote articles published in newspapers like 'Das Reich' or 'Völkischer Beobachter,'" a reference to newspapers published by the Nazis.
Before the letter surfaced, there were doubts as to whether Cornelius Gurlitt, who U.S. archives show was born sometime in 1932, was even alive. German prosecutors have said they weren't sure of his whereabouts or whether he had a lawyer.
Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com
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