Swiss Museum Will Keep Art Trove Containing Nazi-Looted Works

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — A museum in the Swiss capital will accept an art trove containing looted works bequeathed to it this year by German collector Cornelius Gurlitt, vowing to return art seized by the Nazis to their Jewish owners.

Kunstmuseum Bern said today in Berlin that it will keep the modernist art left to it by Gurlitt, who died in May. The museum agreed with the German government to continue efforts to find the rightful owners of works that had belonged to Jews before World War II and were confiscated by the Nazi regime.

The discovery of the more than 1,400 works in a 2012 raid by tax authorities at Gurlitt’s apartment in Munich unearthed prints, paintings and sketches long given up as lost or destroyed under Adolf Hitler’s rule. Gurlitt inherited the collection with an estimated value of more than 1 billion euros ($1.24 billion), including works by Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse and Paul Gauguin, from his father Hildebrand, one of four dealers authorized by the Nazis to sell confiscated art abroad.

In February, an additional 60 pieces were found in Gurlitt’s house in Salzburg, Austria.

A taskforce set up by the German federal government and the state of Bavaria, which includes international art experts, is investigating the provenance of about 970 works from the trove, according to the website of the government agency that coordinates the investigation of lost cultural assets. The rest of the collection is thought to have been acquired legally.

Looted Art

Some 380 works are identified as possibly being art seized by the Nazis and scorned as “degenerate.” Such works were removed from circulation in the 1930s and 1940s and taken primarily from museums as part of a campaign to ban modernist and abstract art. The other 590 works may have been stolen from their owners by Nazi officials, according to the website.

The team announced in June that a 1921 Henri Matisse painting, “Woman Sitting in an Armchair,” was looted from the collection of art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Another painting, Max Liebermann’s 1901 “Two Riders on the Beach,” had also been seized by the Nazis, the taskforce said in August. David Toren, a retired New York lawyer, sued Germany in a Washington court in March for the return of the Liebermann painting, claiming it was taken from his great uncle.

Cornelius Gurlitt died in May at the age of 81 in his Munich apartment where most of the works were discovered. The reclusive art owner lived alone and struggled to grasp the media scrutiny after Germany’s Focus magazine published a November 2013 article exposing the trove.

Legal Challenge

Isolated from the outside world, Gurlitt stopped watching television in 1963, booked hotel rooms months in advance by mail when he had to travel, and never used the Internet, according to magazine Der Spiegel. His collection was discovered in the raid by tax authorities, who became suspicious when he was found carrying 9,000 euros during a random search at the Swiss border in 2010. He was returning from a visit to Bern to sell some artwork.

Uta Werner, an 86-year-old cousin of Gurlitt, filed a challenge to his will last week, citing an assessment that claimed the deceased recluse wasn’t sufficiently mentally sound to conclude a legally binding last testament, Deutsche Presse- Agentur reported, citing a spokesman for Werner.

Hitler’s regime seized hundreds of thousands of artworks from Jewish collectors. Though classified by the Nazis as “second-degree, mixed-race Jewish,” Hildebrand Gurlitt was permitted to sell what the German dictator called “degenerate art” abroad to raise foreign currency.

Kunstmuseum Bern is the oldest art museum in Switzerland with a permanent collection, and houses works covering eight centuries, according to its website.

To contact the reporters on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at [e-mail]; Alex Webb in Munich at [e-mail] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at [e-mail]; Alan Crawford at [e-mail]; Simon Thiel at [e-mail] Angela Cullen