Swiss Langmatt museum settles with Jewish heirs

Museum Langmatt reaches settlement with Jewish heirs Keystone-SDA

The Langmatt Museum in Switzerland has agreed terms with the descendants of former owners of two impressionist paintings after research revealed evidence of Nazi-looted art.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

A “just and fair solution” has been reached in the case of the painting Fruit and Ginger Pot by Paul Cézanne, the Langmatt Museum and the Langmatt Sidney and Jenny Brown Foundation announced on Thursday. A settlement agreement has been reached with the heirs of the former owner Jacob Goldschmidt (1896-1976).

+ Nazi-looted art: Is the Kunsthaus Zurich a ‘tainted museum’?

The Langmatt Museum had put this painting up for auction in New York in November 2023 as one of three Cézanne works in order to secure the museum’s long-term endowment. The total proceeds amounted to the equivalent of around CHF40 million.

As the museum reported, a document was found in the Central Archive for German and International Art Market Research in Cologne in the autumn of 2023. This allows the conclusion that the sale of the Cézanne painting in November 1933 at the Lucerne gallery L’Art Moderne to Jenny and Sidney Brown qualifies as a Nazi-persecution-related confiscation.

A small painting with a long history

The second case concerns the small-format painting Fisherwomen on Berck Beach by Eugène Boudin. The foundation has also contacted the painting’s heirs and reached a settlement agreement, it was reported.

+ Historian urges further scrutiny of Zurich art collection’s provenance 

According to the agreement, the painting remains in the possession of the foundation and the heiresses were compensated at market value. The Langmatt Museum and the heiresses said in the press release that they were convinced they had found a fair solution here too. The painting will be on display in the museum.

Jenny and Sidney Brown had bought the painting in May 1936 at the Galerie Moos in Geneva. It is not clear from the correspondence between Sidney Brown and the gallery whether the provenance was openly communicated. At the time, the painting was owned by Richard Semmel (1875-1950), a Jewish industrialist and art collector.

From 2022 to 2024, the Museum Langmatt investigated the provenance of a total of 13 mostly Impressionist paintings. This so-called provenance research concerned works that Jenny and Sidney Brown bought between 1933 and 1940 to add to their Impressionist collection.

In addition to the two paintings classified as problematic, no indications or evidence of Nazi-looted art were found for 11 other works, the museum announced after the research work was completed.

Translated from German by DeepL/mga

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].