Art stolen from Jews, including a Van Gogh, taken from Swiss museum
Five paintings looted by Nazis from Jewish owners are removed from a Swiss museum. This was announced by the Bührle Foundation, the foundation that manages the works. This includes a painting by Vincent van Gogh.
The foundation says that solutions for the works from the collection in the Kunsthaus Zurich are being sought with the descendants of the former Jewish owners. Reference is made here to the ‘best practices’ for dealing with art looted by the Nazis, published by the US Department of State in March.
Those guidelines represent an expanded interpretation of the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art Agreement, which requires “fair and just remedies” to be sought for property looted by the Nazis.< /p>
The Old Tower
In Switzerland, there has been talk for years about the art collection of arms manufacturer Emil Bührle (1890-1956). He became enormously wealthy supplying weapons to Germany in World War II. He was also an avid art collector. Bührle also financed the expansion of Kunsthaus Zürich. His collection is a large part of that museum.
This led to increasing criticism, because part of the collection was allegedly obtained unlawfully. The Kunsthaus itself was supposed to present new results of the provenance research into the Bührle collection at the end of this month, but the Bührle Foundation is now anticipating this.
The five paintings that are now disappearing from the museum are, in addition to Van Gogh, by Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. The works all come from owners who were persecuted by the Nazis, writes the Swiss newspaper Neue Züricher Zeitung.
Van Gogh’s The Old Tower from 1884 was owned by Walter Feilchenfeldt. In order to live in Swiss exile, he sold this and a work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Bührle.
Manet
In addition to these five paintings, there is a sixth painting, La Sultane by Édouard Manet, for which a solution is being sought with the descendants of former owners. This is a somewhat more complicated case. The work was once owned by the businessman Max Silberberg, who was expropriated by the Nazis in 1933 and later murdered.
The subject of discussion is whether he sold La Sultane in 1937 for economic reasons, in connection with the worldwide economic crisis before 1933, or whether he felt forced to sell it because of the Nazi persecution.