Cezanne's "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire" was found in the trove of notorious "art hermit" Cornelius Gurlitt in 2014. How the work came to be in the hands of the Nazis remains a mystery.
Image: picture-alliance/KEYSTONE/L. Lehmann
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The Bern Museum of Fine Art in Switzerland will retain ownership of a Paul Cezanne painting found in a Nazi-era trove in 2014, the artist's heirs confirmed on Tuesday. They also said that the museum had agreed to regularly exhibit the work in Cezanne's hometown of Aix-en-Provence, France.
"This solution in the spirit of the Swiss-French friendship and partnership allows two great museums, Bern Museum of Fine Art and the Musee Granet in Aix-en-Provence, to show a masterpiece by our grandfather Paul Cezanne for the benefit and enjoyment of a great audience," said Philippe Cezanne (pictured above), great-grandson of the master painter.
The painting was found in the now-infamous Gurlitt collection, originally amassed by German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt under direction from the Nazis to sell or get rid of "degenerate" art seized from museums.
Gurlitt collection shown in Bern
The exhibition "Gurlitt Inventory. Denerate Art" opened in November 2017, with the Bern Art Museum revealing, for the first time, works discovered in the Gurlitt private collection in Munich. Here are a few.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle
August Macke: Landscape With Sailboats
"Of all of us, he gave the brightest and purest timbre to color," declared Franz Marc after his friend and fellow artist August Macke fell in World War I in 1914. Macke painted his sailboat images at Lake Tegernsee in Bavaria. This painting was among the roughly 1,500 found in the Cornelius Gurlitt collection.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle
Otto Mueller: Reclining Female Nude at Waterside
Slender women are a characteristic motif of the influential German expressionist art movement. This model reposes unclothed on a water-surrounded rock.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: "Melancholy Girl"
A difficult, suspicious and depressed man, Kirchner created this wood cutting in 1922. Nazis removed many of his works from German museums and defamed them as "degenerate." Born in the German region of Franconia, Kirchner was buried in Switzerland.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle
Otto Dix: Leonie
The artist had a reputation for social criticism even as a young man. "I can't get ahead; my paintings can't be sold. I'm either becoming famous or infamous," he said in 1920, not long before finishing this painting.
Image: Bundeskunsthalle
Emil Nolde: Broad Landscape with Clouds
"My homeland was like a fairytale, my parents' home in the flat countryside, thousands of larks soaring up and down in jubilation, my country of wonder from sea to sea," enthused the North German painter Maler Emil Nolde. Broad expanses and the blurred transitions between sky, earth and water were his motifs.
Image: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
Franz Marc: Sitting Horse
No motif or animal fascinated Marc more than horse, a metaphor for purity and innocence in the eyes of this expressionist painter. His daring experimentation with color resulted in a group of paintings of blue horses in 1910. This image, also in the Gurlitt collection, was a predecessor.
Image: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
How the painting, the 1897 landscape "La Montagne Sainte-Victoire," ended up in Gurlitt's possession remains a mystery. It was the property of the Cezanne family until 1940, but the family has said that it was not stolen from them by the Nazis.
"When and under which circumstances Hildebrand Gurlitt acquired the work remains unclear," the Bern museum said.
The painting is currently part of the Bern museum's exhibition "Gurlitt: Status Report Part 2; Nazi Art Theft and Its Consequences."
