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| Established | 1879 |
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| Location | 8–12 Hodler Street Bern, Switzerland |
| Type | Art museum |
| Director | Dr. Nina Zimmer |
| Website | www |
The Museum of Fine Arts Bern (German: Kunstmuseum Bern), established in 1879 in Bern, is the museum of fine arts of the de facto capital of Switzerland.
Its holdings run from the Middle Ages to the present. It houses works by Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Edmond Jean de Pury, Ferdinand Hodler, Méret Oppenheim, Ricco Wassmer and Adolf Wölfli. The collection consists of over 3,000 paintings and sculptures as well as 48,000 drawings, prints, photographs, videos and films.
In May 2014, the museum was named sole heir in the will of Cornelius Gurlitt, the German collector associated with the 2012 Munich artworks discovery. [1] [2] [3] The authorities had found over 1,400 artworks, many of them suspected to be stolen from European Jews by the Nazis, in Gurlitt's homes in Munich and Salzburg. The museum was given six months to decide whether it would accept the bequest and its terms. [4] The most important provision required that the museum conduct research into the provenance of the paintings and make restitution where needed to the heirs of the original owners. The museum director, Matthias Frehner, pledged that it would do so if it accepted the bequest. [5] The German government quietly urged the museum to accept the collection in order to provide a neutral place where research into its history could continue. (There was concern that if the collection were dispersed among Gurlitt's distant relatives, there would be no guarantee that they would conduct the research properly.) Determining whether or not to accept required much deliberation on the part of the museum board, work by its legal team, and significant fundraising from Swiss donors, so that the museum would not be reliant on German funding that could taint the neutrality of the provenance research. [6] In November 2014 the board voted to accept the collection. [7]
In August 2018, an episode of Fake or Fortune featured the director of the museum, Nina Zimmer, asking the team to investigate what appears to be the sole British piece of art in the Gurlitt collection. [8]
In 2024, Eberhard W. Kornfeld bequeathed five paintings to the museum, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Junkerboden (1919) and Alberto Giacometti’s Caroline (1965). [9]
Otto Müller was a German painter and printmaker of the Die Brücke expressionist movement.
The Lentos Art Museum is a museum of modern art in Linz, Austria, which opened in May 2003 as the successor to the Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz.
Wolfgang Gurlitt was a German art dealer, museum director and publisher whose art collection included Nazi-looted art.
Giovanni Ulrico Giacometti was a Swiss painter. He was the father of artists Alberto and Diego Giacometti and architect Bruno Giacometti.
Curt Valentin was a German-Jewish art dealer known for handling modern art, particularly sculpture, and works classified as "degenerate", seized from public museums or looted from private collectors by the Nazi regime in Germany.
Serena (Szeréna) Pulitzer Lederer was an Austro-Hungarian art collector and the spouse of the industrial magnate August Lederer, close friend of Gustav Klimt and instrumental in the constitution of the collection of Klimt's art pieces.
Hildebrand Gurlitt was a German art historian and art gallery director who dealt in Nazi-looted art as one of Hitler's and Goering's four authorized dealers for "degenerate art".
The Gurlitt Collection was a collection of around 1,500 art works assembled by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of Hitler's official art dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956), and which was found to have contained several artworks looted from Jews by the Nazis.
Meike Hoffmann is a German art historian and provenance researcher.
Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt was a German art collector. The son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a Nazi-era dealer of looted art, Gurlitt was discovered to have concealed a stash of artworks known as the Gurlitt trove or Gurlitt Collection, several of which have been proven to have been looted from Jews by Nazis.
Galerie Kornfeld is a privately owned Swiss auction house in Bern and one of the leading auction houses in Switzerland in the fields of Modern Art as well as Old Master prints and drawings.
Eberhard W. Kornfeld was a Swiss auctioneer, author, art dealer, and collector based in Bern.
Mary MacPherson Lane is an American non-fiction writer and journalist specializing in Western European art and history.
Max Silberberg was a major cultural figure in Breslau, a German Jewish entrepreneur, art collector and patron who was robbed and murdered by the Nazis. His art collection, among the finest of its era, has been the object of numerous restitution claims.
Étienne Bignou was a French art dealer specializing in 19th and 20th century art.
Karl Buchholz was one of Hitler's Nazi art dealers specialized in selling looted "Degenerate Art".
The Kirchner Museum Davos is an art museum dedicated to the life and work of the German Expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, located in Davos, Switzerland. Kirchner lived in Davos from 1918 to 1938, and was inspired to create many of his works there.
Bruno Stefanini was a Swiss real estate investor and art collector.
Media related to Kunstmuseum Bern at Wikimedia Commons
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