In a Dramatic About-Face, the Kunstmuseum Basel Will Compensate the Heirs of a Jewish Collector for Disputed Works in Its Collection

The Kunstmuseum Basel has
had a change of heart.

The Swiss museum had long defended its decision to purchase some
200 works on paper owned by Jewish collector Curt Glaser at a
Berlin auction in 1933. Now, 12 years after rejecting a restitution
claim from Glaser’s heirs, the museum has agreed to a settlement
totaling an undisclosed sum.

The collection is estimated to be worth more than $2 million and
features works by Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann, Auguste Rodin, Marc
Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Erich Heckel,
according to the New York
Times. Highlights include a pair of lithographs by
Edvard Munch, Glaser’s close
friend, titled Self Portrait and
Madonna.

Glaser got his start as an art critic in 1902 before working at
the Royal Gallery of Prints in Berlin. In 1924, he became the
director of Berlin’s Kunstbibliothek, the city’s art library. He
lost that job in 1933 after the Nazis came to power, and fled the
country, first to Paris and then to the US, where he died in
1943.

Before leaving Berlin, Glaser sold most of his collection at Max
Perl auction house, including the 200 or so works acquired by
curator Otto Fischer on behalf of Basel’s public collections.

The Glaser heirs first sought restitution in 2004. At that time,
the Kunstmuseum insisted their purchase of Glaser’s collection was
made in good faith and at market prices.

But since the Kunstmuseum opted against restitution in 2008,
several other museums have returned art to Glaser’s heirs,
including the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2014, the Hamburg
Kunsthalle in 2015 and 2018, and Berlin’s State Museums in
2016.

The issue of Nazi-related restitution became headline news in
Switzerland when Cornelius Gurlitt left his collection of
potentially looted art to the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2014, forcing the
museum to vet each work carefully to determine if it had been
lawfully acquired.

The Basel Art Commission, the Kunstmuseum Basel’s advisory
committee, decided it was worth taking a second look.

“The Gurlitt case opened up lots of questions and prompted us to
look more closely at the legal basis for restitution decisions,”
Felix Uhlmann, the commission’s president, told the Times.
“We also looked at how other institutions had responded to Glaser
claims, and saw that some had reached different conclusions to the
Basel decision in 2008. So we thought we must at the very least
revisit this case.”

In reassessing the Glaser claim, investigators uncovered minutes
from 1933 museum meetings discussing the acquisition. Those present
described the Glaser works as being offered at “cheap,” if not
“fire-sale prices.”

The Kunstmuseum told the Times it is planning
to work with the family on a 2022 exhibition that highlight’s
Glaser’s accomplishments as “a collector, art historian, critic,
and museum director.”

The post In a Dramatic About-Face, the Kunstmuseum Basel
Will Compensate the Heirs of a Jewish Collector for Disputed Works
in Its Collection appeared first on artnet News.