EIt is like waking suddenly from the sleep of the self-righteous. Suddenly Swiss museum people dare to go into their own archives and wipe the dust off the files. It was unthinkable just ten years ago that the Basel Art Museum would invite visitors to take a critical look at the exemplary, accurate listing of the great pictures that the then museum director Georg Schmidt had taken from the inventory of “degenerate” art confiscated by the Nazis for his house at the end of the 1930s. saved”.
“Rescue” was the code word that stifled all critical inquiries for a long time. The notorious auction of the Theodor Fischer gallery in Lucerne in June 1939, at which 125 of the 21,000 paintings and graphics stolen from German museums were offered as “art of international value”, was and has always been extensively researched by the Basel historian Georg Kreis and even then there were concerns as to how moral business with fascist Germany would be, especially since the overpowering neighbor was preparing for war.
But the soothing rhetoric that the eminent works of art had at least been saved from destruction prevailed. In fact, with the exception of 780 works left to the Nazi art dealers Hildebrand Gurlitt and Karl Buchholz to procure foreign currency, the entire museum robbery was burned on March 20, 1939 in the courtyard of Schönhausen Palace in Berlin.
Georg Schmidt himself never had any doubts about his mission. With a special credit of 50,000 Swiss francs, which would be the equivalent of a million today, he traveled to Lucerne and bought eight works at the auction, including Paula Modersohn’s “Self-Portrait as a Half-Nude” from 1906, which belongs to the Kestner Museum in Hanover Otto Dix’s “Portrait of the Parents” (1921), which was confiscated from the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, or Marc Chagall’s “La Prize (Rabbi)” from 1923 from the Kunsthalle Mannheim.
Marc Chagall, “Die Prise (Rabbi)”, 1923-1926
Source: Kunstmuseum Basel/© 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich/Photo Martin P. Bühler
Alongside the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Liège, Basel was the auction star. No one else was as diligently and successfully involved as the Basel museum director, who had only recently taken up his post with the firm intention of expanding his house, which had previously only scored with the famous old master collection, into a respected haven of modernism.
In this respect, it is not surprising that Lucerne should only be the beginning. What was hardly known until today, how close the cooperation with the shrewd Nazi art dealers actually was. Gurlitt and Buchholz came to Basel, Schmidt visited Schönhausen, and the most important purchases were made without an international auction audience. Franz Marc’s “Animal Destiny” (1916, formerly the Municipal Museum for Arts and Crafts, Halle) had already been acquired before Lucerne. And a fortnight after the auction, a truckload of exquisite paintings crossed the border to be lined up in the museum’s skylight room for selection.
Georg Schmidt grabbed it again and decided to use the rest of his budget for twelve pictures that made the deal absolutely perfect: above all Oskar Kokoschka’s “Windsbraut” from the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Max Beckmann’s “Das Nizza in Frankfurt”, the was stolen from the Städel, or Louis Corinth’s grandiose “Ecce Homo” from the Berlin National Gallery. All of a sudden, a collection of modern art was created on the Upper Rhine that could not be found in any European museum at the time. And pride smothered all burgeoning shame at having done beneficial business for both sides with a sinister, unjust state.
Basel was by no means alone in terms of shamelessness or, to put it mildly, in terms of carelessness. Elsewhere in the foothills of the Alps, no one wanted to bring disturbing unrest into the discarded history. For decades, the capital pictures of the Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Bührle hung in a well-visited Zurich private museum, and nobody cared that the senior boss of the company had become the richest Swiss thanks to flourishing orders from the Hitler administration, and certainly nobody wanted to know who did it sold his priceless classics of modern art.
Max Beckmann, „Kreuzabnahme“, 1917
Source: Kunstmuseum Basel/The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Seen as a whole, this applies to all Swiss museums, which for a long time kept a low profile when it came to the origin of their collections. It was mainly wealthy private individuals who bequeathed them their treasures of paintings. And since it was always the well-known international art trade where the collectors procured themselves, nobody asked about the origin of the pictures. It was a neutral foreign country, far removed from the uprising against modernity that had been organized in Nazi Germany.
In the meantime, significant concerns have surfaced. The trigger was Cornelius Gurlitt’s lifelong hidden art collection, which was bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Bern and caught the well-behaved house completely unprepared. Suddenly one was drawn into the reconstruction of former Jewish art collections, and the old pacification formulas no longer allowed debate. Bern reacted with impressive determination.
The Gurlitt study is one of the prime examples of meticulous provenance research and has contributed enormously to raising awareness. The fact that the Bührle pictures, now large and representatively installed in the new Zurich Kunsthaus, are regarded by the local public as a rather embarrassing inheritance has to do with the heightened awareness of history, the fate of which even a happy country like Switzerland has not remained untouched by .
And the Basel exhibition follows directly from there. Never before have the purchases in 1939 been discussed so self-critically. Together with an instructive documentation on the life of the collector Curt Glaser, it is one of the highlights of recent exhibition policy. Before he emigrated in 1933, Glaser had to have a large part of his collection auctioned off, and the art museum acquired around 200 drawings and graphic sheets at the time. In the meantime, the claims of the community of heirs within the meaning of the “Washington Declaration” have been settled by mutual agreement.
The museum kept the artworks and gave financial compensation in return. As far as “degenerate modernism” is concerned, which was stolen from its museum owners and sold to Basel, the legal position, as the lawyers say, is clear. To this day, of course, no one has ever had the idea of allowing the “Windsbraut” to go home again and let her travel to Hamburg, even if only for a few months.