Swiss museum agrees to return masterpieces seized by Nazis

A museum in the Swiss capital will accept an art trove containing looted works bequeathed to it this year by German collector Cornelius Gurlitt, vowing to return art seized by the Nazis to their Jewish owners.

Kunstmuseum Bern said yesterday that it would keep the modernist art left to it by Gurlitt, who died in May. The museum agreed with the German government to continue efforts to find the rightful owners of works that had belonged to Jews before World War II and were confiscated by the Nazi regime.

The discovery of the more than 1,400 works in a 2012 raid by tax authorities at Gurlitt's apartment in Munich unearthed prints, paintings and sketches long given up as lost or destroyed under Adolf Hitler's rule. Gurlitt inherited the collection with an estimated value of more than €1 billion (HK$9.6 billion), including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin, from his father Hildebrand, one of four dealers authorised by the Nazis to sell confiscated art abroad.

In February, an additional 60 pieces were found in Gurlitt's house in Salzburg, Austria.

A taskforce set up by the German federal government and the state of Bavaria, which includes international art experts, is investigating the provenance of about 970 works from the trove, according to the website of the government agency that coordinates the investigation of lost cultural assets. The rest of the collection is thought to have been acquired legally.

Some 380 works are identified as possibly being art seized by the Nazis and scorned as "degenerate". Such works were removed from circulation in the 1930s and 1940s and taken primarily from museums as part of a campaign to ban modernist and abstract art. The other 590 works may have been stolen from their owners by Nazi officials, according to the website.