The overseers of the Emil G. Bührle collection have reached a settlement with the heirs of a Jewish collector over a Nazi-looted Édouard Manet painting, ARTnews reported on Thursday.
The painting, Manet’s La Sultane (c.1871), is one of the 205 pieces from the collection that have been loaned to Kunsthaus Zurich since 2012, where it may remain according to the new settlement.
Bührle, of the collection’s namesake, was a German Swiss manufacturer who sold weapons to both Allied and Nazi Germany forces during the Second World War. His arms dealing led him to become Switzerland’s wealthiest man at the time. He both directly and indirectly benefited from slave labor in concentration camps, the report said. He was also allegedly known to have purchased a slew of Nazi-looted art.
The museum housing the La Sultane opened a new wing for this specific collection in 2021, leading to a number of public protests. This led artists, including Miriam Cahn, to threaten to remove their work from the institution.
“I no longer want to be represented in ‘this’ art museum in Zurich,” Cahn, who is Jewish, wrote in her 2021 open letter. “I wish to remove all my works from the Zurich Art Museum. I will buy them back at the original sale price.”
The backlash led the city of Zurich and museum trustees to commission a report from the president of the German Historical Museum, Raphael Gross. His report found that over a quarter of the 205 loaned pieces appeared to belong to Jewish owners. He called the collection “tainted on a scale that is possibly unique in Switzerland.”
His report advised that research on the pieces and collection be continued. Gross also recommended that the Kunsthaus initiate a public debate on the collection’s loan and that the museum set up a committee to adhere to the Washington Principles, the nonbinding principles that representatives of 44 nations and 13 NGOs agreed to in 1988, according to the ARTnews report.
The first of these said principles was that any art confiscated by the Nazis, and not subsequently restituted needed to be identified.
Settlement reached over painting
In June 2024, the collection’s foundation announced their intention to reach a settlement with the heirs of the Jewish owners of the work in the collection. This was for five impressionist works, with the sixth as Manet’s La Sultane, seeking a symbolic settlement as the initial owner was the late Jewish collector Max Silberberg.
Art dealer Paul Rosenberg sold La Sultane to Bührle in 1953, who purchased it from Silberberg 16 years prior.
This was just one of more than 250 pieces of artwork hanging in his villa in Poland before the SS forced him to sell his property in 1935. In 1942, he and his wife were deported to Auschwitz, where they were killed.
The foundation issued a statement claiming that Silberberg sold the painting before Hitler rose to power and that the sale was not due to Nazi persecution.
His legal successor, the Gerta Silberberg Discretionary Trust, said that the sale was the result of Nazi persecution.
