The story
The Kunstmuseum Bern, opened in 1879, holds the oldest permanent art collection in Switzerland, eight centuries of it, from Fra Angelico and Italian gold-ground panels through to Hodler, Klee, Picasso and Pollock. For most of its life it was a solid, quiet regional museum.
Then in 2014 it received a startling inheritance. Cornelius Gurlitt, a reclusive old man whose Munich flat had been found stuffed with more than a thousand artworks, left the entire hoard to Bern in a secret will. His father had been one of the dealers the Nazis used to sell art, and much of the trove needed years of research into whether it had been taken from Jewish owners.
The museum accepted the legacy along with that burden, and has returned works shown to be looted. It remains a working city museum, strongest of all in the Bernese painter Ferdinand Hodler.
