Gurlitt exhibition attracts droves of visitors

About 160 of the more than 1,500 artworks are on show in Bern until next March Keystone

A display of artworks of the controversial collection by Cornelius Gurlitt at the Fine Arts Museum in the Swiss capital, Bern, has been hailed as an early success.

The director of the Kunstmuseum, Nina Zimmer, is quoted as saying that more than 78,000 entries were recorded between November and the end of December. That’s more than 1,500 visitors a day.

The exhibition is to run until the beginning of March, when a second series of samplings of artworks from the Gurlitt legacy – currently shown in the German city of Bonn – will be on show in Bern.

The Swiss museum inherited the collection with a total of about 1,500 artworks following the death of Gurlitt in 2014. A legal wrangle temporarily delayed the museum’s acceptance of the controversial collection dating back to the Nazi era in neighbouring Germany.

The Bern exhibition includes about 160 works of art by some of the great international names, including Wassily Kandinsky, along with famous German painters.

“The works of art seem fresh because they have never been shown in public before,” Zimmer is quoted by the German DPA news agency.

She adds that the focus of the exhibition is to put it in a historical context of Nazi Germany’s politics of persecution and “degenerate art” as well as the latest findings in research of confiscated cultural goods.