When a Bern museum inherited a spectacular collection of around 1,600 works of art, including works by masters such as Monet, Gauguin and Picasso, it spent seven months considering whether to accept the offer.

The collection, donated to the Kunstmuseum in 2014 by Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father Hildebrand Gurlitt worked as an art dealer for the Nazis, also included works looted from Jewish property during World War II.

A new exhibition, “Taking Stock. Gurlitt in Retrospect,” explores the museum’s journey in researching the provenance of the pieces and the challenges of determining its commitments in the face of Gurlitt’s tumultuous legacy.

The exhibition, which will run from Friday to mid-January, comes after the museum reached an agreement last year on how to deal with works whose origins remained unclear.

She abandoned 38 works known or suspected to have been looted by the Nazis, but chose to keep 1,091 pieces for which provenance information was incomplete but gave no evidence of looting.

Some have criticized the decision as immoral, but the museum hit back, emphasizing the “great responsibility” it assumed in accepting the Gurlitt legacy.

“We developed categories in order to be able to make a reasonable decision” based on provenance and possible evidence of looting, said Marcel Brulhart, member of the museum’s board of directors and legal expert, during a presentation of the exhibit.

“I think we found a fair solution.”

Cornelius Gurlitt, who lived in a crowded Munich apartment surrounded by paintings by Chagall and Matisse, suddenly found himself in the limelight after German tax authorities discovered part of his collection in 2012.

Before he died in 2014 at the age of 81, the man described by the media as an eccentric recluse reached an agreement with the federal government that looted works would be returned to their rightful owners.

The Bern museum, which he named his sole heir, said it would honor that request and set about determining the provenance of each piece.

There is evidence that some of the works were confiscated from Jews by the Nazis and resold, confiscated as “degenerate” works, or sold at a low price by their fleeing Jewish owners.

“It is an illusion to think that we will ever have full insight into the provenance of the artworks,” Brulhart told AFP.

“The story is progressing and many documents have been destroyed.”

He emphasized that Hildebrand Gurlitt had collected art all his life, but only worked for the Third Reich “to a very limited extent”.

Brulhart said he felt the Gurlitt affair marked a real “watershed moment” by showing that it was possible to find fair solutions in cases where insight into a piece’s provenance was incomplete.

With the provenance research project, which is unique in the world, attention was paid to “total transparency” right from the start, said museum director Nina Zimmer.

She has endeavored to reassess previous expertise when new information emerges and sought fair solutions with potential rightsholders, even in cases where provenance is not fully clarified, she said.

So far, 11 works have been restituted, including a long-lost Matisse painting Seated Woman, which was returned to the family of the late art dealer Paul Rosenberg in 2015.

Almost 30 works are still controversial, said Brulhart.

After 2017 and 2018, the current exhibition is the third at Museum Bern to focus on the Gurlitt Collection.

It goes into detail about the ethical guidelines, legal framework and results of the research project on the Gurlitt Fund, curator Nikola Doll told AFP.

In 14 individual themed rooms, it presents around 350 pieces, including historical documents associated with the extensive legacy from national archives in Germany, France and Switzerland.

Artworks from the collection on display include works by masters such as Cezanne, Kandinsky, Munch and Rodin.