Eberhard Kornfeld, a Swiss art dealer, auctioneer and collector, bequeathed five paintings to the Kunstmuseum in Bern, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1919 work Junkerboden and a 1965 portrait by Alberto Giacometti, Caroline.
The other paintings in the bequest, which is due to go on display in the Kunstmuseum from Friday, are Alfred Sisley’s 1893 Church in Moret Sur Loing, Sam Francis’s Blue, Red and Yellow (1958), and a 1909 self-portrait by Giovanni Giacometti.
Kornfeld was a long-standing patron of the Kunstmuseum and had previously donated graphic works by Maurice de Vlaminck and Alfred Kubin and a mobile by Alexander Calder.
Giovanni Giacometti, Self-portrait (1909)
Nina Zimmer, the director of the museum, said the paintings in the bequest were “carefully selected” by Kornfeld. “Each work fills a gap in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern,” she said in a statement.
Kornfeld built up a large personal collection over a career that spanned eight decades. He began working as a dealer in Bern in the 1940s and was involved in the founding of Art Basel and the creation of the Kirchner Museum in Davos. He counted Marc Chagall, Giacometti and Pablo Picasso among his friends.
He received much unwelcome media attention after the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt was revealed to the public in 2013. Gurlitt inherited his collection from his father, a dealer who purchased art for the Nazis and acquired some works looted from Jewish people.
Kornfeld’s business contacts with the reclusive Gurlitt dated back to at least the 1980s, and he is thought to have influenced Gurlitt’s decision to bequeath his own collection to the Bern Kunstmuseum in 2014.