Bern, Bonn museums will show Dossier Gurlitt together

Simultaneous double exhibition of art collection which a German kept hidden from the world for decades will be shown at museums in Switzerland and Germany later this year, Switzerland's Kunstmuseum Bern announced Wednesday. The content of the exhibitions at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn and at the Kunstmuseum Bern is closely coordinated. 

The Swiss museum, which Gurlitt designated as his sole heir, announced it would co-host the "Dossier Gurlitt" shows together with the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn.

The Museum of Fine Arts in the Swiss capital, Bern, and the Art and Exhibition Hall in the German city of Bonn will hold concurrent exhibitions from November 2017 to March 2018.

The long-awaited exhibitions were scheduled after a Munich court ruled in December that Mr. Gurlitt, who died in May 2014, had been of sound mind when he bequeathed his collection of roughly 1,500 works to the Kunstmuseum Bern.

His collection included paintings by Paul Cezanne, Eugene Delacroix, Albrecht Duerer and other world-famous artists. Experts said several of the paintings likely were stolen from Jews by German Nazis.

The 2013 discovery brought renewed attention to the many unresolved cases of art that was looted from Jewish owners during the Third Reich and never returned to original owners or their descendants.

The collection was amassed by Mr. Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, and was concealed until the autumn of 2013, when the weekly magazine Focus reported that the authorities had stumbled on it during a tax investigation.

After his father's death, Gurlitt kept more than 1,200 works in his Munich apartment and 250 more in Salzburg, Austria.  The Bern museum has pledged to ensure that any pieces that turn out to have been looted will be returned to Jewish owners' heirs.