Heir Says Cézanne Watercolor Shown in Basel Was Lost During Nazi Era
A Paul Cézanne watercolor, La Montagne Sainte Victoire (ca. 1888), shown in a recent Cézanne exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel may have been lost by its Jewish owner due to Nazi-era persecution, according to provenance researcher Willi Korte working for the owner’s heir. Korte said Basel public-archive documents show Berlin businessman Gustav Schweitzer loaned the work to a 1936 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel, later asked the museum to safeguard it and help sell it, and after restoration and an unsuccessful sale attempt it was sent in 1939 to Schweitzer’s secretary in Paris, after which its fate is unclear. Schweitzer died in Manila in 1939; his secretary was deported from Paris in 1942 and killed at Auschwitz a week later, while Schweitzer’s wife fled to the US in 1938 and their US-based grandson is now the sole heir. The Fondation Beyeler said it would inform the private lender of the claim but return the work, citing a lack of legal authority to retain it and noting it was not on Germany’s Lost Art Database; historian Georg Kreis suggested mediation and warned the work could become difficult to sell under a “heavy cloud of suspicion.”
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