What art can head to Bern now?

The end of legal wrangling over Cornelius Gurlitt’s cache of more than 1,500 artworks has finally clarified the path ahead for eventually delivering it to the Bern Museum of Fine Arts, but some obstacles still remain. Until now, it has remained in a Munich storage facility, out of public view. The question is: What can enter the museum’s possession immediately? The short answer: Not all of it. The collection – Otto Dix, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky – reads like a Who’s Who of modernism. Nevertheless, its range is wider: it also includes some important Dutch Old Masters, a work by Albrecht Dürer and Japanese woodcarvings.  Research, then return Under the terms of an agreement that the museum signed with the German government, a German research team will continue investigating the provenance of the collection. Artwork that is proven to have been looted, or that has a “high probability” of it, cannot enter ...