For greater than a half-century, Eberhard Kornfeld, a famend artwork auctioneer, broker, collector and student, presided over an annual June public sale underneath a tent adjacent his Galerie Kornfeld, which made its house in a brilliant Nineteenth-century mansion in Bern, Switzerland.
A two-day match, the public sale used to be a top level of the Swiss social season, at which Mr. Kornfeld — Ebi to nearly everybody who knew him — most often offered tens of millions of bucks of works via Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the More youthful, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and alternative used masters, in conjunction with the ones via more moderen artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.
But even so being an astute salesman, Mr. Kornfeld used to be a famous artwork historian and the writer of heralded monographs, together with a definitive 1979 find out about of the German Expressionist Kirchner.
“That’s what makes him such a seminal and unique figure in the art world,” Klaus Albrecht Schröder, the director basic of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, mentioned in an interview in 2010. Mr. Kornfeld’s interest for Kirchner led him to buy the artist’s house in Davos, Switzerland, and repair it as a museum containing a gigantic archive of Kirchner letters and works.
Mr. Kornfeld loved intense relationships with dwelling artists, whose works he amassed and offered. His Swiss compatriot, Alberto Giacometti, drew more than one portraits of Mr. Kornfeld and pleaded with him to write down a complete monograph about him. Mr. Kornfeld in the end did in order a co-author in 2010, lengthy upcoming the artist died.
Mr. Kornfeld himself died on April 13, 2023, at his house, at the outskirts of Bern, the rustic’s capital. His gallery introduced his demise quickly upcoming, nevertheless it used to be now not broadly reported and most effective lately got here to the eye of The Untouched York Occasions. He used to be 99.
On account of Mr. Kornfeld’s lengthy friendship with Chagall, the property of the artist’s daughter, Ida Chagall, became over 42 Chagall art work to Galerie Kornfeld on the market in 2006 rather of providing them to bigger public sale homes like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. And the American painter Sam Francis lived and labored at Mr. Kornfeld’s house for months at a past.
Mr. Kornfeld used to be additionally a defendant in decades-long litigation introduced via the heirs of a customery Viennese cabaret performer, Fritz Grünbaum, whose massive assortment used to be inventoried via Nazi brokers in 1938 upcoming he used to be despatched to the Dachau focus camp, the place he died 3 years after. It extra opaque how lots of the greater than 400 artistic endeavors within the assortment had been confiscated via the Nazis and what number of may were spirited out of Austria to Grünbaum relations in Belgium and Britain.
In 1956, 63 works via the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele from the Grünbaum assortment had been advertise via Mr. Kornfeld. Within the resulting felony battles over the provenance of the ones works, Mr. Kornfeld in 1998 produced what he mentioned had been letters and receipts documenting his acquire of the Schiele works from Mathilde Lukacs-Herzl, a sister-in-law of Mr. Grünbaum’s who had controlled to retirement the Nazis.
She died 20 years earlier than Mr. Kornfeld disclosed his documentation for the Schieles. The Grünbaum heirs insisted that the paperwork had been forgeries and that the artistic endeavors have been looted via the Nazis.
In 2011, the Federal District Courtroom for the Southern District of Untouched York reached a judgment on probably the most works in query — Schiele’s 1917 drawing “Seated Woman With Bent Left Leg (Torso)” — that exonerated Mr. Kornfeld and declared that he had exercised ample due diligence in buying the paintings.
However in 2018, a Untouched York Climate Ideal Courtroom pass judgement on, Charles J. Ramos, dominated in partial of the Grünbaum heirs in a free case involving two alternative Schiele works that have been offered via Mr. Kornfeld and ended up with a London broker, Richard Nagy. The pass judgement on forged hesitancy on Mr. Kornfeld’s documentation and ordered Mr. Nagy to show over to the heirs the 2 art work in query: “Woman in a Black Pinafore” (1911) and “Woman Hiding Her Face” (1912). In July 2019, a Untouched York appellate courtroom preserved Pass judgement on Ramos’s ruling.
The ruling didn’t mark the top of litigation involving the Grünbaum assortment. A number of sellers who personal lots of the Schieles offered via Mr. Kornfeld insisted that the works weren’t stolen, and so they won the backup of the German Misplaced Artwork Bedrock. The substructure, which operates a gigantic database of artwork more likely to were stolen via the Nazis, has been applauded for assisting the go back of works looted from Holocaust sufferers to their rightful house owners.
A Schiele can exit for up to $40 million, the cost paid at public sale in 2011 for the 1914 portray “Houses With Colorful Laundry (Suburb II).” (That portray, an city park, isn’t a few of the works related to Mr. Kornfeld.)
Over the extreme bundle years the Grünbaum heirs have recovered a lot of Schiele works offered via Mr. Kornfeld to museums, artwork sellers and creditors.
Mr. Kornfeld used to be born on Sept. 23, 1923, in Basel. He advanced an vision for artwork underneath his father, a a success inner fashion designer.
He used to be a teen when he started his lengthy occupation as a collector via collecting Neolithic stone equipment and fragments of historical Roman bronze artifacts discovered at archaeological digs close Basel. He studied archaeology on the College of Basel however dropped out to provide within the Swiss Military throughout International Conflict II as impartial Switzerland girded for a imaginable German invasion, which by no means passed off.
Nearest the warfare, Mr. Kornfeld turned into an apprentice at Gutekunst und Klipstein, a German public sale area that had relocated to Bern. As it had a robust recognition in used masters, he spent summers learning within the Renaissance and Baroque drawings and prints segments at museums in Amsterdam, Paris and London. “I looked at the Rembrandt etchings until I knew every detail about them,” he mentioned in an interview for this obituary in 2010.
He used to be quickly promoted to teenager spouse, and when the landlord, August Klipstein, died in 1951, Mr. Kornfeld took over the public sale area and in the end purchased out the Klipstein heirs.
The entire date he constructed a name for a nearly unerring vision in his drawing and print specialties, permitting him to fee top class costs. “Whatever passes through his hands is almost never questioned,” mentioned Paul Hahnloser, a Zurich collector.
But even so overseeing his public sale area and gallery, Mr. Kornfeld helped museums in Switzerland and alternative Ecu nations level primary presentations of drawings and etchings.
The Kornfeld place of dwelling, a former Fifteenth-century manor area with a stunning view of the Alps, used to be a veritable museum. Its 3 flooring had been cluttered with works via Francis, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. Etchings and engravings via Rembrandt and Dürer and drawings via Kirchner and Klee stuffed drawers. Stacked in opposition to the partitions via the bundle had been framed Giacomettis and Schieles that Mr. Kornfeld frequently pondered, one upcoming some other, date sitting in his favourite simple chair.
In 2006, he donated his complete Rembrandt assortment, together with greater than 100 etchings, to the Kunstmuseum Basel, in a while upcoming it staged an exhibition of the works. However he persisted to shop for extra Rembrandt etchings.
From a drawer in his area, he retrieved for a customer in 2010 a number of of the ones contemporary acquisitions, together with “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” “Christ Preaching” (higher referred to as “The Hundred Guilder Print”) and “Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves” (often referred to as “The Three Crosses”).
“I just didn’t want to live without them,” he defined.
