For greater than a half-century, Eberhard Kornfeld, a famend artwork auctioneer, seller, collector and scholar, presided over an annual June public sale below a tent adjoining his Galerie Kornfeld, which made its residence in a grand Nineteenth-century mansion in Bern, Switzerland.
A two-day occasion, the public sale was a excessive level of the Swiss social season, at which Mr. Kornfeld — Ebi to virtually everybody who knew him — sometimes bought thousands and thousands of {dollars} of works by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Youthful, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and different previous masters, together with these by more moderen artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.
Moreover being an astute salesman, Mr. Kornfeld was a famous artwork historian and the writer of heralded monographs, together with a definitive 1979 examine of the German Expressionist Kirchner.
“That’s what makes him such a seminal and distinctive determine within the artwork world,” Klaus Albrecht Schröder, the director common of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, mentioned in an interview in 2010. Mr. Kornfeld’s ardour for Kirchner led him to buy the artist’s residence in Davos, Switzerland, and restore it as a museum containing an unlimited archive of Kirchner letters and works.
Mr. Kornfeld loved intense relationships with dwelling artists, whose works he collected and bought. His Swiss compatriot, Alberto Giacometti, drew a number of portraits of Mr. Kornfeld and pleaded with him to put in writing a complete monograph about him. Mr. Kornfeld lastly did in order a co-author in 2010, lengthy after the artist died.
Mr. Kornfeld himself died on April 13, 2023, at his residence, on the outskirts of Bern, the nation’s capital. His gallery introduced his dying quickly after, nevertheless it was not broadly reported and solely not too long ago got here to the eye of The New York Occasions. He was 99.
Due to Mr. Kornfeld’s lengthy friendship with Chagall, the property of the artist’s daughter, Ida Chagall, turned over 42 Chagall work to Galerie Kornfeld on the market in 2006 as an alternative 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 residence for months at a time.
Mr. Kornfeld was additionally a defendant in decades-long litigation introduced by the heirs of a well-liked Viennese cabaret performer, Fritz Grünbaum, whose giant assortment was inventoried by Nazi brokers in 1938 after he was despatched to the Dachau focus camp, the place he died three years later. It stays unclear how lots of the greater than 400 artworks within the assortment had been confiscated by the Nazis and what number of may need been spirited out of Austria to Grünbaum family in Belgium and Britain.
In 1956, 63 works by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele from the Grünbaum assortment had been put up on the market by Mr. Kornfeld. Within the ensuing authorized battles over the provenance of these works, Mr. Kornfeld in 1998 produced what he mentioned had been letters and receipts documenting his buy of the Schiele works from Mathilde Lukacs-Herzl, a sister-in-law of Mr. Grünbaum’s who had managed to flee 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 artworks had been looted by the Nazis.
In 2011, the Federal District Courtroom for the Southern District of New York reached a judgment on one of many works in query — Schiele’s 1917 drawing “Seated Lady With Bent Left Leg (Torso)” — that exonerated Mr. Kornfeld and declared that he had exercised ample due diligence in buying the work.
However in 2018, a New York State Supreme Courtroom choose, Charles J. Ramos, dominated in favor of the Grünbaum heirs in a separate case involving two different Schiele works that had been bought by Mr. Kornfeld and ended up with a London seller, Richard Nagy. The choose solid doubt on Mr. Kornfeld’s documentation and ordered Mr. Nagy to show over to the heirs the 2 work in query: “Lady in a Black Pinafore” (1911) and “Lady Hiding Her Face” (1912). In July 2019, a New York appellate courtroom upheld Decide Ramos’s ruling.
The ruling didn’t mark the tip of litigation involving the Grünbaum assortment. A number of sellers who personal lots of the Schieles bought by Mr. Kornfeld insisted that the works weren’t stolen, and so they acquired the help of the German Misplaced Artwork Basis. The muse, which operates an unlimited database of artwork prone to have been stolen by the Nazis, has been applauded for aiding the return of works looted from Holocaust victims to their rightful house owners.
A Schiele can go for as a lot as $40 million, the value paid at public sale in 2011 for the 1914 portray “Homes With Colourful Laundry (Suburb II).” (That portray, an city panorama, isn’t among the many works linked to Mr. Kornfeld.)
Over the past dozen years the Grünbaum heirs have recovered quite a few Schiele works bought by Mr. Kornfeld to museums, artwork sellers and collectors.
Mr. Kornfeld was born on Sept. 23, 1923, in Basel. He developed an eye fixed for artwork below his father, a profitable inside designer.
He was an adolescent when he started his lengthy profession as a collector by gathering Neolithic stone instruments and fragments of historical Roman bronze artifacts discovered at archaeological digs close to Basel. He studied archaeology on the College of Basel however dropped out to serve within the Swiss Military throughout World Battle II as impartial Switzerland girded for a doable German invasion, which by no means occurred.
After the struggle, Mr. Kornfeld grew to become an apprentice at Gutekunst und Klipstein, a widely known German public sale home that had relocated to Bern. As a result of it had a powerful repute in previous masters, he spent summers finding out within the Renaissance and Baroque drawings and prints departments at museums in Amsterdam, Paris and London. “I appeared on the Rembrandt etchings till I knew each element about them,” he mentioned in an interview for this obituary in 2010.
He was quickly promoted to junior associate, and when the proprietor, August Klipstein, died in 1951, Mr. Kornfeld took over the public sale home and ultimately purchased out the Klipstein heirs.
All of the whereas he constructed a repute for an virtually unerring eye in his drawing and print specialties, permitting him to cost premium costs. “No matter passes by means of his fingers is nearly by no means questioned,” mentioned Paul Hahnloser, a Zurich collector.
Moreover overseeing his public sale home and gallery, Mr. Kornfeld helped museums in Switzerland and different European international locations stage main reveals of drawings and etchings.
The Kornfeld residence, a former Fifteenth-century manor home with a splendid view of the Alps, was a veritable museum. Its three flooring had been cluttered with works by Francis, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. Etchings and engravings by Rembrandt and Dürer and drawings by Kirchner and Klee crammed drawers. Stacked towards the partitions by the dozen had been framed Giacomettis and Schieles that Mr. Kornfeld usually contemplated, one after one other, whereas sitting in his favourite simple chair.
In 2006, he donated his complete Rembrandt assortment, together with greater than 100 etchings, to the Kunstmuseum Basel, shortly after it staged an exhibition of the works. However he continued to purchase extra Rembrandt etchings.
From a drawer in his home, he retrieved for a customer in 2010 a number of of these current acquisitions, together with “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” “Christ Preaching” (higher often called “The Hundred Guilder Print”) and “Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves” (also called “The Three Crosses”).
“I simply didn’t wish to reside with out them,” he defined.
