Foundation E.G. Bührle


The Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection is an art museum in Zürich, Switzerland. It was established by the Bührle family to make Emil Georg Bührle's collection of European sculptures and paintings available to the public. The museum is in a villa adjoining Bührle's former home.

Collections

Although the collection includes a number of Old Masters and Modern art including works by Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, it comprises mainly French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism paintings by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Alfred Sisley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh and others.

Gallery

Art theft

On 10 February 2008, four paintings worth CHF 180 million were stolen from the museum. The four paintings were: Cézanne's The Boy in the Red Vest, Degas' Count Lepic and His Daughters, Monet's Poppies near Vétheuil and Van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches.
All four paintings were eventually recovered. Monet's Poppies near Vétheuil and Van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches were recovered on February 18, 2008 in a car parked in the parking lot of a nearby hospital. Cézanne's "The Boy in the Red Vest" was recovered in Serbia on April 12, 2012. Count Lepic and His Daughters was recovered in April 2012 with slight damage. In 2012, three men were arrested in connection with the theft.

The "Bührle Black Book" controversy

In a 2015 publication entitled The Bührle Black Book, Thomas Buomberger and Guido Magnaguagno called for an investigation into Nazi era provenance gaps in a number of paintings in the Bührle collection. The Foundation had been working with provenance researcher Laurie A Stein since 2002 to update the ownership history of the collection and to publish it online.