“Is the Artwork Bought by Dad Looted?”

Some lives are prolonged beyond your existence. Bruno Stefanini’s (1924-2018) breaks those limits. He was a self-made Swiss businessman who made a fortune in real estate. Although no one will remember him for that. For decades he assembled an eccentric collection that includes buildings, works of art, castles, the toothbrush that Napoleon presumably used at Waterloo or, bordering on the darkest seams of taste, the clothes worn by defendants and prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. after the Second World War. He was obsessed with contention and hoarding.

An addiction, that of collecting, transformed into 100,000 pieces. Among them, 6,000 oil paintings on canvas. Many worthless. He bought as eagerly at an auction house as he did at a flea market. Others, on the other hand, were signed by Ferdinand Hodler, Albert Anker, Félix Vallotton, Niki de Saint Phalle or Augusto Giacometti. Everything interested him. From the Stone Age to the reproduction of a circus the size of an apartment. Also machine guns, aerial bombs, grenades, pistols or a tank. He even purchased the desk where President John F. Kennedy signed the 1963 partial nuclear weapons test ban agreement. He stored most of it in a huge cave built under his Swiss castle of Brestenberg. Some explosives are still there. Hundreds of works are still unopened, in the original boxes of the auction houses, and may contain anything from toxic to radioactive products. Nobody knows.

But in all existence a crack opens, a fracture from which it is impossible to return. “In 1971, his wife abandoned him with their two children because she reproached him for being an alcoholic at work and having no time for the family,” recalls his daughter, Bettina Stefanini, by videoconference from the Swiss city of Winterthur. . In her diaries he writes: “Life has ceased to be fun.” The construction business was hampered by regulation, and he returned—just like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane- to childhood. The happiest days of him. Your particular Rosebud.

Bettina works in that lost paradise that is childhood. In 1980 her father created the Foundation for Art, Culture and History (SKKG, according to its German acronym) in order to share the collection. Six months before Bruno Stefanini passed away, Bettina took over. In 2021 they began to register and restore the funds. Some 80 people from the team cataloged 221,261 pieces over 18 months. Now they face a unique challenge: filtering the collection to discover works looted from Jews or sold to flee Nazi persecution.

An independent group of experts will decide on possible refunds. Between July 2022 and December this year, seven researchers will have examined 700 paintings. “We still do not know how many works have been looted. We think few because many are Swiss artists. But more than 20,000 on paper still have to be inventoried”, predicts Bettina. For now, 6 of the 93 jobs that have raised suspicions require further investigation. The pieces with a crystalline history will be moved to the new headquarters of the foundation called Campo (near Winterthur), which will be finished in 2027. But they will not open a museum. “There are already many fantastic ones in Switzerland”, clarifies the collector’s daughter. They have loans in 45 Swiss institutions and last year they left 160 pieces. But the extraordinary thing is to look for looting in an immense collection. Without excuses. “Many institutions and States are not very brave when they have to return looted works”, laments Bettina Stefanini. She knows that her search is an important punctuation mark in the very long sentence of doing justice to the despoiled Jews.