Kunsthaus Zurich Reopens the Emil Bührle Collection With Van Gogh Masterworks and Provenance Questions
The Emil Bührle Collection has been completely redisplayed at Kunsthaus Zurich, where it remains on long-term loan, and the new presentation places one of Europe’s most scrutinized private collections back in public view. The installation includes 205 works, among them five paintings by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), one forgery, a sixth Van Gogh now under conservation, and a seventh that has been withdrawn because of a Nazi-era issue.
The Bührle holdings are often described as the strongest private group of Van Gogh paintings on public view, with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia sometimes cited as the only serious rival. The collection offers a broad cross-section of the artist’s career, but it also carries the weight of its history. Emil Bührle (1890–1956), the Swiss industrialist and arms dealer behind the collection, made much of his fortune through the Oerlikon-Bührle armaments company, selling weapons from neutral Switzerland during the Second World War and afterward.
That history matters because Bührle acquired many works during the Nazi period and the immediate postwar years, including pictures that had belonged to persecuted Jewish owners. Although provenance research has been published for the collection, questions remain around several works, and the museum has continued to present the collection with that tension in view.
Among the Van Goghs on display are “The Bührle Self-portrait” (summer 1887), which Van Gogh originally gave to his friend Emile Bernard; “Head of a Peasant” (March 1885), the earliest Van Gogh in the collection; “The Bridges of Asnières” (May–July 1887), bought by Bührle in 1951 through Marlborough Fine Art for £18,000; and “The Sower at Sunset” (November 1888), one of the collection’s acknowledged masterpieces. “Branches of blossoming Almond” was stolen in 2008 and later recovered, while “The Old Tower” was withdrawn from Kunsthaus Zurich in 2024 after a Nazi-era issue emerged.
The result is a display that is visually rich and historically unsettled. It offers a rare chance to see major Van Gogh works together, while also reminding visitors that the story of a collection can be inseparable from the circumstances that made it possible.
