Eberhard Kornfeld, art dealer, collector and historian, has died at the age of 99
Settling in a 15th-century Swiss manor house, he became an expert on Old Masters and then contacted the heirs of a collector murdered by the Nazis.
For more than half a century, Eberhard Kornfeld, renowned auctioneer, dealer, collector, and scholar, directed the annual June auction under a tent adjacent to his Kornfeld Gallery, which was housed in a stately nineteenth-century mansion in Bern, Switzerland.
The two-day auction was the culmination of a Swiss social season in which Mr. Kornfeld - the Eby almost everyone knew - routinely sold millions of dollars worth of works by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and other old masters, as well as works by more modern artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.
In addition to being an astute salesman, Mr. Kornfeld was a noted art historian and the author of acclaimed monographs, including the definitive study of the German Expressionist Kirchner, published in 1979.
"That's what makes him such a significant and unique figure in the art world", Klaus Albrecht Schroeder, the director general of Vienna's Albertina Museum, said in a 2010 interview. His passion for Kirchner prompted Mr. Kornfeld to purchase the artist's home in Davos, Switzerland, and restore it as a museum containing an extensive archive of Kirchner's letters and works.
Mr. Kornfeld maintained close relationships with living artists whose works he collected and sold. His Swiss compatriot, Alberto Giacometti, painted many portraits of Mr. Kornfeld and begged him to write an extensive monograph about him. Finally, in 2010, well after the artist's death, Mr. Kornfeld co-authored it.
Mr. Kornfeld himself died on April 13, 2023, at his home on the outskirts of Bern, the nation's capital. His gallery announced his death shortly afterward, but it was not widely publicized and only recently revealed by The New York Times. He was 99 years old.