Switzerland is again at the center of a dispute over an art trove acquired during the Nazi era, as the Basel Art Museum reconsiders demands that it return a Jewish art historian's collection to his descendants.
It rejected the family's restitution bid in 2008.
The museum owns 120 drawings and prints, including a "Madonna" lithograph from Edvard Munch potentially worth millions of dollars, that belonged to Curt Glaser, a German Jewish art historian who auctioned the works in 1933 after losing his job heading the Prussian State Art Library in Berlin and being evicted from his home in the first wave of Nazi anti-Semitic laws. Glaser fled Germany for Switzerland, and later emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1943, at age 64.
Basel Art Museum director Josef Helfenstein has called up a task force after Glaser's heirs demanded the case be reopened, citing newly unearthed documents they say underscore their claims.
"We hope it won't be put on the back burner so everybody forgets about it again," said Valerie Sattler, a great-niece of Glaser's.
The city, which owns the art, may announce a meeting with the family and its lawyer as early as this week, a museum spokeswoman said on Monday.
Scrutiny of Jewish-owned art sold for low prices or stolen by the Nazis is nothing new in Switzerland. So-called "degenerate art" amassed by the Nazis' art dealer, Hildebrand Gurlitt, and given to a Bern museum in 2014 has been on display since November.
For decades, Sattler's family in the United States, Brazil and Germany has petitioned museums and private owners around the world to return the art Glaser sold before fleeing Germany.
Some, including Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and Cologne's Ludwig Museum, have cooperated.
Last month, Bartholomaeus Spranger's 16th century "Mercury Carrying Psyche to Mount Olympus" was sold at Christie's in London for $3.85 million in a deal with a private owner in Germany.
But the family has faced rejection too, including in Basel.
Ten years ago, Basel officials wrote that the museum had "absolutely no evidence" the art belonged to Glaser and that it paid "period-typical" prices for it.
Glaser's heirs now cite the minutes of a June 1933 Basel Art Commission meeting describing works "from the Glaser auction," indicating that the museum knew the source. The minutes, dug up by Swiss state broadcaster SRG, also describe a "good opportunity at cheap prices."
Museum spokeswoman Karen Gerig said the task force aims to understand how Basel arrived at its conclusions a decade ago. It will make a recommendation to the city.
"We have in mind the whole moral situation, to try to figure out ... why this auction happened and when he [Glaser] decided to sell," Gerig said.
Felix Uhlmann, president of the Basel museum's art commission, said a decision could take six months to accommodate meetings with the family, gathering any new evidence and scrutinising how museums in Germany, the Netherlands and Britain handled similar claims involving Glaser's collection.
"On the outcome, it's really an open process," Uhlmann said in a phone interview on Monday. "Otherwise, we would not do this."
Much rides on the case, given that Glaser's heirs dispute ownership of valuable works elsewhere in Switzerland.
In 1941, Glaser sold Munch's "Music on Karl Johan Street" to the Zurich Museum for Modern Art for 12,000 francs. The family contends the transaction was forced as a cash-strapped Glaser fled Europe for the United States.
Sattler, a U.S.-born cellist with the Nuremberg Symphony in the city where Adolf Hitler once staged massive Nazi party rallies, said her family was treated shabbily by Basel in 2008.
Officials called them "supposed heirs" and "distant relatives" and argued that Germany's Jews began unloading art at fire-sale prices only after 1938, long after the Glaser auction.
"It's impossible to deny he was a victim," Sattler said.
