The buyer?

Hildebrand.

Kirchner had killed himself by then, and Hildebrand, notwithstanding his own part-Jewish ancestry and modernist affiliations, had been hired as one of Hitler’s private art dealers, gobbling up stolen and other works to glorify the Führer while surreptitiously pocketing what he liked for himself.

The Allies only rewarded his finagling after the war by deciding that the art expunged from German museums didn’t have to be returned. (You can’t loot yourself, was the logic.) Hildebrand, and then — by inheritance — Cornelius, could rightly claim to be the owner of “Two Nudes” along with other pictures that once belonged in public collections.

Hildebrand even lent the Kirchner to a show in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 1953. There’s a photograph in the Bern exhibition of that show. Like “Gurlitt: Status Report,” it recounted the Nazi campaign against modernism. I looked around at the visitors in Bern studying the wall texts explaining the Nazis and art. The museumgoers in the photograph, wearing pillbox hats and baggy suits, were doing the same. What’s that metaphor about rowing? You can’t move forward without looking back?