(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-02-12 14:26

A five-year, Swiss government study released in 2001 said Buehrle had acquired an unknown amount of "flight art" _ works smuggled out of Axis-controlled areas by Jews and sold at rock-bottom prices to avoid confiscation by the Nazis.

"We couldn't examine the flight art acquisitions of Emil G. Buehrle systematically," the study into Switzerland's wartime cooperation with the Nazis said. But it added: "In general, there was more flight art available than looted art" and this was reflected in collections such as Buehrle's.

Daniel Heller, author of "Between Company, Politics and Survival: Emil G. Buehrle and the Machine Tool Factory Oerlikon, Buehrle & Co. 1924-1945," said Buehrle repurchased 77 paintings after the war from a Jewish dealer, after the Swiss high court ruled the works had been stolen.

The museum's catalog refers to those pieces as "acquired in 1951 from a private French collection," Heller said.

The current collection is housed in a villa adjoining Buehrle's former home where he stored art before his death in 1956.

"We are happy that no employees or visitors were hurt," museum director Lukas Gloor said at a news conference.

Gloor said the robbers stole four of the collection's most important paintings, but added that they appeared to have taken the first four they came to, leaving even more valuable paintings hanging nearby.

The museum also owns Auguste Renoir's "Little Irene" and Edgar Degas' "Little Dancer," but Gloor said the shlice reported two Pablo Picasso paintings were stolen from an exhibition near Zurich. The two oil paintings -- "Tete de cheval" ("Head of horse") and Verre et pichet ("Glass and pitcher") -- had been on loan from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany.

Cortesi, the police spokesman, said police were pursuing the possibility the Picasso theft was connected with the Buehrle robbery.

In a robbery in the late 1980s, three armed men made off with 21 Renaissance paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars from a Zurich art gallery. The case was made public in 1989 when FBI agents in New York arrested two Belgians and recovered stolen paintings.

In 1994, seven Picasso paintings worth an estimated US$44 million (euro 30 million) were stolen from a Zurich gallery. They were recovered in 2000, and a Swiss man and two Italians were jailed for the theft. The stolen paintings included Picasso's "Seated Woman," and "Christ of Montmartre," which had been stolen from the gallery once before, in 1991.

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