The Kunsthaus Zürich and the arms dealer Emil Bührle – culture

So this is it, the room that is supposed to present the history of the Bührle Collection in “great detail and clarity”. It is a bright room on the second floor of the new Kunsthaus. The tall, slim windows look out onto the so-called garden of art with a view of green trees and the old canton school behind. The wooden floors made of solid oak give the place a certain warmth, despite the ceiling made of gray exposed concrete. The room is just big, not big. Especially when you compare it with the central hall that you have to pass through to get up here. The dimensions of the bright foyer with the ticket counter, the gold-colored wood paneling and the marble staircase are actually so huge that many Zurich residents have to get used to it. Surely there is no comparable place in the old town, with such generous room height, where otherwise the medieval houses crowd tightly together in the winding streets.

But that is not the biggest problem with the “Documentation on the Emil Bührle Collection”. It is the perspective adopted by the Kunsthaus Zürich in the processing of this collection, a collection that – as can be undisputedly confirmed – causes anyone who is halfway interested in art to go to their knees. Not only because all the impressionist and early modern artists are represented, who made art history with their works, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet as well as Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, as well as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso. But because the paintings themselves are masterpieces: Cézanne’s “Boy with the Red Waistcoat”, Manet’s “Young Woman in an Oriental Dress”, Van Gogh’s “Sower by the Setting Sun”, Courbet, Ingres, Pissarro – you can’t help but be amazed what you can see here in the dignified skylight halls with their gold frame – both the passages and a door-high “spatial horizon” in the rooms are gold-colored – on 1000 square meters.

One immediately understands why the Kunsthaus Zürich, which itself has a rather disparate art collection, wanted to exhibit this collection of 203 works, the Emil Bührle collection, once the richest Swiss and arguably the largest arms dealer of his time.

Open detailed view

But why the museum stoically and stoically stuck to this wish and, when it was carried out, barely responded to the justified criticism of the processing of the collection, which has accompanied the project of the extension almost from the beginning, i.e. for almost 20 years you really don’t.

Because the “great detail and clarity” that Kunsthaus director Christoph Becker promises in the documentation in an interview about the Bührle Collection cannot be found even with good will. Let alone elsewhere: In the entrance area to the presentation of the collection there is a detailed depiction of the biography and collection history of Emil Bührle, where his membership in the paramilitary Freikorps Roeder is missing, as is his benefit from Nazi Germany’s hunger for armaments and the terrible suffering of Jewish collectors This allowed the art trade to flourish during the war. In the numerous advertising brochures that the Kunsthaus and the City of Zurich had printed in the run-up to the opening, the Bührle Collection is only listed as a means of city marketing, even washed away. It says, for example: “This means that, alongside Paris, Zurich will offer the most important collection of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism on the continent – a quantum leap for Zurich as a cultural center and Switzerland.”

Bührle’s income skyrocketed during the Second World War and paved his way into the art scene

And the documentation in the new Kunsthaus itself? She wants to help “to gain a differentiated picture of Bührle’s goals and strategies as a collector and entrepreneur”. The strategies as an entrepreneur are not really difficult to understand. Born in Germany, he built the machine tool factory in Oerlikon near Zurich, which he became owner from 1937, into an international arms company and then sold it to everyone who wanted to wage war: to Nazi Germany as well as to the Allies, to Spain, Japan and China . Later also to the USA, Egypt, India. Bührle’s income in World War II rose by leaps and bounds, from 50,000 to 15 million francs a year. With this money he was able to buy into the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, which is the sponsoring association of the art house, of which the arms dealer became a member in 1927.

Open detailed view

Bührle has not only been so present in the house since the new Kunsthaus and its collection there. In 1941 he promised two million francs for a structural extension to the now narrow Moser building, which, after an architectural competition – in the middle of the war – was to lead to the Pfister brothers’ exhibition wing and the opening of which is said to have been a major social event in Zurich in 1958. In 1943, works from the Emil Bührle collection were on view in the Kunsthaus for the first time. The arms dealer repeatedly supported art purchases with private money, including financing Rodin’s monumental “Hell Gate”, which has stood on the outer wall of the Moser building since 1947. Bührle’s bust is still clearly visible in the Moser building. Director Becker explains: “The Kunsthaus has had contact with Bührle for almost a century. You can’t talk him away.”

So far, so known (and visible). In the documentation on the history of the collection, all the facts and figures are correct. What is missing, however, is a classification, a historical-scientific perspective. For example, it says: “In September 1945 the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who fled to New York from Paris, visited Bührle in Zurich and confronted him with the fact that some of his purchases were illegal.” How likely is it that Emil Bührle needed Rosenberg to understand that? A man who was so internationally networked and who profited from the war? Who until the end of the Second World War received license payments from the cannon company Ikaria from Germany, which he co-founded in 1934 and which can be shown to have employed Nazi forced laborers?

“It is not easy for us as architects to draw red lines,” says David Chipperfield

The Kunsthaus Zürich has made itself vulnerable to seeing. Because Bührle’s activities in the run-up to the collection’s move into the new Kunsthaus were processed by a commission set up by the city and canton of Zurich. However, this commission submitted its report to the private “Emil Bührle Collection Foundation” and the latter, hope dies last, actually changed something about it. After which the historian Erich Keller left the commission in protest and instead let out his anger over the influence in his book “The Contaminated Museum”. The recently published paperback is now well-behaved in the museum shops of the Kunsthaus – even in both, the old and the new – but nobody can be happy about it. Just as little about the fact that the provenance research of the collection was taken over by the director of the private Emil Bührle Foundation, Lukas Gloor. That leaves a bitter aftertaste, which is why the historians Thomas Buomberger and Guido Magnaguagno – both published “Schwarzbuch Bührle. Looted art for the Kunsthaus Zürich?” – after the publication in July this year in the NZZ on Sunday stated that Gloor’s study “colored a fined picture of Bührle through the omission”.

Open detailed view

And the new museum, which is exactly opposite the old Moser building and, in its compact box-like shape, is significantly larger than the nested parent house? Shouldn’t one write more about the CHF 206 million model building in terms of sustainability? About all the gold that was used here? The underground connecting tract to the Moser building, which, with its almost infinite length, the bench made of Carrara marble and Ólafur Elíasson’s marble chunk on the ceiling, which was mistaken for the lighting, is reminiscent of the noble version of a bunker system? About the strange non-location of Heimplatz, at whose intersection the Zurich luxury cars continue to pile up, unimpressed, even though the square is now even framed by cultural buildings on three sides? Or maybe why we have been discussing for years that museums must finally break their thresholds and appeal to the general public as much as possible and then flank the entrance area with restaurants that are wrapped in dark green velvet and serve cappuccino for six francs, or shops that Offer golden oil lamps for 238 francs a piece? Or at least through the other two private collections that have also moved into the extension building on permanent loan for at least 20 years: the Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher Collection with works of Expressionism and Fauvism, and the Hubert Looser Collection with American post-war art.

In any case, David Chipperfield, the architect of the extension, a professional for museum buildings, was a little irritated when he was not asked about his architecture, but about the red line, from when he would reject an order. “Of course I have limits. I don’t think, however, that by designing this building we are promoting selling weapons or accepting the provenance of stolen works of art. I am 100 percent against both,” he explained and later added: ” It is not easy for us as architects to draw red lines. We are not artists. ” Does he have a problem with the arms dealer’s private collection increasing in value as a result of its construction? “It’s not our job. Our job is to design a museum that will display works of art. The paintings are innocent. You haven’t done anything wrong. These rooms were designed to display paintings.”

Perhaps the rooms would have preferred to tell the story of the Emil Bührle Collection in such a way that one can appreciate its art and architecture.