Press review – Kunsthaus Zürich: world fame at any price? – Culture
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With the reopening, the Kunsthaus Zürich will gain international radiance. The focus: the controversial Bührle collection. What the press outside of Switzerland has to say about it.
New York Times: How clean was the provenance research?
It was foreseeable that the Bührle collection in the newly opened Kunsthaus Zurich would make waves in the media. That these waves make it overseas, not necessarily.
But the exhibition was worth a contribution to the New York Times. In one Background article is primarily dedicated to the biographical background of Emil Georg Bührle, who was once the richest man in Switzerland.
The arms dealer’s “dark legacy” would overshadow the opening of the Zurich million dollar project, according to the New York Times. Dark legacy means: Bührle became rich with weapons in Nazi Germany, used by forced labor, and bought Nazi-looted art.
It gets most explosive when the New York Times quotes Erich Keller. In his book “The Contaminated Museum”, the historian criticizes that.
The Kunsthaus should never have accepted the paintings. “It’s a collection that was built with money from arms sales, slave labor and child labor,” Keller is quoted as saying.
Frankfurter Allgemeine: How should one look at the pictures without the context?
Even more critical lines can be read in the newspapers from Germany. For die Frankfurter Allgemeine For example, it is clear that the Kunsthaus Zürich has to face many “unpleasant questions” in connection with Emil Bührle – but has not done so.
The “irrepressible desire for world size” is risky, as the FAZ writes. The “incorporated private collections” could theoretically be withdrawn at any time.
Art department co-manager of the FaZ Niklas Maak also asks whether one can look at the works without thinking about the Jewish collectors, “who could no longer see them because they left their houses in a hurry?”
Süddeutsche Zeitung: Where is the transparency?
The Zurich “new building with contaminated site” houses a beautiful collection, which “makes anyone halfway interested in art kneel”, she admits Southgerman newspaper a. However: The announced “great detail and clarity”, which the Kunsthaus director Christoph Becker promised in the documentation in an interview about the Bührle Collection, “cannot be found with good will”.
Yes, it would be a documentation room with correct and important facts about Emil Bührle as a person. But there is no classification and “the maximum purification of the biography and collection history of Emil Bührle” is questionable, so the SZ.
In addition to a lack of transparency, the SZ is angry that the Bührle collection is used “as a means of city marketing” and is thus “washed clean”.
And otherwise?
Le Monde, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, the Standard – none of them write anything about the new exhibition. Just El País mentions them briefly in order to rave about the cultural city of Zurich in general. So it didn’t work out entirely with the international appeal – neither for better nor for worse.