Breaking van Gogh

by James Grundvig

  4

  The Passionate Bull’s-Eye

  By late spring 1987, Hortense had come up with the concept of exhibiting her father’s paintings, both those in the Foundation and in the siblings’ private collections. The more she tinkered with the project, the more it made sense, at this particular time, to exhibit the art collection beyond Zurich to the outside world. She knew she would need to sell the exhibit to the top museums of the world to launch a global tour. She removed an August 1959 Studio magazine from a plastic folder to remind her of both Emil’s past and his persona.

  The second paragraph read:

  Bührle’s name is still hardly known in Britain, and not very familiar even in his country of adoption, Switzerland, for he was an invincibly shy, retiring man, completely averse to personal publicity—but everyone who was in the last war must have heard of the weapon that made his fortune and thus enabled him to become one of the greatest Maecenas of our time—the famous Oerlikon 20 millimeter anti-aircraft gun. And thereby hangs a strange tale.10

  From that one passage Hortense understood better than her business-minded brother that the exhibit had to overcome two big hurdles to succeed.

  The first challenge was the unfamiliarity with the Bührle name outside of Zurich, with its alien sound and strange-looking letter. The second obstacle came from the legacy her father established—easily discovered by anyone who cared to look—of selling arms, ammunition, and anti-aircraft guns to Nazi Germany during World War II, as well as Dieter’s shady past as a convicted criminal. Hortense knew she would have to remove Dieter’s name from virtually all exhibit-related correspondence, communications, and marketing materials.

  She would also have to dance the tango, if not the foxtrot, with museum directors, curators, and government officials, absorb or deflect their outsized egos, deal with foreign cultures, and steer strong personalities away from Emil and Dieter’s arms-trading careers. She would have to channel people’s interest to focus on the art. She would have to be nimble, resolute—and, if need be, to show a stiff German spine when negative issues of the past managed to percolate to the surface in the press and news media.

  She read on: “His eminently catholic taste embraced all periods and all schools, but he never lost his juvenile passion for the French impressionists.”11 And then, “The impressionist galaxy is so sparkling that it is difficult to know where to begin—and where to stop.”12

  Hortense came away with a game plan. Through her family’s global network of government officials, she would begin to make inquires with museums about hosting and sponsoring the exhibit. It would be an Impressionist roadshow commemorating the hundredth birthday of Emil G. Bührle. She would tie it to a name that would mean absolutely nothing outside of Switzerland and parts of southern Germany.

  Her father was born in 1890, the same year that Vincent van Gogh died, so perhaps the exhibit should have commemorated not Emil’s birth year, but rather the premature death of Vincent van Gogh at age thirty-seven. That would have marked a solemn occasion by honoring the art master that museum curators and directors would have recognized and gravitated toward, without the controversies surrounding the Bührle name. But Hortense and Dieter needed the show for an alternate agenda: they wanted to put one of the van Gogh masterpieces up for sale without it being advertised as such, and without going through the rigorous authentication process of an auction house with outside consultants worried about broken or missing provenance. It was one thing to examine a painting in granular detail and to review its condition report; it was another to examine one hundred paintings with matching condition reports. Also, if they could drum up a private sale through the exhibit, Dieter wouldn’t have to pay exorbitant brokerage fees to an auction house. Both of these potential obstacles were major turnoffs to Hortense.

  She set her sights on a world tour in 1990 that would start in America—New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC—three high-profile art-loving cities. The centennial celebration would then travel to Canada, on to Asia, and back to London to conclude the tour.

  Hortense moved swiftly. In June 1987, she set up the first meeting in Zurich between herself, Dieter, the Emil G. Bührle Foundation executives, and the National Gallery of Art’s senior curator of paintings, Charles Moffett, along with his team.

  After that June meeting with Charles Moffett, over dinner with Dieter at her favorite Zurich restaurant, Hortense became the face associated with Emil and his commemoration, while Dieter would focus on getting the Oerlikon business units back in the black.

  Hortense was impressed with the young but sharp and fluent curator of European art. “Charlie” Moffett had turned thirty-two shortly before Hortense and the Foundation held their second meeting with him in October. Hortense knew she had to win his commitment because Moffett became the focal point of her probe to gauge the level of interest for the art exhibit honoring her father. She had researched his background and learned that, at a young age, Moffett had curated shows on Degas, van Gogh, Monet, and Manet at the venerable Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where wealthy and powerful American bankers and industrialists had bought many prized European artworks from the time of van Gogh’s death to the start of World War II. Over that half-century stretch, J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, among others, imported thousands of pieces of art, from paintings, sculptures, medieval arms, and textiles to artifacts from ancient civilizations.

  Charles Moffett bridged the chasm between two of the United States’ most prestigious museums, the Met in New York and now the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hortense wouldn’t take that feat for granted.

  In October 1987, Moffett was sent the following letter on behalf of Hortense:

  Dear Mr. Moffett,

  Mrs. Anda has asked me to forward to you the information concerning the paintings of the Bührle Collection not belonging to the Foundation and therefore, not listed in the catalogue.

  We have sent 2 sets to London. By separate mail, you will receive 3 sets for you, Mr. Tinterov [sic] and Mr. Brettell. Also by separate mail, you will receive the requested 13 x 18 black and white photographs of all of the paintings going to the exhibition.

  For Washington you receive a set of 3 pictures each, New York and Chicago only asked for 2 pictures each.13

  The tactic of sending three letters concurrently to Charles Moffett at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), Gary Tinterow at the Met, and Richard Brettell at the Chicago Institute of Art worked. It did more than plant the seed of an idea for a grand exhibition on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters; it unlocked the gates to the top art museums in America, if not the world. Ideally, Hortense hoped, the exhibition could make its way to all three museums, whose experts would collaborate to compose and compile the descriptions of the works.

  Behind the scenes, Hortense employed Dieter to oversee a team of specialists and historians to catalogue the collection and produce an art book filled with colorful reproductions, inside stories, vignettes, and anecdotes presenting Emil G. Bührle as an art collector with exquisite taste and appreciation for modern art amid the turmoil of two world wars. Hortense recalled her father telling her, when she was a teenager, that it was the treasures of European art that saved Paris from being bombed like London and other British cities by the German Luftwaffe during World War II.

  With his business acumen, Dieter understood that to win over the American museums, the Foundation would need to hire curators to catalogue Emil’s art book that would be tied to the exhibit. It was to be a key factor in the advertising and marketing of the exhibition as a whole and its individual works.

  He was right. When Hortense pitched the idea of a catalogue book to be published by the Foundation, more requests for meetings in Switzerland and the United States came to pass.

  As is the case with any major project—a Broadway musical, a film production, the construction of a new building or airport terminal—planning and resolving the many disparate elements and
logistics that make a project successful took time. A large-scale, world-class exhibition required both sides of the exhibit—the art owner and the host museums—to negotiate, compromise, and resolve issues early on in order to synchronize the planning details.

  By June 1988, many open-ended issues remained unresolved. On Friday, June 3, Charles Moffett, through his assistant Cassandra, wrote a lengthy memorandum to “D” (meaning the director of the National Gallery of Art, John Carter Brown III, who helmed the institution from 1969 to 1992).

  The memo began:

  This afternoon I spoke with Philippe de Montebello about the Bührle Collection exhibition.

  He remains reluctant for the following reasons: First, by the Met’s calculations the “figures for shared expense budget are optimistic.” Next, he complained that the “old masters section” made no sense, strictly limiting the paintings to a narrowly defined era. Third, Charlie thought the title from an unknown Swiss arms dealer—Masterpieces from the E. G. Bührle Collection—“sucked” to put it mildly. Finally, on the cost-benefit ratio, with the expense prohibitively high, the “run was too short” to recoup the investment of the exhibition.14

  The memo went on to emphasize Frau Anda’s temperament, adamant if not obstinate in her insistence that a “smaller, tighter exhibition” was not going to happen.

  Moffett also reminded Director Brown that the “first organizational meeting” between both sides had taken place in Zurich in June 1987, and that “little progress has been made” since the second meeting in October 1987. He also pointed out that, in addition to the “serious unresolved problems,” his team would miss the “first deadline for the catalogue (December 1988) because the authors are reluctant to write entries for a project that may collapse.”15

  Worst, he pointed out that the Met’s Gary Tinterow (15 entries for the book) might not be “involved,” and asked “whether Chicago will find someone to replace Rick Brettell (15 entries).”16

  Moffett concluded that though the “practical problems can be resolved,” the exhibit is “expensive and unfocused,” and called his participation an “exercise in frustration.” Moffett saved his best shot for last, writing: “If I were the triage officer at the NGA, I would not waste further resources on the Bührle exhibition unless most of the outstanding problems can be resolved quickly. It has become a candidate for museological [sic] euthanasia.”

  He strongly suggested a replacement exhibition including the same Impressionist artists, “Still Life and Flower Painting ready for January 1990.”

  By the following Tuesday, with the skill and patience of a diplomat, NGA Director J. Carter Brown needed to assuage his talented but young and temperamental curator, which he did by alleviating Moffett’s concerns, writing a letter to Frau Hortense Anda-Bührle, announcing:

  First, I am pleased to be able to report that we have learned that The Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities will support the exhibition. However, without a final list of insurance values for each art in the show, the Council will not indicate the level of support. We believe that it will ultimately be in the range of $50–75M. We will need the values by August 1st in order to submit the final application.17

  J. Carter Brown shifted the tone and stated that he was “not optimistic” about securing the Met’s participation in the show, since “Mr. de Montebello’s reservations are rooted in concerns about the budget as well as the focus of the exhibition.”18

  Two days later, like a coach on a losing football team that had to keep the players focused on the next game, Brown sent a short note to the Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, thanking him for the Metropolitan’s “involvement” in the project that was still tenuous.

  A week later, de Montebello called Brown and echoed Moffett’s sentiment about the bad working title of the exhibit, Masterpieces from the Collection of Emil G. Bührle. To make matters worse, the Met director poked fun at Emil and Dieter’s Nazi-linked, arms-dealer past, suggesting an alternate title: Hidden Treasures of Switzerland.19

  In the same memorandum to the file, the NGA director also noted two alternate titles, Quality: The Collecting Achievement of Emil G. Bührle, and Paintings by Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Thirty-Five Other Masters. They were not great, but better.

  When Charles Moffett got wind of the alternate titles for the Bührle exhibition, he grew more incensed, not assuaged. He toned down the words, but not his aversion to the show. The title was key for him to get involved and not mar his stellar fine art reputation. Inwardly, he was tired of the compromises that the US museums, particularly the NGA, had to make to keep the show alive.

  By late fall 1988, J. Carter Brown had to find a solution to the title of the exhibition that would please both sides: Hortense Anda-Bührle and Charlie Moffett. So he flew to Zurich with the sole purpose of viewing the paintings. Upon seeing the greatest private art collection in Europe, J. Carter Brown labeled the exhibit The Passionate Eye (according to a 2013 email from the Emil G. Bührle Foundation manager Lukas Gloor to this author).

  Brown, who might have felt a sense of spiritual connection with the late Emil, appreciated the number and quality of the artworks the collector had accumulated during the first half of the twentieth century. Brown’s personal tour of the Emil G. Bührle Foundation, showcasing the many paintings in the landmark villa, reminded him of the great Barnes Collection housed in a mansion in Philadelphia. The tour made a believer out of him that the show indeed would be a grand success. When he met Dieter Bührle for the first time and learned about Oerlikon Aerospace’s connection to US defense contractor Martin Marietta, Brown’s thought turned to the practical side of things; he knew he had his first corporate sponsor to back the show. He would go through his Rolodex to find a congressman or senator who was connected to Martin Marietta to make the key introduction.

  On December 9, still in Zurich but ready to fly back to Washington, Brown transcribed a “memorandum for the file” via telephone. Referring to his meeting with Hortense, Brown said over telephone about the Bührle exhibition: “The title [Hortense] and I worked out—and I have to bounce it off Charlie Moffett here later today, but you can try it on others—it would be ‘The Passionate Eye: Impressionist and Other Paintings from the Collection of E.G. Bührle’ and then the dates ‘1890–1956.’”20

  Charlie did latch onto the new title for the show, The Passionate Eye. And like J. Carter Brown, he knew the subtitle had to be worked out—and that’s what Hortense and Moffett did.

  By early 1989, with the exhibition still a year away, the final title and companion art book had finally been resolved. It would be called The Passionate Eye: Impressionist and Other Master Paintings from the Collection of Emil G. Bührle.

  After Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Rick Brettell of the Chicago Institute of Art had both dropped out of the show, as Brown knew might happen, Hortense Anda-Bührle bestowed on Charles S. Moffett the duty of cataloguing twenty-four of the painting entries for the book, The Passionate Eye, to be published in 1990 by the Oerlikon-Bührle Group’s book company, Artemis, in Zurich.

  Of those twenty-four entries that Charles Moffett would write, six were descriptions of van Goghs, including Dieter’s Wheat Field with Cypresses, one of three of the same landscape paintings Vincent had painted in the summer of 1889, during his confinement to the Saint-Rémy asylum.

  In the essay, Moffett wrote:

  Van Gogh was fascinated by the cypresses as the natural equivalents of architectural forms, ‘as beautiful in lines and proportions as an Egyptian obelisk.’ … Like cypresses, wheat fields are among van Gogh’s most important metaphors. Wheat, for the artist, was ‘the germinating force’ in the cycle of life and the creative process.21

  Few people knew that Moffett cited Ronald Pickvance, the longtime Scottish fine arts professor at the University of Glasgow, Impressionist art expert, and Vincent van Gogh author. Even fewer knew that, strangely, the NGA curator somehow had either left out or deliberately omitt
ed the name Emile Schuffenecker from the painting’s history. Art researcher and van Gogh specialist Benoit Landais, who has long been calling attention to Schuffenecker’s history as a forger, insists, “Moffett was aware of the poisonous smell of the Schuffenecker name.”

  5

  The Honey Trap

  By mid-February 1989, the marching orders on the book from the National Gallery of Art’s editor-in-chief, Frances P. Smyth, were to marshal the disparate entries and essay writers into a cohesive production and push the project forward with the catalogue, meeting the schedule for the opening of the exhibition in spring 1990.

  Smyth, who had flown with Charles Moffett to Zurich for the February 2 meeting with Hortense Anda-Bührle, Dieter’s son Christian Bührle, two others from the Emil G. Bührle Foundation, and three representatives from the Bührle Group’s publisher Artemis Verlag, wrote a detailed “memo for the file.” She noted what was discussed, what needed to get done, and who was in charge of the various tasks necessary to open the exhibition in fifteen months. The memorandum was copied to six museum executives, as well as J. Carter Brown and Maryann Stevens of the Royal Academy in London.

  The two sides agreed on the title for the book and exhibit that included Frau Anda’s “enthusiastic” support for Director J. Carter Brown’s name of the show. The cover artwork to adorn the catalogue—which would be like a coffee-table book—was chosen: van Gogh’s Blossoming Chestnut Branches, painted long after the artist’s arrival at Auvers-sur-Oise, a farming commune northwest of Paris, after his yearlong stay at the asylum. Like Wheat Field with Cypresses, Blossoming Chestnut Branches had a complex history of ownership. Today, Wheat Field with Cypresses hangs in a gallery at the Met, and Blossoming Chestnut Branches resides in Switzerland as part of the Emil G. Bührle Foundation, never to tour again.