Breaking van Gogh Read online

  The meeting also addressed a number of more minor logistical issues. Frances Smyth stated that the “Foundation will prepare a brochure describing their work which they will put in the catalogue before shrink-wrapping it.”22 The National Gallery of Art would ask to see a mockup of the brochure’s “text and design” and state how many copies would be needed for the exhibit and gift shop. The group also chose the eight Bührle paintings to be used for reproductions; one of those would be Wheat Field with Cypresses.23

  Smyth also listed “postcards, note folders, and posters” that NGA would choose with input from London and Montreal museums, the second and fourth legs of the tour.

  The NGA’s editor-in-chief put emphasis on other items, the order of the artworks and the need to keep the Bührle name out of the spotlight:

  Frau Anda wishes all works not in the Foundation collection to be simply credited as “Private Collection,” not as “Collection of Mrs. Hortense Anda-Bührle” or “Collection of Dieter Bührle.”

  Works in the catalogue will be arranged chronologically in a sequence to be suggested by Charlie Moffett and sent to the Foundation.24

  Director Brown wrote a thank-you note to Hortense: “Your collection, which is much broader in scope and so overwhelming in quality, will, of course, be ‘the news,’ as it has never been seen before in the US.” The director also mentioned that pictures from the Annenberg Collection, less than one-third of Emil G. Bührle’s, were “on view all summer in nearby Philadelphia just the year before,” something that seemed to suggest success for The Passionate Eye. Unbeknownst to Brown was the Bührles’ ulterior motive for setting up the exhibition—their plan to sell Wheat Field with Cypresses to the right billionaire art collector. Walter Annenberg, they would come to realize, fit that bill to a tee.

  In June 1989, J. Carter Brown informed Hortense that the smaller, but “good quality,” Annenberg Collection of Impressionist art would be shown simultaneously with The Passionate Eye exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. From the point of view of the NGA, the reason was clear—to “double” or “triple” overall attendance. For a museum that had an annual budget of $51.4 million in 1990—79 percent of it funded by the US federal government—the decision was grounded in economic reality and made good business sense.25

  In her response to Brown’s letter, Hortense played it cool, aloof; with a royal air, she stated she was a bit disappointed that the exhibit needed to be bigger to draw larger crowds, when the “artists names” alone should have been able to achieve the same end goal. Then, in a phone call with Hortense a week later before she boarded a train to Florence, Brown found her “fairly cheerful and resigned to the double showing.”26

  While Brown focused on statistics about “overlapping artists” beyond the constellation of Gauguin, Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, and van Gogh, and how well the two exhibits would play off each other side by side, Hortense, with Dieter behind the scenes, was preparing a honey trap for the big whale, Walter Annenberg.

  Mr. Brown’s greatest attribute was being a dealmaker with a grand vision who got things done. In helping create the modern museum blockbusters at both the New York Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery of Art, from the huge Treasures of Tutankhamun to the successful Treasure of Houses of Britain, J. Carter Brown could deliver shows better than P. T. Barnum. He saw that bringing in a fine art collector and media magnate with the well-known American name of Ambassador Walter Annenberg would help elevate the profile of the unknown Swiss family name of Bührle and guarantee a well-attended, moneymaking exhibition of the highest standards.

  When Martin Marietta leveraged its sponsorship for the tour, it forced one minor change in the catalogue cover. Van Gogh’s colorful Blossoming Chestnut Branches was out, replaced with Camille Pissarro’s Road from Versailles to Louveciennes (1870).27 The substitution was fine with Dieter and Hortense as long as the face of the exhibit, Dieter’s painting Wheat Field with Cypresses, remained on the cover of the brochure.

  6

  Seduction at Sunnylands

  April 1990.

  Sitting in the living room of their spacious, naturally lit modernist estate of Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, California, Walter Hubert Annenberg and his wife, Lee, were sifting through the mail. He opened an oversized envelope from the director of the National Gallery of Art and pulled out a handwritten note from J. Carter Brown. The director wished all of them good luck with the dual art exhibits that would take place next month, showcasing Annenberg’s private art collection alongside that of the late German-Swiss arms manufacturer and art dealer Emil G. Bührle.

  Ambassador Annenberg took out the book on the exhibition—The Passionate Eye: Impressionist and Other Master Paintings from the E.G. Bührle Collection—and sliced open the shrink wrap with a sterling silver letter opener. With a steady hand, the eighty-two-year-old philanthropist tore off the plastic sheath. He pulled out the exhibit’s brochure and admired the cover with van Gogh’s landscape masterpiece Wheat Field with Cypresses.

  There on Walter’s lap sat the catalogue with Camille Pissarro’s Road from Versailles to Louveciennes staring at him with its bright yellow summer scene of a couple walking their daughter on a dirt road in nineteenth-century France. Annenberg grinned at the cover. He then gazed fondly out the window wall to the lush green grass with cacti and trees, manicured hedges, and a golf course set across his 200-acre estate on Bob Hope Drive near Palm Springs. It dawned on him that the idyllic scene of Pissarro’s art matched the beauty and brilliance of the Southern California sun with the purple San Jacinto Mountains set against the distant horizon. He wondered how the Impressionist master would have painted Sunnylands, had he lived in the modern age.

  Artemis, the Swiss publisher, removed the dark left side of Pissarro’s painting that showed a pair of women with a little girl talking in the shade of a tree. Clever, he thought. He came to the conclusion that Artemis knew what it was doing when it used the lighter, brighter half of Pissarro’s artwork on the book jacket and wrapped the darker half of the painting around to the back cover. The graphic designer had manipulated the image to project a softer aura with a golden ambiance. Alluring. Exquisite. Effective.

  More than clever, he acknowledged. Later that day, Walter realized, he would have to go to his 3,400-volume library and pull out the art history catalogue on Pissarro’s oeuvre to compare the full Road from Versailles painting to the reimagined version that appeared on the back and front of the exhibit catalogue.

  “Lee, take a look at this beautiful cover. Isn’t it marvelous?” he said, turning around to show his wife the catalogue.

  “Why, yes,” she said. Sitting on a plush white linen sofa, Leonore Annenberg, Walter’s second wife of forty-one years, pushed her reading glasses down and gazed at the book cover. “It does look grand, Walter,” she said, as she held up a letter from the White House. “It’s as superb as this note from the First Lady. She and George had a wonderful time last month at Sunnylands. They enjoyed the dinner we hosted in honor of George’s presidency together with [Japanese] Prime Minister Kaifu and his lovely wife.”

  “How could they not, Lee? It was a sumptuous affair. Great company, better conversation. The entire evening matched the red-hot economy in Japan … The guests loved our art collection. One day I think a Japanese conglomerate will make an offer to buy it. And I am sure I sold George on the idea of Sunnylands being the Camp David of the West.”

  Walter looked past his wife and saw the empty space above the fireplace mantel where his most beloved acquisition, van Gogh’s Roses, usually served as the centerpiece, the fulcrum of his art collection, the center of attention and light of the room. But that painting, along with dozens of others that he and Lee had collected and bought over the decades, had been shipped to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to be exhibited alongside the private collection of Emil G. Bührle.

  With most of his fine art elsewhere, Sunnylands felt empty, as if the Annenbergs had just sent their children off to coll
ege for the first time. Sure, there were the Chinese porcelain and Meissen vases and lesser artwork, along with many other items of prestige and luxury. Yet nothing, he knew, beat the masters of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

  Walter Annenberg recalled the first two fine art purchases he made in the 1950s: Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees and Claude Monet’s The Stroller.

  Over the years, he and Lee added Auguste Renoir’s The Daughters of Catulle Mendès and Reclining Nude, Cézanne’s Seated Peasant, Monet’s Camille Monet on a Garden Bench, and Pablo Picasso’s At the Lapin Agile (Harlequin With a Glass).28 He still chafed at the memory of being outbid by the J. Paul Getty Museum in November 1987 at an auction for van Gogh’s Irises.29

  As he had done before, Annenberg reminded himself of a saying he had coined to soften the blow, and said with exaggerated enthusiasm, “I like my Irises better,” referring to Monet’s The Path Through the Irises that he acquired the same year he lost the van Gogh to the Getty Museum.30

  He held the tall coffee-table book on his lap and looked at the Passionate Eye brochure. Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses stood out on the cover of the brochure, more so than Pissarro’s painting on the book jacket. The van Gogh’s landscape image was bold and colorful, framed by a thick dark blue border on the top with the title of the exhibit, and a matching border on the bottom providing the show details:

  National Gallery of Art

  May 6—July 15, 1990

  The exhibition is made possible

  by Martin Marietta Corporation31

  Like a young boy about to open a birthday gift, the excited art collector opened the book and flipped through the pages to the back, where Vincent van Gogh was alphabetically listed, and saw entry No. 62, written by Charles Moffett, on Wheat Field with Cypresses. Right there: a larger image of the van Gogh masterpiece with the wheat field, bushes, and cypress trees in the foreground; the bluish Alpilles Mountains in the background crowned by a big sky with swirling, windswept clouds blowing east to west above; a breeze on the ground blowing the wheat and bushes across the painting in the opposite direction. He compared what he saw in the painting to his Sunnylands estate. He saw the commonalities of nature’s rarefied beauty, a bright southern sun pinned high above an unmatched landscape of serenity. What van Gogh painted in capturing the view at the asylum with the wheat field in the foreground achieved a similar perfection of lasting beauty to the land that Walter and Lee bought back in 1963 that indeed made an impression on all who laid eyes on the estate.

  Walter imagined that in lieu of van Gogh’s wheat, he saw the green sod on his property; instead of the tall painted cypresses, the palm trees of the Palm Desert were more than a suitable stand-in; and the low-range Alpilles were, in his reckoning, a close European cousin to the San Jacinto Mountains. Seeing something he loved, he suddenly knew he had to wrestle van Gogh’s masterpiece from Dieter Bührle’s hold.

  Walter read through the provenance of Wheat Field with Cypresses. He saw van Gogh had created the painting during his yearlong stay at the asylum, May 1889 to May 1890; after Vincent and Theo’s deaths less than a year later, the painting resided with Theo’s widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, and her son for a dozen years before being sold to a Paris art dealer. A few sales later, the painting made its way to art dealers in Germany, where it was eventually sold to Franz von Mendelssohn, heir of a German-Jewish banking dynasty—the family tree of classical composer Felix Mendelssohn.

  Although what Walter saw in the Mendelssohn heritage was not necessarily a mirror of his own German-Jewish ancestry, he felt there were certain similarities between the families’ histories; the reflection made him crack a sheepish grin. In the roots of Franz von Mendelssohn’s bloodline was a close facsimile of the Annenberg family. Both patriarchs shared the same first name—Moses. In Annenberg’s case, his father “Moe” immigrated to the United States in 1900, while the eighteenth-century German-Jewish banking family’s patriarch was a famous German philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, who paved the way for the banking dynasty to be chartered in 1795 and grow beyond Bavaria until the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in the twentieth century.

  Annenberg traced the painting’s ownership to Emil Bührle, who bought it in 1951 from the heirs of Franz von Mendelssohn and then willed it to his son, Dieter, upon his death in 1956.

  “So this painting does belong to Dieter and is not part of the Foundation,” he said to himself, sensing a buying opportunity. Having not spent the $53.9 million on van Gogh’s Irises three years earlier when he lost the bid on that painting, Walter had the money to buy another Impressionist masterpiece. He thought about the painting’s current owner and his past.

  He had a gut feeling that, for the right price, he could convince Dieter to sell the painting to him, especially with the help of the Annenberg’s dear friend J. Carter Brown. After all, Brown had attended one of his and Lee’s politically popular dinners at their Sunnylands estate in July 1988, when the director made inquiries about what the Annenbergs were planning to do with their billion-dollar fine art collection.32

  While not committing to the National Gallery of Art or any other of the museums thought to be on the short list of candidates for the eventual repository of the collection—the Los Angeles County Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the city where Walter and Lee lived half the year—he did appreciate J. Brown’s idea to convert Sunnylands into an extension of the NGA, a museum open to the public on the West Coast under their care.33

  Walter stood up and waltzed over to Lee. He handed her the brochure and opened the book to the larger image of van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses. She looked at the moving, brilliant landscape painting, put the brochure down, took the book from her husband, and read Moffett’s essay.

  “Lee, after you read that section, go to the back and check the provenance. The older brother to Hortense owns the painting, not the Foundation.”

  “That means I should talk to Frau Hortense Anda-Bührle and whisper sweet nothings to her about her brother … What a grand old name for a dame,” she said with a chortle.

  “Do you like the painting?”

  “I love this van Gogh. But can we buy it, Walter?” She looked at the centerfold of the painting on the following page.

  “We should examine it at the exhibit next month in DC, then see if we can’t move to make an offer with Carter’s help.”

  As she examined the provenance of the painting, she said, “It sure would be cheaper than bidding on it at the auction houses.”

  And so Walter and Lee agreed on their first step. What neither one of them knew at the time was that the provenance Charles Moffett had provided was incomplete. (It is unclear whether knowing the Schuffenecker connection would have made a difference, however—they owned another painting with a provenance that went through the Schuffenecker brothers, so, as Landais points out, “the name was not necessarily a scarecrow to them.”)

  Their fixation on getting another van Gogh for the Annenberg Collection made Walter and Lee less focused on the details of its history. There were only three Wheat Field with Cypresses in the world, three van Gogh variations on the same landscape study. They had to have the painting. Walter knew one Wheat Field was with a private collector in America. The second—and final, according to most experts—version hung in Gallery 45 at the National Gallery, London; it had a different provenance through the Tate Museum in the 1920s.

  When he was the US Ambassador to Britain from 1969 to 1975, Walter recalled, he and Lee had visited London’s National Gallery and seen that painting for the first time. Having donated millions of dollars to various London causes, charities, and institutions after the sale of his bully-pulpit newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, in 1969, the connected Annenberg would have little trouble getting the history and technical report from the National Gallery about their version of the van Gogh masterpiece.34

  As Lee scanned other van Gogh artworks in the Passionate Eye catalogue,
she handed a letter from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to her husband, saying, “Looks like Ronnie’s project will open on time next year. Good work, Walter.”

  “Maybe by then we will own one more van Gogh masterpiece,” he said.

  “That would make it painting number fifty-three for Sunnylands.”

  7

  Making an Impression

  Tuesday, May 1, 1990.

  The National Gallery of Art held the press breakfast and preview for The Passionate Eye in the East Building. At the head table, from left to right, sat Daniel A. Peterson, Senior Vice President of Martin Marietta, NGA Director J. Carter Brown, Frau Hortense Anda-Bührle, and Charles S. Moffett.

  Missing from the press conference were two notable worldly, similarly hard-knuckled businessmen: Dieter Bührle, chairman of the Oerlikon-Bührle Group, defense partner with Martin Marietta; and Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg. Both men deserved to be at the opening breakfast for the exhibit. Both men would have stoked controversy.

  Conveniently absent, Dieter was back in Zurich due to business concerns, shielded from journalists who missed an opportunity to drill down into the history and stewardship of the arms manufacturer that had blood on his hands from Jewish Holocaust victims, American servicemen in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of World War II, blacks in apartheid South Africa, and Israelis from the sales of gun batteries to Egypt prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

  What about Walter Annenberg? Why wasn’t he sitting at the table right next to his close friend J. Carter Brown? What was his liability to the exhibition? Was Walter a risk, being the former owner of TV Guide and the Philadelphia Inquirer, along with other media and broadcast outlets, who attacked political and journalist enemies with hardcore retribution near and far? Had Walter attended the breakfast, it would have been akin to putting an old great white shark into a pool of young barracudas. One could surmise that Leonore Annenberg had advised Walter not to attend for that very reason.