Breaking van Gogh Page 6

  For the well-attended press conference, the Oerlikon-Bührle Group and the National Gallery of Art went heavy with preemptive damage control. The day before, Ruth Kaplan, the NGA’s external information officer, sent a memorandum to Brown outlining the problems with Emil Bührle’s arms dealer past during World War II. The notes she gave him warned about a particular journalist and prepared him for probing questions about Emil Bührle’s Nazi-tainted past, questioning whether the NGA should have commemorated his legacy as an art collector at all.

  Kaplan wrote:

  The one issue which is more than likely to come up is the question of Bührle’s arms sales during WWI [sic]. For your additional background, the Bührle company sold arms to the Allies during the war but did not directly sell to the Axis. The Swiss government made a deal with the Nazis when Germany surrounded Switzerland and no supplies go in or out of the country. The Swiss agreed to provide arms and pharmaceuticals to the Nazis in exchange for an open route of the country. This question is likely to be posed by Elliot Nagin of The City Paper who has been assigned to do a cover story about Bührle’s wartime activities …35

  One defensive tactic the NGA adopted for “non-art related” inquires was to prep Hortense on how to answer questions from the press by coming up with a list of nineteen “possible questions and their recommended responses.”36 Without a doubt, Hortense had to protect her father’s legacy, reputation, and family name, even if it were unknown outside of Switzerland. Below are some of these questions and suggested answers:

  Question 2: Why [has] the Bührle family never considered donating the collection to a museum?

  Answer 2: For us it was very important that our collection remain intact and as a whole, the way our father assembled this harmonious, well-thought collection. Donating it could have meant a split up of the collection.37

  Question 3: Has the Foundation ever sold any paintings?

  Answer 3: In 1960 we sold approx. 20 paintings of minor importance in order to establish a capital fund which would assist the Foundation in maintaining both the collection and the house in which the collection is hung.38

  Question 6: In your opinion, what is the most expensive aspect related to maintaining an art collection of this stature?

  Answer 6: I would say that the security installations are very expensive.39

  Question 8: With Japan’s reputation for being the highest bidders on the auction block, would you consider selling any paintings if they were to make you an offer?

  Answer 8: We do not have a reputation for selling our paintings.40

  Three of those four questions focused on whether the Bührle heirs would ever part with selling a painting, especially artwork of outstanding and historical value, such as a Vincent van Gogh masterpiece. The answers to those three questions were a firm No, No, and No, as in not open to further discussion.

  In answering the question on “cost” of maintaining the collection, Kaplan inserted the only response to what was hot news at that time. In the spring of 1990, security at fine art collections around the world were on high alert. Seared in their minds was the St. Patrick’s Day robbery of the Gardner Museum in Boston six weeks earlier—a theft of priceless masterpieces valued at a combined $500 million. With the Bührle exhibit coming on the heels of the biggest art heist in history, it was important to supply Hortense with the right response should the question arise.

  The scripted answers, devised to insulate Frau Hortense from a barrage of questions and soften the depiction of the business dealings of Emil Bührle and his company during and after World War II, did not fool everyone. One journalist in particular wasn’t buying the story.

  In January 1990, the New York Times chose thirty-one-year-old Michael Kimmelman, “a writer of proven scholarship and journalistic flair,” to be its chief art critic.41

  Of Jewish descent, Kimmelman would prove to be a thorn in the side of all participants involved with The Passionate Eye. For Kimmelman, there was no fog of war, no gray, just black and white. He knew Emil Bührle supplied the Nazis with weapons that killed Americans and Allied troops during the war. He knew that Oerlikon sent its heavy-duty guns to Japan. The art critic wouldn’t be swayed, not in light of the vast troves of priceless European art stolen by Hermann Göring and his Nazi collaborators.

  But the poison dart that Michael Kimmelman would fire at the exhibit, the Bührle family, and the National Gallery of Art, in the form of a caustic review, wouldn’t be published for another three weeks. Did Kimmelman deliberately hold off on writing about the biggest exhibition of the year in an act of defiance? If he did attend the press breakfast that day, he was quiet. Between the morning of May 1 and May 20, when he finally wrote about The Passionate Eye, the Times chief art critic published three articles (on May 4, 11, and 14). All of them were art reviews of lesser shows, in smaller venues, with inferior artists. Holding off on his critique was in itself a calculated statement.

  After Martin Marietta’s Daniel Peterson and NGA’s J. Carter Brown gave their opening remarks, the director introduced Frau Hortense Anda-Bührle, President of the Emil G. Bührle Foundation, to the audience. She took the podium. Like the center of gravity she was to her father’s art collection, Hortense calmly placed her six-page, double-spaced, all-caps speech on the lectern and addressed the audience. Speaking with a thick Bavarian accent, she told the story of her father’s life and the rise of his career as an industrialist.

  Armed with press kits, the journalists learned the Foundation was chartered in 1960; that it received numerous requests over the years to show the collection outside of Zurich; and that due to the logistical challenges of bringing the breadth of artwork to the world stage, the collection would be “retired from international lending after the current world tour”42 of the four cities.

  Well prepared, knowing the subject matter her entire life, Hortense delivered a thoughtful speech about her father, his life as an art lover, and his art collection:

  [He] began to acquire paintings, in particular Impressionists, for it had been the works of these masters that had kindled the fire in his student days. So it was only natural that Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse, Gauguin and van Gogh were to form the nucleus of his collection. He recognized the relationship of these artists to their forebears in Dutch and Venetians such as Cannaletto, Guardi and Tiepolo. And he expanded the collection accordingly.43

  She dodged any direct probes into her father’s past (it helped that the event took place five years before web browsers and search engines existed), and the breakfast went smoothly. The only slip up occurred when J. Carter Brown stood to introduce his senior curator of paintings and, peering into the audience, couldn’t find his Impressionist expert. Laughter ensued as it was pointed out that Charles Moffett was right there, sitting at the head table with Brown, on the other side of Hortense.

  With the gala dinner—where Walter and Leonore Annenberg conversed with First Lady Barbara Bush, Swiss and US dignitaries, heads of state, and Republican politicians—a success, the buzz about the Annenbergs’ and Emil Bührle’s art collections likewise was positive. Not a landmine in sight. From the champagne and three-course meal onward, it appeared smooth sailing ahead for the exhibits when the throngs of visitors poured into the museum on opening day, Sunday, May 6, 1990.

  Walter had taken a private tour of Bührle’s artwork before the first review of the exhibit came out on Friday, May 4. Up close, free of the crowds, he and Lee moved around the East Building, walking quietly from room to room, admiring the collection of masterworks from the Bührle Foundation. When the Annenbergs came to the large gallery room, with its luminous high ceilings, spacious dark green walls, and knee-high baseboard and trim, Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Cypresses stood out from the other paintings in the room. In Walter’s eyes there was no comparison. It was a classic he had to own.

  The ambassador would soon begin to work behind the scenes, make calls, and pull any and all strings necessary to do
whatever it took to bring the van Gogh masterpiece into his fold.

  He took Dieter’s bait.

  8

  Poison Dart Art Critic

  Michael Kimmelman, who was well versed in the myths and facts surrounding Emil G. Bührle’s life and his suspect—even tainted—art collection, must have been aware of a scathing magazine article in late 1989, a publicized outing of Dieter Bührle’s dark past.

  The annual Canadian arms conference, held on October 25–26, 1989, in Ottawa, Canada, was a not-so-veiled sign of protest against the United Nations’ “Disarmament Day,” observed the day before.

  For Richard Sanders, a freelance reporter for the Coalition to Oppose Arms Trade (COAT) in Ottawa, it was an opportunity to shine a light on the conference and its delegates. Since those were pre-Internet days, Sanders did what any good reporter would have done—dumpster dive for intelligence. He lifted business cards and arms brochures out of wastepaper baskets and trash bins, picked up fliers and marketing materials from exhibit booths, and stayed under the radar, not drawing suspicious eyes to his real purpose for attending the bizarre trade show. He knew that no arms manufacturer would go on or off the record to speak to him; what’s more, had a vendor found out that Sanders was from COAT, he likely would have been shown the door.

  One month later, Sanders published “Merchants of Death Conference” in Peace Magazine. In discussing statistics on which arms manufacturers were in attendance, which countries they represented, and which companies sponsored the two-day conference, he zeroed in on one central speaker: Dietrich S. Bührle, also known as Dieter.

  On Dieter, Richard Sanders wrote:

  He was following in his father’s footsteps. Emil George Bührle, founder of the Oerlikon-Bührle Machine Tool Company, was blacklisted for selling armaments to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In 1971 Dietrich Bührle was in the Swiss Supreme Court, admitting responsibility for Oerlikon’s illegal sales of arms to South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Malaysia and Nigeria.

  The article went on to explain that “21 million worth of arms” had been illegally exported by Oerlikon-Bührle Group, with more than half to South Africa, and the forged “end of use certificates” and a shell corporation in France were all that was needed to get it done.

  Next, Sanders wrote about how Dieter “got off easy” with a suspended prison sentence, a fine, and three years of probation, and that a couple of other company executives took the fall on Bührle’s behalf.44

  Sanders noted that in the speaker’s bio, there was no mention of Dieter’s criminal past.

  In addition to covering the arms dealer’s business past, with its moral compass that always pointed to the Bührles’ wealth and well-being in Switzerland, Michael Kimmelman also dug deep into Emil Bührle’s art acquisitions. On Sunday, May 20, with The Passionate Eye entering its third week with full attendance, he wrote a blistering 1,300-word account that skipped over the artwork and the master artists and gutted the show.

  The art review began with the curious title “Was this Exhibition Necessary?”45 He took a swipe at Walter Annenberg and the Annenberg Collection by openly castigating wealthy private collectors who tried to “enhance” their dented and soiled reputations through the purchase of “vanity art.” Most of Kimmelman’s concerns, in fact, were of a moral kind:

  But it is also an exhibition that the National Gallery should never have undertaken. The astonishing thing is that this public institution evinces no embarrassment.46

  Kimmelman threw a left hook at Bührle and his past:

  What is nowhere mentioned in the catalogue is that Bührle-made arms were distributed to the Nazis as well as to the Allies. Nor is anything said about Dieter Bührle—the collector’s son and the present chairman of Oerlikon-Bührle, who owns many of the works in this exhibition—except that he continued to buy art for the family firm after his father’s death. A reader will search in vain for news about Dieter Bührle’s conviction in 1970 in Switzerland for illegal arms sales.47

  He then took his gloves off and pointed out a very specific and damning association. “And only the most scrupulous reader of the small print on the back of the catalogue will notice curious bits of information like the provenance of Renoir’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Irene Cahen d’Anvers, which traces the painting to the collection of Hermann Göring,”48 the New York Times chief art critic wrote.

  When J. Carter Brown and Charles Moffett read the scathing review on Friday, May 18, in the New York Times weekend edition, their jaws must have hit the floor. Sure, Moffett expected something to come out, a hit job on Emil Bührle and his collection. He got wind that such a piece was going to come out when he met Michael Kimmelman at the exhibit on Monday, May 7. What he didn’t expect was the Molotov cocktail the art critic hurled in the direction of all participants.

  Moffett wrote a memo to the file:

  After seeing the Annenberg and Buhrle [sic] exhibitions this afternoon, Michael Kimmelman came to see me.

  He had only one thing on his mind: the question of morality and the Buhrle family. He asked me several questions about E. G. Buhrle’s arms business, most of which I couldn’t answer.49

  Kimmelman went on to pound Charlie about Dieter’s conviction and the fine paid by the company in 1970 for selling illegal arms. Whenever Moffett tried to move the conversation to art, Kimmelman turned it back to questions on morality.50

  Up to May 18, a dozen positive reviews, local and regional, had been written about the twin exhibits, several with a title playing off the word “Impression.” Up to that point, the National Gallery of Art, Hortense Anda-Bührle, the Annenberg Collection, and Martin Marietta had avoided most forms of controversy. Now they were the targets of censure and ridicule.

  Meanwhile, J. Carter Brown wrote a letter to the Art and Education Committee of the Trustees to preempt anger and heated reaction to the Kimmelman review, reminding them, “You may remember that at the time the Bührle exhibition came up for approval by the A&E Committee in 1986, I mentioned that we would be incurring the risk of some journalistic reaction to business activities of the Bührle firm, and that it was felt at the meeting that we should not let this deter us from a major art opportunity.”51

  But Kimmelman had done his homework. He knew some of the unpublished history of Emil and Dieter Bührle. He nailed the industry of war—superficially “purified” by the commerce of art—to the cross. He accomplished the investigative feat seven years before the CIA declassified “Operation SafeHaven,” which showed the movements of Emil Bührle during the war across France, his network of art dealers, his connections to Hermann Göring, the laundering of the Nazi Reichsmark into gold and Swiss francs, and the sales of arms for artwork and other forms of payments with Nazi Germany, despite the claims made by Emil’s children to the contrary.

  Kimmelman wrote his hit piece eighteen years before the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s detailed, 165-page 2008 brief, The Hunt Controversy: A Shadow Report, which reported on the looted art of Jewish and European collectors and dealers. That report dedicated a full chapter to the schemes, dealings, and connections of Emil G. Bührle during World War II. Nothing in the Shadow Report enhanced Bührle’s reputation as an art collector. In fact, it had the opposite effect of discrediting the industrialist, suffocating any chance his family had to rehabilitate his reputation.

  In August 2015, a new book appeared, titled The Bührle Black Book: Art Stolen for the Zurich Kunsthaus. Researched, investigated, and written by Dr. Thomas Buomberger, a Swiss historian and journalist, and Guido Magnaguagno, an art historian, it skewered the Bührle Foundation art collection. Its authors pointed out in an email to this author: “Not enough research has been done into the provenance of all the paintings.”52

  Dr. Buomberger has called on the Swiss government to open an investigation into the nineteen cases of artwork with suspect provenance that the authors profiled in their book, which does not include Dieter Bührle’s Wheat Field with Cypresses, since neither Dieter’s esta
te nor the Foundation had owned the painting for nearly a quarter of a century. The authors complained that the Bührle Foundation continues to receive public subsidies (the Kunsthaus in Zurich was being renovated to host the art collection in 2020).

  Kimmelman was way ahead of the curve when it came to the dark undercurrents of the Bührle father-son dynasty. His piece, however, met with some resistance, and not only from Brown and the NGA. On May 21, New York businessman and art enthusiast Doug Russell wrote a strongly worded rebuttal to Kimmelman’s piece, in which he called out the art critic for “forwarding his bias” instead of focusing on art. Russell wrote his diatribe not to the editor of the letters section, but to the publisher of the New York Times, and he was savvy enough to copy J. Carter Brown.

  On May 24, Piers Rodgers, secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts, wrote a letter of complaint to the editor at the New York Times, expressing a similar sentiment about focusing on the art itself:

  Your readers may be interested to know that the artists who form the Membership of the Royal Academy debated the ethical issues involved two years ago. There was an overwhelming majority in favor of the proposition that no moral taint could possibly attach to a work of art unless it were at the moment of its creation. It is in the public interest, and in the interest of their creators, for great works of art to be shown regardless of their provenance.53

  The Royal Academy of Arts in London would be the fourth and final destination of The Passionate Eye tour. Several other people and professionals responded to Kimmelman’s piece in the New York Times.

  When the show was over in mid-July, J. Carter Brown and Charles Moffett knew they had a winner on their hands. Over 200,000 visitors showed up to see the exhibitions; dozens of glowing reviews were published in local, regional, national, and international magazines, newspapers, and journals. The show was a smash hit. If one left out the acerbic review from Michael Kimmelman, there was a lot to be proud of. Annenberg’s exhibit wound up traveling through Chicago, ending in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before the fifty-two paintings returned home to their rightful place in the 20,000-square-foot estate of Sunnylands.