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House of Bührle

Dieter Bührle, a Swiss arms manufacturer, drove along the river toward Lake Zurich to his father’s mansion on Zollikerstrasse. He adjusted his thick Coke-bottle glasses and looked in the rearview mirror. He didn’t like what he saw—the gray receding hairline appeared to have crept further up the crown of his head, and the worry lines on his forehead aged him. He practiced smiling and frowning, glancing at those lines while keeping one eye on the road.

Friday, December 12, 1986.

On past Friday afternoons before the annual Oerlikon-Bührle Group board meeting, he recalled being more relaxed, often celebrating a good year of profits and growth with drinks and an early dinner with colleagues or his bankers in town. Not that year. Stressed by the news he would have to deliver to his sister Hortense and the rest of the board the next day, he grimaced and tried to take his mind off business.

Visiting his late father’s private art collection, one of the largest in Europe in the twentieth century, would bring some respite from the bad business year. It had worked in the past—when he was a child and teenager, and later a college graduate—to take a private tour of the colorful Impressionist paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas and Henry Matisse, and numerous other European masters. Thinking about those paintings brought him joy, even though he wasn’t an art expert or enthusiast like his father. Somehow, it even gave him hope that he would come out of the Saturday board meeting having tendered his resignation and the board having rejected it.

A historical landmark, the Zollikerstrasse mansion was built in 1886. Emil Georg Bührle bought it in 1937, the year he and his children became Swiss citizens, having emigrated from neighboring Germany. This was also the year when he began to buy and collect art from the French Impressionist school. Emil was rich. He had arrived. And the drums of World War II would make him wealthier. Another world war was great for business at Oerlikon-Bührle, armaments manufacturer.

Bührle’s company sold anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and anti-submarine guns, 20mm cannons, and the components of new missile-guided systems to the Nazis and Allies in both theaters of the war, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Oerlikon-Bührle supplied industrial arms to the British Royal Navy, fitted its weapons on the frigates and destroyers of the US Navy Pacific Fleet in 1942, and fed the Nazi war machine to the very end, when the Nazis looted billions of dollars in art for barter to purchase more weapons and munitions.

The war was great for business and even better for Bührle’s ability to buy European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. By the time he died in 1956, there were more than 150 artworks in his collection. Thanks to the war, he had become the richest man in Europe: he bought more than three-quarters of his collection in the last decade of his life.

During the war, he would buy art with suspect and sometimes unknown provenance, which would lead Emil Bührle into trouble as accusations began appearing after the war. The industrialist had to perfect a delicate balancing act to erase his ties with the Nazis, including Hermann Göring.

Thirteen paintings in Bührle’s collection that were acquired during the war would eventually be clawed back by the US OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the predecessor of the CIA, which pressured the Swiss government to help recover art stolen by the Nazis and return it to its rightful owners in 1945. Ever the art collector, Bührle would buy back nine of those thirteen paintings from the original owners at better-than-market rates—in cash. As his wealth grew, he outbid and outmaneuvered most American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for works such as Marc Chagall’s Russian Wedding and Pablo Picasso’s Still Life with Flowers and Lemons.

Emil’s sudden death in 1956 from a heart attack left his son Dieter wounded, cast into an emotional fog, and in charge of the Oerlikon-Bührle empire. The Bührle empire was making the next generation of missile-guided systems for the United States, Canada, England, the European allied nations, and later NATO. Not unlike his father, Dieter found ways to work with countries sanctioned by the Allies, from Iran to apartheid South Africa, among other rogue regimes. In 1970, such back-channel dealings had landed him in trouble with Swiss authorities.

Now, in 1986, arriving at the foundation’s house, Dieter drove into the gated driveway and parked in the back of the three-story red brick mansion with its A-frame roof with dormers, ivy that climbed up the walls and brick columns by the front door, and cypress trees that stood tall behind a wrought-iron fence with hedges around the perimeter of the property. It was the cypress trees, imported from Italy and planted on the mansion yard, that reminded Dieter and his sister of the van Gogh paintings in their father’s art collection, seven of them the artist’s masterpieces, including Sower with Setting Sun and Blossoming Chestnut Branches.

A villa attached to his father’s old house stored more than one hundred works of art—three-fifths of Emil’s collection—Dutch Masters, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Cubist painters. Emil’s widow and children owned the rest of the paintings.

This trip to his father’s mansion, in peace and solitude, served two purposes. The visit would relax his frown lines and lower his blood pressure, getting his mind off business; more importantly, it would also give him an opportunity to pick out a painting or two that he could sell if his business went further south and there were no new contracts. Maintaining the lifestyle of wealth with a summer home in Italy and a ski chalet in the Swiss Alps was paramount to his well-being.

He entered the villa and it was as though he stepped into a time portal that took him back to his teenage years. He inhaled the familiar musty odors that were embedded in the carpets and wallpaper of the house. Even though the house and villa were touched up in 1960 and then totally renovated in 1976—twenty years after his father’s death—his memory still saw the home where all those bright French paintings hung side by side, covering the dining-room wall. In his head, he still heard the stern footsteps and deep voice of his domineering father, a robust man, who conducted business with an iron fist but also had a warm side, a passion for the arts that dated back to his school days before World War II.

The evidence of his father’s passion was right there on the walls—paintings by Cézanne, Chagall, van Gogh, Gauguin, Renoir, Picasso, Goya, Manet, and Monet, among others. That was why, on February 24, 1960, Dieter, his sister Hortense, and their mother Charlotte Bührle-Schalk had established the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection. They decided that the villa would be a museum, open to the public one day a week. They wanted to establish Emil’s legacy and share his love for art with the public.

Making his way to the Impressionism gallery, Dieter approached a van Gogh masterpiece, Wheat Field with Cypresses. Seeing the landscape artwork—painted by Vincent van Gogh during his troubled but artistically liberating stay at the Saint-Rémy asylum in southern France in 1889, a year before his untimely death—transported Dieter back to 1951, the year his father purchased the painting from a German-born arachnid specialist named Peter Witt. Dieter recalled being there when an intermediary, an art broker, entered the house and the two men sat down for coffee discussing market prices for Impressionists, the Saint-Rémy masterpiece, and other paintings that were available for Emil to purchase. What they didn’t talk about was the war.

Since Dieter’s current concerns had more to do with finances than with art, he wondered about the painting’s value going into 1987. He knew it had to be in the low millions, but how much? Was Wheat Field with Cypresses worth $3 million? Might it be worth as much as $5 million? How much could it fetch at an auction? He didn’t know if there had been a large sale in the art auction market on French Impressionism, so he was unsure of the painting’s potential value in the marketplace.

As he looked over the clouds that swept from left to right in the painting’s pale blue sky, with shafts of sun and shadow dancing across the low-range gray mountains in the background and a breeze blowing through the wheat and the cluster of cypresses in the foreground, Dieter understood that this painting could be his meal ticket, his insurance policy in case Oerlikon-Bührle imploded.

He made a vow to himself: after the start of the New Year, he would get the masterpiece appraised.