Breaking van Gogh

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.

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.

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.