Breaking van Gogh

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.

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

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.

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 estate 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.

The Passionate Eye exhibition headed north to Montreal, where large crowds would see it, before heading overseas to Japan. By spring 1991, the exhibit ended its international tour at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.