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Kunsthaus Zurich courts controversy with Nahmad show

Henri Matisse, La lecture (deux fillettes, bouquet de pivoines sur fond noir), 1947. Oil on canvas, 46 x 55.2 cm, The Nahmad Collection © 2011 Succession H. Matisse / ProLitteris, Zurich

Article first published by Swissinfo on 26.10.11

Zurich’s Kuntshaus was bound to rock the art establishment when it invited the notorious Nahmad dealers to exhibit their goods. The museum’s director stands by his choice.

Kunsthaus Director Christoph Becker is convinced that the quality of the works on show in “Miró, Monet, Matisse – The Nahmad Collection” will dispel any thoughts that a world-class art institution is catering to the commercial interests of a family who happens to deal art on a global scale. He explains his decision in an exclusive interview.

Christoph Becker, Director of Kunsthaus Zürich, photo Laird

The latest exhibition at Zurich’s fine arts museum is a direct consequence of its centenary celebration in 2010, when it revived the 1953 Picasso retrospective. Because the Nahmads had loaned key paintings, Becker “suspected” that they possessed many more and hoped that they could be convinced to show them.

The Nahmads have been dealing in art for five decades, ever since the three sons of a Sephardic banker from Syria left Beirut for Milan, then Paris or New York, London and Monaco, to escape the tensions in the Middle East.

Depending on the source, the Nahmads are said to have accumulated between 3’000 and 5’000 works of art – including more than 200 Picassos, a collection that is second only to that of the Picasso estate.

Most of the works are squirrelled away in a secure duty-free warehouse near Geneva airport. Even the Nahmads had never seen them displayed together before the Zurich exhibition.

But is not so much a collection, the art world says, than a stockpiling of works by specific artists in order to corner markets and influence prices. Hardly an art auction takes place in premier auction houses today without the Nahmad family either selling or buying. With a fortune estimated by Forbes at more than $3 billion – also amassed from currency and commodity trading – they have the financial clout to invest, possess, squeeze or drive markets. Occasionally, they hold on to their goods.

Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Guillaume, 1916, Oil on board laid down on cradled panel, 53 x 37 cm, The Nahmad Collection

“When I first approached the Nahmads, they said that they did not believe that they had a collection. I told them to think about it,” Becker said. Two weeks later and following many internal discussions, the publicity-shy family acquiesced and agreed to produce a core selection of 150 pieces, later reduced to a hundred.

“The selection met the highest museum standards. If it had not, I would have cancelled the show,” Becker said. Furthermore, he discovered what he qualifies as a “Nahmad taste”, with the prominence of some artists and the exclusion of others.

“Miró, Monet, Matisse – The Nahmad Collection” focuses on the five artistic periods between 1870 and 1970 favoured by the Nahmads, including Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Abstraction, Surrealism, and Picasso.

Claude Monet, Canotiers à Argenteuil, 1874, Oil on canvas, 60 x 81 cm, The Nahmad Collection

Visitors at the opening commented on the odd hanging, as if they were invited to discover crucial developments in art history, rather than the paintings themselves. A row of seven Modiglianis from the artist’s period of greatest artistic intensity in the years before his death in 1920 are lined up like models all sitting in the same chair facing the same window (they probably were).

Picasso’s colourfully riotous interpretations of Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” or Delacroix’s “Les Femmes d’Alger”, all splashed on a single wall, prove to us that, yes, there can sometimes be too much of a good thing.

Becker wants us to understand that a collection “must be regarded as existing in a state of becoming.” What he is celebrating is the commitment of a group of individuals to art.

However, unlike the legendary art merchants who would discover and sustain artists, the Nahmads respond to auction barometers. “It’s the world upside down,” said Sami Kinge, who went to school in Beirut with David Nahmad. Contacted in Paris, where he runs an eponymous gallery in the tradition of the old-style merchants, he said laconically: “The Nahmads only buy and sell.”

Becker admitted that the exhibition, even before it opened, had caused a stir. Accused of becoming an ally to the most influential art dealers in the world, he insisted that his aim is only “to bring something into being.” There was no deal, he emphasized.

He added that the value of the works presented was “above money” and that the exhibition would therefore not influence auction prices any more. “With works of this quality, it’s impossible. If we thought we were turning the screw, we wouldn’t have done it.”

Urs Lanter, Director of the Swiss Art Department at auction house Sotheby’s concurred with Becker’s opinion. “Exceptional works command exceptional prices,” he said, “especially when they enjoy great provenance and when they are important in the art history and the career of the artist”.

Simon de Pury refuted the suggestion that the Kunsthaus could become the backdoor of auction houses. As head of Phillips de Pury & Company, the youngest and some say most dynamic of the three auction houses, he said that some of the greatest art collections in the world are the creation of art dealers. He gave the examples of Ernst Beyeler and Heinz Berggruen who built museums to house their collections, respectively in Switzerland and Germany.

“Museums cannot exist without collectors, and collectors cannot exist without art dealers,” he said, adding simply: “Greats museum show great art.”

What we perhaps learn from this exhibition is that market forces have become part of the fabric of museums. Art collectors donate to reduce their fiscal liability, art dealers take risks and get caught in monetary spirals.

Nobody knows what will become of the Nahmad collection. There are rumors, unconfirmed by Becker, that the present exhibition has inspired the Nahmads to make long term plans, now that they have discovered that they have a collection after all.

Pablo Picasso, Le petit pierrot aux fleurs (Portrait of the artist’s son, Paulo, as Harlequin), 1923/24, Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 73.6 cm, The Nahmad Collection © 2011 ProLitteris, Zurich

The Nahmads

Joe (Giuseppi), the elder and more flamboyant of the three Nahmad brothers, started his collection by commissioning paintings by Lucio Fontana and Wilfredo Lam in the lively Milan of the sixties. Almost 80, he now lives the life of a recluse.

His younger brothers, Ezra (1945) and David (1947) demonstrated entrepreneurial skills at a very early age and began investing in the stock market at the age of 15. They became interested in art through Joe.

For his first art transactions, David would lend a buyer the money to buy the work of art he was selling, then use the debt as collateral to obtain a loan from the bank.

Ezra’s son, Helly, opened the Helly Nahmad Gallery in London in 1998. He attended the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and has played a pivotal role in the organisation of the Zurich exhibit. David’s son, also named Helly after the grandfather, opened the Helly Nahmad Gallery in New York in 2004. He is often pictured with celebrities.

Art dealers

The legendary pre-Nahmad art merchants who bought directly from the artists (as opposed to auction houses) were Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Cubism), Paul Rosenberg (Picasso and French Modernists), Sidney Janis (American Abstract Expressionism), Alexander Iolas (late Surrealism, Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle), Leo Castelli (Pop art) and more recently Bruno Bischofberger (Basquiat).

The exhibition

‘Miró, Monet, Matisse – The Nahmad Collection’ features more than 100 paintings by Miró,

Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Monet, Magritte and many others. The Impressionist section is dominated by Monet; Abstraction is represented by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian; Surrealism represented by De Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy, Max Ernst and especially Joan Miro.

Picasso’s “Petit Pierrot aux fleurs” (Harlequin with Flowers), a portrait of his son painted in 1923/24, is considered one of the highlights of the show.

The lavishly illustrated and commented catalogue is sold for CHF 45.00.

The exhibition runs until 15 January 2011.

The Kunsthaus Zurich averages 300’000 visitors a year, with records between 2’000 and 3’000 daily visitors for the major exhibits, including the recent Picasso retrospective.

Links

“Miró, Monet, Matisse – The Nahmad Collection”

Kunsthaus Zürich

Helly Nahmad (London)

Helly Nahmad Gallery (New York)

 

Joan Miró, Soirée snob chez la princesse, ca 1946, Pastel and gouache on paper, 31.4 x 51.4 cm, The Nahmad Collection © Successió Miró / 2011 ProLitteris, Zurich

Zurich museum recreates key Picasso exhibition

Pablo Picasso, 1933, photo Man Ray © Man Ray Trust/2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

To celebrate its centenary, Kunsthaus Zurich restages the mythical 1932 retrospective that was to establish Picasso as one of the most radical artists of the 20th century. Originally curated by Picasso himself, the show offers insight into his creative genius and keys to understanding his work. The last major Picasso retrospective took place 30 years ago.

There has not been a major Picasso retrospective since the one that took place in 1980 at MoMA, the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibitions with Picasso’s works are programmed continuously all over the world (see list of recent examples at end), but none of the displays can claim to illustrate the meaningful journey of an artist into his creativity through his own selection of works.

Picasso, his first museum exhibition 1932 at the Kunsthaus in Zurich until January 30, 2011 revives the show that took place at Kunsthaus Zurich in autumn 1932 and in which Picasso played a major curatorial role.

Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare), 1924, Oil with sand on canvas, 140,7 x 200,3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

A first version of the exhibition had taken place in Paris in the spring of 1932 at the private Georges Petit gallery.

Piqued by his rivalry with Matisse, who had exposed in the same venue a year before, Picasso selected emblematic pieces from 1899 onwards, which he scattered amongst the large-scale compositions that he had feverishly prepared for the show.

Discovering Picasso’s more recent works, the then director of the Kunsthaus, Wilhelm Wartmann, who had travelled to Paris to see the show, had the foresight to distinguish that Picasso “was in a league of his own” and dropped his original idea of a joint Picasso/Braque/Léger presentation.

“What we have done at the Kunsthaus is a retrospective in retrospective,” curator Tobi Bezzola says of a project that took five years to complete. Because the original catalogue contained no illustrations, he and his collaborators have painstakingly reassembled the exhibition’s puzzle.

Pablo Picasso, Pitcher and Fruit Bowl (Pichet et coupe de fruits), 1931, Oil on canvas , 130,2 x 194,9 cm
Saint Louis Art Museum, Legat Morton D. May © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

They were able to identify and locate the 240 works that were included in the original Zurich exhibition and have obtained the loan of more than 100 of them.

Interestingly, the largest number of works in the 1932 exhibition came from a collection in Lausanne belonging to Dr. Gottlieb Friedrich Reber (1880-1959), who was described during a visit to America in 1930 as “without any question the most important collector of modern art in Europe today”.

The timing for the first exhibition was perfect, Bezzola believes, because, coming right after the stock market crash, a number of collectors, including Reber, needed to sell, whilst gallery owners and art dealers needed to collaborate to survive. The status of the Kunsthaus allowed the sale of the works on show.

“The scientific reconstitution of a historically important show,” he indicates, “was the legitimatization to knock on important doors” and secure loans that would have been virtually impossible to obtain otherwise.

But not a single painting was obtained without lengthy negotiations, he points out. More than 40 institutions and countless private collectors have agreed to part with their works during the show, which is exclusive to Zurich and will travel nowhere else.

Installation view, photo © jpg-factory.com

“We toyed with the idea of holding it in the galleries of the Kunsthaus where it originally took place, but this proved to be impossible for reasons of flow and access of visitors and also because it would have meant emptying out our permanent collections.”

Insurance costs, which already represent two thirds of the budget, would have soared even higher.

Because this ruled out the idea of visually recreating the original show, Bezzalo decided on an installation that clearly divides Picasso’s earlier production from his conceptual breakthrough in the late 20s and early 30s. “I really wanted to preserve two distinctive parts to the show,” he indicates.

Visitors first walk into an intimate display of Picasso’s pink and blue periods and Cubist and neo-classical phase that resonate gently against walls painted in the Kunsthaus’s signature green-grey.

Another section is devoted to Picasso’s immense ability as a draughtsman, reminding us that he was not just a painter.

Loves of Jupiter and Semele, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1930, Copperplate etching on paper, 22.5 x 17.2 cm
Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

The selection of paintings is an instant lesson in art history covering the beginning of the last century, whilst tossing up clues to Picasso’s evolution from one style to the next, particularly the influence of African art on subsequent Cubism.

Then suddenly a wide open space, with glaringly white walls that are fanned out diagonally, introduces visitors to Picasso’s febrile new production leading up to the 1932 exhibition. Following his encounter with the blond Marie-Thérèse Walther who was 27 years younger, the 50-year-old artist entered into a period of explosive creativity.

“I wanted these works to be visible together at a glance,” Bezzola explains, “to allow us to better understand the relationship between them.”

Installation view, photo © FBM Studio Zürich

Picasso, he points out, worked simultaneously in several styles and was constantly experimenting in different mediums. “He would work on a neo-classical composition in the morning, launch into Cubism in the afternoon and finish with Surrealism.”

“This exhibition allows people to see the elements that he chose and combined,” the curator underlines, as well as the variety of techniques in which he experimented, including adding sand to oil paint.

Shocked by the apparent chaos of the artist, the world-famous psychologist and psychotherapist C.G. Jung pronounced the painter a schizophrenic, claiming that his pictures “immediately reveal their alienation from feeling”.

“One has to remember that the flow of information was very different at that time and people were easily confused,” Bezzola points out.

“But by 1932, Picasso had developed most of his formal repertory, so this exhibition can be said to cover the important part of his oeuvre,” he suggests.

Pablo Picasso, Bathers with Beach Ball (Baigneuses au ballon), 1928, Oil on canvas, 15,9 x 21,9 cm
Private collection © 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

It is also an exhibition of historical importance, since it “may have been one of the first times a living artist was invited to present his works in a museum environment,” the curator says, pointing out that the Zurich Kunsthaus was actually founded as an artist’s association and not a museum.

The concept of presenting contemporary art by a living artist was to lay the foundations for the creation of modern art museums, but only several decades later.

Asked if there were any pieces that he regretted not including in the exhibition, Bezzola mentions the sensuous masterpiece Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, a portrait of Walter that Picasso is said to have painted on a single day in March 1932.

Cecil Beaton, Pablo Picasso, 1933. Courtesy the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
(not in exhibition)

To be loaned from the Brody estate, where it has been since 1951, the painting was sold one month ago by Christies following the recent decease of Sidney Brody. It sold for more than 106 million US dollars, the highest amount ever paid for a work of art in an auction.

“Traditionally, art collectors love to be involved in the art world,” Bezzola observes, “but I am now encountering for the first time collectors who are not in the least bit interested in art. They are simply investors who are approachable only through their lawyers.”

Major works of art will predictably become more difficult to expose. Combined with mounting insurance costs, exhibitions like the current one at Kunsthaus Zurich may become a rarity.

To gain overall insight into the kaleidoscope mind of a genius, this might be your last chance.

Picasso
Until January 30, 2011

Kunsthaus Zürich
Heimplatz 1
CH–8001 Zurich

Opening times:
Sat/Sun/Tues 10am–6pm
Wed–Fri 10am–8pm
Closed Mondays

Recent examples of how Picasso keeps museums busy and publics flocking through recent partial expos: Picasso: themes and variations (MoMa, New York), Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (Gagosian, London), Klee meets Picasso (Zentrum Klee, Bern), Picasso and the masters (Grand Palais, Paris), Picasso: portrait of soul (Suntory, Tokyo), only a few examples of many more.

Zurich exhibition fails to do Seurat justice


Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, final study © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

French neo-impressionist painter, Georges Seurat, is the subject of the latest exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich. But with only 60 works on display, many of them studies for larger paintings, it is difficult to tell whether the claim that Seurat is one of the fathers of modern art is justified. The monastic sobriety of the display, despite the wondrous pictures, does little to explain the quasi-religious fervour that Seurat inspires.

Georges Seurat (1859-1891) died of diphtheria at the age of 31. During his short life, his artistic output, estimated at around 400 works, was already considered groundbreaking. By inventing pointillism, a chromatic painting technique based on tiny brushstrokes of individual colours, Seurat came very close to producing pixels.

“What makes Seurat so fascinating today is the variety of approaches implicit in his work” indicates Christoph Becker, Director of the Kunsthaus Zürich and editor of the sumptuous catalogue dedicated to Figures in Space, the title of the exhibition.

“What seems at first glance excessively cool and objective in the Pointillist works is in reality the stormy beginning of a new epoch in art that led to the abstraction of classic modernism,” he adds. No less!

The exhibition has been laid out in three parts. The first presents the sketches and paintings that led to the large compositions that Seurat prepared for the Paris salons, including the one he founded in 1884 with other artists, when his works continued to be rejected by the official galleries.

Seurat’s drawings are instantly recognizable: the silhouettes are not so much drawn as rubbed into high-quality Ingres paper with the dark charcoal and wax of Conté crayons. Already the outlines have disappeared, a characteristic that Seurat was to reproduce with his innovative painting technique.

Drawings are followed by a series of “croquetons”, early oil paintings on small wood panels no larger than a cigar box. True to the spirit of the reigning Impressionists, who preferred to paint out of doors, the vivid brush strokes were meant to capture impressions, rather than depict reality.

“The advantage of these croquetons was that they fit beneath the lid of a small paintbox and could thus be easily carried around even if the paint had yet to dry,” explains Julia Burckhardt Bild, who co-edited the catalogue with Becker.

Various studies for well-known works then follow. Although the artistic evolution of Seurat is well illustrated, the display in Zurich stops just short of disappointing.

One of the reasons may be that many of Seurat’s works are too fragile to travel, including A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which is considered his masterpiece and that is now permanently exposed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Once you have done an exhibition like this, you know why Seurat exhibitions are rare events,” says Becker. He also points out that the painter has always been a collector’s artist and that many of his works have therefore disappeared into private collections.

The Kunsthaus in Zurich and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in Germany, where the exhibition will move to after Switzerland, have nevertheless secured loans from prestigious institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Tate and National Gallery in London.

Thanks to the many studies, we get a feel for Seurat’s progression into pointillism but the absence of the end result can leave visitors with the feeling that the artist was more a tireless and methodical labourer than an inspired genius. Surely this was not the intent.

Nowhere in the exhibition is this more perceptible than in the second section of the exhibition dedicated solely to the seascapes of ports and harbours that Seurat painted towards the end of his short life. They appear strangely inert, not because they are uninteresting, but because the linear display is too monotonous.

Figures in Space culminates with the world-famous The Circus generously on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Chairs are set up in a semi-circle, as if to suggest that we, the on-lookers, are to become part of the event in the circus tent.


Georges Seurat Le Cirque, 1890-91,185,5 x 152,5 cm, legs de John Quinn, 1927 Musée d’Orsay, Dist RMN / Patrice Schmidt

But there is one painting in the exhibition leant by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco that alone makes the trip to Kunsthaus Zürich well worth it. No reproduction, however faithful, can do The Eiffel Tower justice. Painted by Seurat in 1889, as the tower was being finished for the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1900, it allows the unfinished spire to disappear into the sky.


La Tour Eiffel, ca. 1889, 24,1 x 15,2 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, William H. Noble Bequest Fund

It is the beauty of a technique that does away with boundaries – including the frame – obliging the eye to work differently, that ensures Seurat’s enduring legacy. He was a master of pixels before pixels were even invented.

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