According to a report on Tuesday by the Swiss Public Radio SRF, the art group KKKK broke into the website of a contentious show at the Kunsthaus Zurich in Switzerland. To replace the four QR codes with its own biography of the collector Emil Georg Bührle, whose collections are the focus of the exhibition, the collective divided itself into four halves.
Bührle was referred to by the collective as “a Nazi sympathiser, authoritarian militarist, at the very least a war profiteer, and probably a war criminal.”
Bührle was a Swiss manufacturer who made a fortune supplying weapons to Nazi Germany and buying plundered art from the Nazi dictatorship before his death in 1956.
The controversy surrounding the Bührle collection, many of whose pieces are said to have been stolen from Jews by the Nazis, overshadowed the 2021 inauguration of the Kunsthaus’s addition, which was planned by British architect David Chipperfield. The structure is home to 170 Impressionist pieces under loan from the Bührle Foundation.
The collective sought the sale of all remaining works to assist Holocaust survivors, their families, and the descendants of slave labourers who were forced into service by the Nazis, as well as the restoration of any works that had been taken from Jews.
Since joining as a board member in 1940, Bührle has had a connection to the Kunsthaus. He also provided funding for a 1958 addition to the structure.
Claude Monet’s Poppy Field Near Vétheuil (1879), at least one piece in the collection, has come under scrutiny, despite the foundation’s claim that none of the pieces on exhibit were associated with Nazi persecution.
Ann Demeester, who was appointed director of the Kunsthaus in January, vowed to address the Bührle legacy. The city and canton of Zurich are also working on establishing an impartial committee to look into the foundation’s provenance study.
Feature Image Courtesy: The Art Newspaper
Pratiksha is an art enthusiast and writer.
