Sept. 27



GERMANY:

History's Long, Dark Shadow at Berlin Show


BERLIN - When a deranged protester did some handsprings and
trampled on two works by Gordon Matta-Clark in an
exhibition here of Friedrich Christian Flick's collection,
she proved again that art, even the art of a dead American
sculptor far removed from German history, does not exist in
a vacuum.

Can art cleanse a name tainted by a sordid past? In a
stroke, the Flick collection, a vast, high-priced trove of
hip brand-name contemporary art on view at the expensively
renovated Hamburger Bahnhof, has, for the moment, put
Berlin on the map with cities like London and New York. But
it has also come at a steep cost. There is no promise of a
gift to Germany from Mr. Flick, who can take back the art
when his loan expires in seven years, and is free to sell
work while the exhibition naturally inflates the value of
his collection.

This is a risk Germany never should have undertaken.


Here, history is unavoidable. In Dresden, the Green Vault,
the city's historic treasury of Renaissance and Baroque
jewelry, recently reopened in opulent new galleries in a
palace that was firebombed during the war and is still
being renovated. The collection had partly been on view
some blocks away at the Albertinum, where a group of
Gerhard Richters have since been installed: Mr. Richter, an
adolescent during the war, donated them to the city, where
he once cleared rubble from the bombings and from which he
eventually escaped to West Germany.

In Berlin two exhibitions that are also freighted with
history have dominated the headlines. A traveling show of
highlights from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, just
closed, became such a blockbuster at the Neue
Nationalgalerie that local radio broadcast updates on the
number of hours people had to wait in line to get into the
show each day (up to 11 hours by the end).

That the exhibition featured art the Nazis called
degenerate and banned, and that was thereby lost for German
museums, is a fact implicitly understood here. Berlin is a
cultural capital lacking cultural capital when it comes to
modern and contemporary art, so the city has become
anxious, even desperate, as the Flick loan illustrates, to
gets its hands on some now.

Through his agreement with the government, Mr. Flick is
lending his collection of some 2,500 works to the Hamburger
Bahnhof, the railway station turned museum for new art,
where it will be shown in exhibitions that are supposed to
change every nine months or so. The first show includes
about 400 works.

It has caused a spectacular ruckus. Mr. Flick, 60, is a
grandson and heir of Friedrich Flick, a notorious Nazi
industrialist who employed thousands of slave laborers in
his arms factories and who profited from Hitler's
Aryanization program, which seized businesses from Jewish
owners. His conviction at the Nuremberg trials (he was
sentenced to seven years but released after three) did not
stop him from rebuilding his empire in West Germany to
become the world's fifth-richest man before he died in
1972.

Since the 1970's, the younger Mr. Flick, investing his
inheritance and creating a fortune on his own, has amassed
one of the most glittery collections of contemporary art in
Europe. It is valued to be worth $300 million. A plan to
construct a Rem Koolhaas-designed museum in Zurich to house
the collection ran aground a few years ago in the face of
protests there. Then Berlin stepped in.

Opponents here claim the collection is tainted by
association with Flick family history, that Mr. Flick is
trying to whitewash his name via art, which he adamantly
denies, adding that he is not his grandfather. He did not
enhance his reputation by declining, unlike his brother and
sister, to contribute a few years ago to a government fund
for slave laborers and their families. He has since paid $5
million to set up a foundation in Potsdam to fight
xenophobia and racism.

"It's fine by me that my family history and my
responsibility are being discussed," he said in an
interview. "I'm not a believer in letting the past be the
past. There was a dark past. But why shouldn't another
generation stand for another side? I want to disconnect the
art I collect from my family history. These are two
completely different issues."

They aren't to the protesters who picketed the show's
opening. A pair of billboards plastered by artists outside
the museum mocked Mr. Flick. "Tax Evaders Disclose Your
Fortunes," said one. (Mr. Flick lives in Switzerland.)
"Free Entrance for Slave Laborers," said another. The woman
who vandalized Matta-Clark's sculptures (she punched and
pushed over "Office Baroque" and "Graffiti Truck") shouted,
"Flick, now I forgive you!" as the police carted her away.

When Die Zeit, the German newspaper, asked various artists
in Mr. Flick's collection for their views of the situation,
Mr. Richter responded by noting disdainfully how quickly
and easily a "so-called top-class" collection of
contemporary art can be bought today by anybody with enough
money. He added that a loan is not a gift - and moreover,
that "the moral side of the whole story, insofar as it can
be separated from the aesthetic side, is also only
disgusting to me."

Mr. Flick gave a private tour of the collection before the
opening, with his public relations adviser and a curator
from the museum in tow. A blustery man, anxious to appear
open, he moved excitedly through the show, occasionally
talking over the curator to venture an opinion about a work
here or there.

.His taste is for the kinds of artists "who ask irritating
questions." He stopped to admire Duane Hanson's bloody,
hyperrealist "Motorcycle Accident" and Jeff Koons's gilded
ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson. Two photographs by
Jeff Wall, he volunteered, to him represent flip sides of
American culture, despair and aspiration. He said he
enjoyed Paul McCarthy's "Saloon Theater" because it mocked
American icons like cowboys.

Duchamp and Bruce Nauman are among his heroes, Mr. Flick
added. The exhibition includes a virtual Nauman
retrospective, with both a drawing and a neon sculpture of
men goose-stepping and another work in neon, reminiscent of
a swastika, called "American Violence."

"At the center of my collection is the human being," he
said, "not idealized but with mistakes and faults that
humans have. In a way this is a reaction to my family
history, but that was not my game plan. It just came from
my gut."

The art is exhaustingly laid out along fuzzy curatorial
themes in sprawling white-box quarters that spill from the
museum into a newly converted two-story annex three
football fields long. There are rooms for Duchamp, Dieter
Roth, Nam June Paik, Jason Rhoades, Wolfgang Tillmans,
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pipilloti Rist and Thomas Struth (one of
the few other artists in the collection besides Mr. Richter
to criticize Mr. Flick in Die Zeit, in this case for not
paying into the slave fund).

The impression is of a collection busily acquired and
buzz-driven. It is astonishingly long on cruel, cold,
black-humored art. It includes much of what has made news
in New York and at mega-shows around the world during
recent years.

Will it stay here after seven years? Mr. Flick professes to
enjoy his relationship with the Hamburger Bahnhof, so far,
and insists he has no intention to sell anything. He paid
for the renovation of the annex to the Hamburger Bahnhof
(nearly $10 million) but not for the rest of the museum
renovation (including a bridge between the museum and the
annex), nor will he pay to maintain the exhibition now. The
German taxpayers (Mr. Flick not being one) will cover the
costs.

Meanwhile, the museum's curators, who might otherwise be
able to put public money to use for exhibitions of their
own, will no doubt consult with him about how to rearrange
the collection every several months. They want to keep him
happy. Asked whether independent curators would be
permitted to tinker, Mr. Flick said, "We'll see."

.Germany's culture minister, Christina Weiss, defended the
arrangement as pragmatic. She said the collection was an
asset for a heavily indebted city trying to re-establish
itself as a cultural center. Visitors receive a handout
with an interview between Mr. Flick and Eugen Blume, a
curator at the museum, and a dossier of press clippings
about the debate over the show.

Mr. Flick and German officials clearly hope this will
appease critics by acknowledging the legacy of Friedrich
Flick but also inoculate the art on view from that history,
as if the two could somehow be separated.

But as the vandal proved, art is not divorced from its
context. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, defending
Mr. Flick and the show, said at the opening that it would
be wrong to punish the public by depriving them of this
"wonderful collection." The outcry, he said, has only
ensured that the past will be remembered, because now
everyone, including a young generation, knows who Mr.
Flick's grandfather was.

True. Memory is served when it stubbornly resists
resolution. But surely it could have served Germany better
to have secured a few more promises at the start from Mr.
Flick.

For his part, while he might have been a hero and avoided
the whole brouhaha by declaring his collection a gift to
the nation, he is now trying to seem sensitive.

Still, during his tour of the show, he couldn't resist
pointing mischievously to a work by the German artist
Martin Kippenberger, a painting of vaguely crisscrossing
lines. Mr. Flick read the title, "I Really Can't See a
Swastika," and laughed.

(source: New York Times)