2023-07-28 13:44:01
Art dealer – old profession. Is anything like tour agent, court chaplain, representative, picture broker, ringmaster. Probably a passion from another time. Today, when one becomes either an influencer or a gallery owner, or both, and with a fair opening every week somewhere in the art-obsessed world, the old word has an almost reverent connotation.
Especially when the art dealer turns 90. Rudolph Zwirner. One of the most influential contemporary art managers in the second half of the 20th century. He had his “Memoirs” written by his Berlin critic Nicola Kuhn (“I always wanted the present”) and is now being celebrated in a major exhibition at Berlin’s Palais Populaire, featuring many artists whose path he has accompanied. And like any retrospective of a vitally lived life, the private stations merge with the public scenery of an entire epoch.
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Zwirner, born on July 28, 1933 in the “year of empowerment” in Berlin, is a member of a generation that, if it had survived and burrowed through the years of rubble, found itself in a time when the adventures of contemporary art offered opportunities to to free from the federal German confinement. Anyone who can still remember the first Documenta in 1955 in Kassel was not interested in the Nazi involvement of its directors, but encountered an art that seemed to transcend the post-war period in an almost imperious way.
The Documenta as a formative experience
There was no lack of cultural disputes during the Adenauer era. So there was the eternal conflict between the adherents of the representational and the “abstract”. But it remained limited to elite gallery circles. It wasn’t until the Documenta that the stage was suddenly wide open, shockingly. The pedagogical structure of the exhibition alone, the return or, for the Zwirner generation, the first viewing of pre-war modernism, the art of Expressionism, the Bauhaus, abstraction, has been described by many as a lasting experience. Formative also for the young Rudolf Zwirner.
In Kassel he decided to give up the legal profession he wanted to pursue. He broke off his law studies in Freiburg and also gave up the minor in art history, which was then shaped by venerable professors such as Kurt Bauch and Hans Jantzen, who with unshakable seriousness ensured that the curiosity of researching youth did not grow beyond the late 19th century.
Nevertheless, warm memories of the Baden alma mater connect him. He rode his bike across the border to Colmar to marvel at the Isenheim Altarpiece. And when he tells his biographer it sounds like Goethe raving about love affairs in Sesenheim in Alsace.
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In retrospect, it seems plausible that Zwirner decided without much searching to become an art dealer. In fact, the critical part of his generation recognized a distinguishing feature in contemporary art, which was flourishing in the Rhineland in particular, as left-wing social theory for the student movement would become a decade later.
The difficult, provocative art of the time was the surest way out of the narrow confines of the petit bourgeoisie. Especially since the Europeanization and soon also the internationalization of the arts had to appear like a sensual affront to the complacency of the German provinces.
Zwirner’s apprenticeship as an art dealer began in Cologne
Zwirner began with Hein and Eva Stünke in their Cologne gallery Der Spiegel, a meeting place for artists, critics and museum people who formed the forefront of a slowly growing avant-garde. Paris was still the art capital – and Stünke created the connection, introduced his German audience to the French scene around Wols, Poliakoff, Arp, Ernst, Miró, who in turn had a significant influence on painters such as Nay, Meistermann and Hartung.
The years of apprenticeship are quickly told; Stünke in Cologne, Rosen auction house in Berlin, Berggruen gallery in Paris. In the lively biography that Nicola Kuhn wrote in her subtle way, which manages without any literary embellishment, the early path reads like the romantic artist’s tale that allows the soon-to-be-successful to mature in destitute:
“In Paris, fortunately, I was able to sleep for free in a windowless, dusty room behind a friend’s father’s office. My father continued to pay 150 German marks a month, my grandmother added 30 German marks. Since I didn’t earn anything as a trainee at Berggruen, the money was still not enough, so I went to donate blood every three months to supplement my income.”
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The pocket money phase was quickly over, in accordance with the dramaturgy of the budding career, and the decisive step was then taken in 1959 with the appointment as General Secretary of the second Documenta. The young man had arrived, so to speak, in the logistical center of the art world, which was becoming increasingly powerful, and was jointly responsible for an exhibition that, even more than the previous Documenta, can be considered the actual founding act of the label “Westkunst”, which in the long term became synonymous with “world art”. should be.
For the first time, American abstracts were celebrated imperially on the big stage, and in the synopsis with European art of the post-war period, it became immediately clear who will be in charge in the future. What Zwirner tells about the Inner Circle of the Documenta and how he observes the old Nazis next to him, who are hardly colored in their wool – Werner Haftmann, Kurt Martin and Co. – is instructive contemporary history and fills considerable gaps in the Documenta Time.news.
Cy Twombly causes a sensation
In any case, the net was now tied. Very well equipped with acquaintances and connections, Zwirner began his art dealer career in Essen, before moving to Cologne in 1962. If one recapitulates the early programmes, then their European orientation, following the line of Nouveau réalisme, is striking – with Karel Appel, Takis, Spoerri or Konrad Klapheck, who drew Zwirner’s attention to René Magritte.
From the US scene, it was above all Cy Twombly who caused a quiet furore: the self-confessed outsider, spun into old myths, who with his delicately scriptural pictures had nothing at all of the triumphalistic nature of abstract expressionism and stylistically connected to European traditions. We got to know and see Twombly at Zwirner, and the shock of silence before these last altarpieces of an exhausted modernity is unforgettable.
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But that’s a long way ahead. Business was good. Right from the start. Zwirner began in a relaxed phase of prosperity in Germany. Major collectors such as Wolfgang Hahn, Bernhard Sprengel, Karl Ströher, Willi Kemp and Harald Bongartz valued the art dealership expertise. The urban milieus that discovered the entertainment value and enormous social prestige of young art became ever denser.
What had previously been a sport for the upper classes, art collecting, spread more and more to the middle class. Before the golf game at the weekend, there was a vernissage on Friday evening. And it was inevitable that when you visit a gallery you will soon feel a little guilty if you don’t bring anything with you for your own collection.
In the Berlin exhibition “Life in Pictures. A portrait of seeing for Rudolf Zwirner”: Gerhard Richter, “Bomber”, 1963
Source: © Gerhard Richter 2023
Merlin James’ painting “Orange Love” (2002)
What: Merlin James
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, “The Adoration of the Magi”, c. 1750
What: Lea Gryze
In the meantime, Zwirner had teamed up again with Hein Stünke and founded the association of progressive German art dealers in Cologne, the basis society of the Cologne art market, which then took place for the first time in 1967. If you think of the 18 exhibitors who opened up an adventurous panopticon of contemporary art in the Gürzenich and almost 40 years later of the galleristic mass appearance of an Art Basel, then you have the whole widescreen film in front of you, which an art dealer like Rudolf Zwirner was originally involved in directing.
And there on the Cologne art markets we lost sight of each other. We still saw how the always neat and stately art dealer disappeared with his major customer Peter Ludwig for a discreet exchange of notes and stayed alone and for an infinitely long time in front of the fascinatingly cheeky icons of pop artists, for whom Zwirner had become a name.
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Then it was the politically settled 1970s, it was the economic boom towards the foreseeable end of the Cold War, it was the largely depoliticized society of the Kohl era in which contemporary art was able to become a key currency of the bourgeois way of life. Seen in this way, luck was also involved when Rudolf Zwirner became the art dealer par excellence. But happiness does not diminish lifetime achievement.
And if you go through the list of well-wishers from artists who are gathered with their works in the Berlin exhibition – from Georg Baselitz and Joseph Beuys to Agnes Martin and Maria Lassnig to Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, then you also appreciate the sporting part, which has accrued to the art dealer in the immemorial popularization of the arts. The fact that his life’s job almost no longer exists is something he can happily record as an honorary title.
“Life in Pictures. A portrait of seeing for Rudolf Zwirner”July 29 to August 14, 2023, People’s Palace, Berlin
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