The Muhl Museum is currently hosting a temporary exhibition, until July 21, featuring the collection of German arms manufacturer Emil Birla, who was born in Germany but lived in Zurich from 1924 until his death. Emil Birla, who was born in Germany in 1890 and died in Switzerland in 1956, acquired some six hundred pictures, increasing his pace of acquisition until the day he died.
Four years after his sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 66, his widow (1896-1979), his son (1921-2012) and his daughter (1926-2014) established a museum in the house next door to the house where the family lived, where they presented the collection to the general public. Following an agreement between the collector's family (the son's son Dieter and the daughter's son Hortense) and the city of Zurich, the collection will move next year to the city's Museum of Fine Arts, to a wing designed by the British architect David Chipperfield. It should be noted that in his last years, Emile Birla supported the Museum of Fine Arts in Zurich with donations of money (for its expansion, which included the construction of an additional exhibition hall) as well as of pictures (two paintings of nymphaea by Claude Monet).
The process of moving to the municipal museum was accelerated following an armed robbery in 2008 at the family museum, during which four important works from the collection worth approximately 180 million Swiss francs were stolen. The paintings that were stolen are: “The Boy in the Red Waistcoat” by Cézanne, “Count Ludovic Lepic and His Daughters” by Degas, “Field of Poppies near Vathes” by Monet, and “Chestnut Branches in Blossom” by Van Gogh.
The last two photos were found a week after the robbery in the car by a security guard at the Zurich University Psychiatric Clinic, the other two were found in Belgrade during a police raid in 2012. The family museum, which was not equipped with sophisticated security measures, was closed in 2015 and the collection was moved to the Fondation de L'Heritage in Lausanne.
Last year, the collection was displayed in three museums in Japan (Tokyo, Fukuoka, Nagoya) and enjoyed the visits of about seven hundred and eighty thousand viewers. And now, as mentioned, the collection will be available in Paris until the end of July. If you miss the exhibition, you can always see it in Zurich, starting in 2020, in the new wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in the city center.
Controversial collector
Emil Birla survived World War I, where he served as an officer, and married the daughter of a successful banker in 1920. His father-in-law arranged for him a job at a machine factory, of which he was one of the owners, in the city of Magdeburg. In 1924 Birla was sent by the management from Magdeburg to supervise another factory it had bought in Erlikon, a district north of Zurich.
Birla began manufacturing weapons and acquired the patent rights to a 20mm rapid-fire anti-aircraft gun, developed by German engineer Reinhold Becker. Birla quietly aided Germany and sold it guns despite the arms embargo imposed on it under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles .
At the same time, the successful manufacturer and trader also sold his wares, anti-aircraft guns as well as anti-ship and anti-submarine weapons, to the British and French armies. Money is money. From 1940 onwards, his only client was, by force of circumstances, the Nazi army. He supplied guns and other weapons, under the sympathetic eye of the Swiss Confederation authorities, who had granted him local citizenship three years earlier. What is certain is certain.
Within four years, thanks to the war, Emil Birla increased the profits of the factory, which he had meanwhile bought all of its shares and became its sole owner, from one hundred and forty thousand Swiss francs to one hundred and twenty-seven million... Emil Birla became the richest man in Switzerland and even in Europe, rich but hated.
In the 1950s, Emil Birla expanded his business outside of Europe, diversifying it to the US, India, and Chile. However, he continued his activities as an arms manufacturer and supplied, he and his son after him, new-generation missile systems to the US, Canada, England, Switzerland, and NATO.
After Emil Birla's death, his son Dieter continued to run the company for 34 years. His illegal activities got him into trouble with the Swiss authorities and forever tarnished his name: in 1970, Dieter Birla was sentenced to probation and a fine for illegally exporting weapons to South Africa, Iran, and Nigeria.
Although he established additional factories in India and Egypt and further expanded the company's activities, selling old shoes and bags (acquiring the "Bali" brand), insurance and hotels, he was unable to prevent its decline. The failed "Adets" air defense system emptied its coffers.
In the early 2005s, about ten thousand workers were laid off (out of thirty-seven thousand that the company had at its peak) and the son of Hortense, Dieter's sister, took over the management. But Emil Birla's grandson did not fulfill the hopes that his mother had pinned on him. After failing to restore the crown to its former glory, in XNUMX Austrian businessmen bought the company, which was suffering heavy losses every day. They too were unable to revive it. Thus ended Emil Birla's controversial enterprise.
Birla buys “degenerate art”
The arms manufacturer began purchasing paintings to decorate the large house he moved into with his family in 1936. He made most of his purchases through galleries based in Switzerland. During World War II, Birla acquired about a hundred paintings, thirteen of which were discovered at the time to be property stolen from Jews.
Birla claimed to know nothing about the theft and offered to buy them a second time. Nine owners, including the Jewish art dealer and grandfather of journalist Anne Sinclair, Paul Rosenberg, agreed to the deal. Four other owners received their paintings back. Birla bought four paintings from Rosenberg, which were part of the stolen property.
These moves took place in 1948. In 1951, Birla sued the Swiss gallery in Lucerne, the Theodor Fischer Gallery, which had sold him the stolen pictures, and he won. The Fischer Gallery refunded him the amounts he had paid for the stolen pictures.
Historian Emmanuelle Pollack, who has just published her book “The Art Market Under Occupation” (1), explains that the Fischer Gallery provided Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man, with classical works and in return received from him what the Nazis called “degenerate art,” namely Impressionist paintings looted from Jews.
The Fischer Gallery even held an auction in 1939, offering for sale 125 “degenerate pictures” looted by the Nazis in France. The proceeds were intended to finance Nazi Germany’s military expenses. The gallery sold these works to Emile Birla, who during the war purchased about a hundred pictures.
Emmanuelle Polak is also the curator of the exhibition, which bears the same title as the book, at the Holocaust Museum in Paris (2). The exhibition scenographically illustrates Emmanuelle Polak's research, which is organized in book form. The looting of the Jews, gallery owners and private individuals, whose paintings were confiscated, gathered in the Musée des Jaumes in the Tuileries Garden and transported to Germany, was one of the first steps in the Nazi plan to expel all Jews from political, social and economic life and to bring about their physical destruction.
Emmanuelle Pollack regrets that the exhibition does not explain in detail the stories of the looted pictures. Corot’s “The Reader,” for example, was originally called, when it was in Paul Rosenberg’s possession, “Woman in a Red Shirt.” After it was stolen by the Nazis, its name was changed to obscure the theft. Thus, it was sold to Birla under the name “The Reader.”
Irene Kahn from Antwerp
The story of Renoir’s painting, “Irène Kahn of Antwerp” (“Little Irène”), is even more tragic. Art dealer Paul Rosenberg managed to escape the clutches of the Nazis, but the fate of the Kahn, de Camondo and Reinck families was not as good as his. The story of the painting began in 1880, when Louis Kahn, a French banker and art collector from Antwerp, commissioned Renoir to paint a picture of his eldest daughter, Irène (1872-1963).
The picture, considered a masterpiece, did not please the Kahn family. Neither did Iran. The banker and his wife, Iran's parents, delayed paying Renoir, who even painted another picture, of their two younger daughters. The family also did not like this picture. Renoir left their home, his rent in his pocket, but disappointed, resentful, angry and hurt. Today, there is no dispute that the two pictures in which Renoir painted the Kahn daughters are masterpieces.
Irene Kahn grew up and married in 1891 to Moise de Camondo, a banker and art collector, her father. The couple had two children, Nissim (1892-1917) and Beatrice (1894-1944). Shortly after the birth of her daughter Beatrice, Irene fell in love with a handsome Italian baron whose services her husband had hired to train his horses. Moise de Camondo was not only an avid art lover but also an avid horse lover.
The couple divorced and Iran converted to Christianity, married the Italian sailor, gave birth to another daughter, and separated from her second husband. Her children from her first marriage, Nissim and Beatrice, continued to live with their father in his various homes. In 1910, Iran's mother gave the Renoir painting to her granddaughter Beatrice.
Nissim was killed when his plane was shot down in an air battle during World War I when he was only 25 years old. His father turned the city mansion he built near Parc Monceau , at 63 Rue Monceau, into a museum named after his son, the Nissim de Camondo Museum , bequeathed it to the state and continued to enrich him with luxurious goods until the day he died in 1935 (3).
The painting of Irene, which was owned by Beatrice, was moved, along with thousands of other paintings, by the directors of the French national museums in Paris and the north, to the Château de Chambord, which they saw as a safer place from German bombings and the horrors of war. In 1941, the painting was looted from the château by Hermann Göring.
Leon Reineck, Irene's husband, whom he divorced in 1942, vigorously protested to the French authorities about the theft of this picture in particular and thefts in general. Some say that his move hastened the family's bitter end. Leon, his ex-wife Irene, and their two children, Fanny, 23, and Bertrand, 20, were captured, arrested, and taken to Drancy and from there to Auschwitz. Fanny was murdered immediately in 1943, while Beatrice died two weeks before the camp was liberated. Leon and Bertrand died of exhaustion in Auschwitz in early 1944.
After the end of the occupation, in 1946, Irene recognized her picture, called “The Little Girl in the Blue Ribbon,” in an exhibition called “French Masterpieces Found in Collections in Germany.” She demanded and received it back from its owner – Emil Birla, who had bought it during the war from a contact of Hermann Göring. But Irene, whose hatred for the picture had not diminished, decided to sell it again, and so the picture returned in 1949 to the collection of none other than Emil Birla (4).
Birla's Black Book
Another book, in German, “Birla’s Black Book, Stolen Art in the Museum of Fine Arts in Zurich?”, written by two historians, examines some of the works Birla bought as well as his problematic personality (5). The book states that other pictures from Birla’s collection, besides those whose provenance has been investigated, were sold on a murky background. Birla bought about a hundred pictures during the war, and only some of them have been properly investigated for provenance.
“The Black Book of Birla” examines nineteen of these pictures. How, for example, the book asks, did Manet’s “reigning” picture pass from the hands of the German Jew Max Silberberg in 1933 to the hands of Emil Silberberg in 1953? Max Silberberg’s path of suffering began in 1933 and ended with his murder in Auschwitz. The Birla Foundation catalog presents a completely different version and casts doubt on Max Silberberg’s ownership of the picture.
Poppy field near Vathy
Another painful issue that the book addresses is those paintings that were sold for less than their true value by their Jewish owners who were forced to hastily leave Nazi Germany or occupied Europe. Monet’s “Field of Poppies near Vey,” the flagship painting of the exhibition at the Musee de la Muelle, is being sued by Chilean Juan Carlos Emden, who claims that his father was forced to sell it for a low price, thirty thousand Swiss francs, to the art dealer Fritz Nathan, before fleeing Nazi Germany for Latin America.
Fritz Nathan, a Jewish merchant from Munich who had found refuge in Switzerland, sold the painting for thirty-five thousand Swiss francs to Emil Birla. The Birla Foundation, for its part, claims that Emden negotiated properly and even rejected an offer from a Swiss bank to purchase the painting on the grounds that its price was too low. Emil Birla's descendants also claim that the father of Juan Carlos Emden, son of Max Emden, did not lose control of his fortune throughout the war.
Juan Carlos, for his part, has enlisted the help of expert lawyers and is preparing to fight to regain possession of the painting. It was purchased in 1920 by the Jewish Hamburg businessman, department store magnate and collector Max Emden, Juan Carlos' grandfather. Its current value is estimated at twenty-five million Swiss francs.
Perfect collection
Did Emil Birla atone for the way he made his fortune and the way he used it? Everyone has their own opinion. Emil Birla sold weapons to the Nazis, that is a fact. Emil Birla bought stolen pictures from Jews through contacts close to Nazi officials, that is also a fact, but those who defend his name repeat his claim and say that Birla did not know the origin of the pictures he purchased. But if the collector's personality and his work rightly raise extremely difficult questions and doubts, the quality of the collection is unquestionable. The shrewd merchant of death was a sharp-eyed collector. Before us is a perfect collection, one of the most prestigious in the entire world, which any museum director would desire.
It would be too short to describe the stunning exhibition, a panorama of French art in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially since intelligent and detailed explanations adorn its walls. It is recommended to reserve at least three hours, if you want to enjoy and be properly educated. I advise you to skip the museum's permanent collection, the stunning works of the multidisciplinary artist Aristide Meul, in order to return to it one more time. Meul, like Birla's collection, is worth a visit in its own right.
In his youth, Emil Birla studied philology and literature at the University of Freiburg and art history at the University of Munich. On a visit to the National Gallery in Berlin in 1913, he saw the Impressionists for the first time and was moved. Birla testified to himself that he wanted to be a painter, because otherwise he would not have become a collector. The visit to the Berlin museum would have an impact on him for the rest of his life. A large part of the exhibition is indeed dedicated to Impressionism, but the collector's strong desire to understand the birth of the movement from earlier periods is evident.
The exhibition illustrates the development of the currents of painting from one another and at the same time the personal contribution of each painter to the history of art. Emile Birla understood art and its development throughout the generations, there is no doubt about that. He used to say that Dumieux led him to Rembrandt and Manet to Frans Helles. Thus, the works are sometimes displayed in pairs, a pair of paintings by two different artists, for comparison, or a pair of paintings by the same painter.
There is indeed a clear tendency to understand the development that painters themselves undergo during their creative period. And Birla understood the twists and turns and knew how to choose the pictures he bought. From the drama of the suicide in the shooting on Manet's bed to the magnificent garden of Bellevue where his partner sits, from Gauguin's impressionism to the exoticism of Tahiti, the route of Van Gogh's wanderings in just a few pictures - all of these impress the viewer.
Fifty-seven works are on display at the Musee Maillot, from Edouard Manet to Pablo Picasso. And more:
Impressionists: Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Degas
Post-Impressionists: Cezanne, Gauguin, Lautrec, Van Gogh
Painters from the Nabi Group (from Nabi, in Hebrew): Villar, Bonar
Cubists and Fauvists: Braque, Dran, and Lemanck
To expand the time periods, a quick look at the ancients – a 17th-century Dutch painting by Albert Cuyp and an 18th-century Venetian painting by Francesco Guardi, as well as a glimpse into the moderns – one Derain, one Braque and two Picassos.
There are many absolute masterpieces that adorn the collection, including Manet's "Suicide" and "Corner of the Garden of Bellevue," Renoir's "The Fountain," Degas's "The Little Dancer of 14," Lautrec's "Maslin," Gauguin's "The Host" and "Sunflowers on an Armchair," "The Boy in the Red Waistcoat," "The Gardener and Liège," Cézanne's "The Temptation of Saint-Antoine," Bonnard's "The Luncheon," Pissarro's "A Snowy Day in Louvain," and Van Gogh's "The Sower at Sunset."
Relaxation
You can relieve tension, relax and unwind by sitting in one of the cafes/restaurants offered by the new passage, a gastronomic temple in the heart of the 7th arrondissement , “ Bospassage ”, at the exit from the museum. Pierre Armat, Anne-Sophie Pic, Thierry Marx, Yannick Allen are some of the stars offering food, including sandwiches, and drinks. This is a modern complex that also includes boutiques, supermarkets and a sports hall for the convenience of its residents, over ten thousand square meters, which required three years of work, with four sculptures, including the famous cardboard forest by Eva Jospin.
And as you leave the place through the narrow twenty-meter passage that will lead you to Boulevard Respey, between the cardboard tree trunks in the window strip and the mirror strip in front of it where they are reflected, remember to say a short prayer of thanks for the good fortune you have had to visit such wonderful and unique places.
Museum information
You can find more information about the exhibition and the Mayol Museum at this link.
(1) Emmanuelle Polack, Le marché de l'art sous l'Occupation, Tallandier, 2019
(2) Le marché de l'art sous l'Occupation 1940-1944
Shoah Memorial
(3) Link to the website of the Nissim de Camondo Museum
(4) The biographer Pierre Assolin wrote about the history of the de Camondo family in his book, “The last of the Camondo family", published by Schocken Publishing, translated by Adina Kaplan, in 2004
The book originally:
(5) Thomas Buomberger, Guido Magnaguagno, Schwarzbuch Bührle:
Raubkunst für das Kunsthaus Zürich? Rotpunktverlag, 2015
More on the subject
Hey
The article is great.
I was at the exhibition about a month ago, but the article made me want to go back for another visit on my next visit to Paris.
Thank you
Orit