Art
The Biilhee Collection
By HUGH GRAHAM Biihrle himself was hardly a Marxist. He was an intelligent German-born bourgeois who, as President of the Oerlikon armaments factories at Zilrich, did more than most men to contribute to the world's material misery. He was a multi- millionaire, a philanthropist, and an aesthete moved almost exclusively by the art of the past. But, as one views the selection from his best French pictures now on exhibition at the National Gallery, one realises that he was a splendidly 'this-sided' man. Ecstasy, fantasy, mystery, had scarcely a place in his taste. What he went for was the reasonable, the solid, the accessible.
Then why the Redon and the Van Goghs? Why so many other things (left behind in the vast collection in Zilrich)—the Greek bronzes, the Gothic sculptures, the Tintoretto and the Grecos? The answer, suggested by the pattern of art-collecting during the past seventy years, and confirmed by Mr. Douglas Cooper in his remark- able preface to the catalogue, is a historical one. Emil Btihrle did not buy, as most rich men do, for amusement, or decoration, or personal prestige. He did not even buy for investment. He bought what any intelligent art-lover would have bought if his taste had been formed at a con- tinental university shortly before the First World War. Buhrle, so Mr. Cooper informs us, studied art- history at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau under Wilhelm Voge, a distinguished mediae- valist who applied to art-history the strict methods of archmology. He was thus trained to regard pictures not as a luxurious accessory to living but as a subject for methodical study and an integral part of historical evolution. His taste, however, was his own, not Viige's, and had formed decisively by the time he was twenty- three. In that year (1913) he first saw a group of French pictures in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and in his own words 'standing before these French masterpieces I was deeply moved and decided there and then that, in so far as it might be within my means, I would try one day to hang similar paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cdzanne on my own walls.' This reaction was spontaneous but by no means original. In fact, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were admired by the German intelligentsia even before the First World War, and German collectors were second only to American in their flair for collecting them.
Service as a cavalry officer in the First World War, and hard work in industry after it, left Buhrle little time to develop his taste much further. Not till 1938, when his personal fortune was sufficiently great, did he embark upon forming the collection which he had envisaged in 1913. At first his choice was conservative and classical : Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh, Cezanne—precisely the artists whom Samuel Courtauld had been collecting in England, and a host of others in the United States and Switzerland. Then he branched out and started filling the gaps in the nineteenth-century section and extending the scope of the twentieth. Eventually, somewhere around 1950, his art- historical training began to assert itself. Where did Manet get his deft illusionism? From Frans Hals. So Bilhrle bought a Hals portrait. Where did the Impressionists' intimate bourgeois interiors come from? The Dutch. So he bought a Pieter de Hooch. From whom did Delacroix learn his dashing, colour-charge brush-work? From Rubens. So he bought a Rubens sketch. Where does the plain-air waterscape come from? The Venetians. So he bought a Guardi and two Canalettos. Ingres, Cezanne, Renoir and Gauguin were all in their various ways inspired by the classical ideal. Very well then, the collection must include some good classical sculpture. Even his Gothic sculptures are there because they 'anticipate' Expression- ism (as well as testifying to his debt to Voge).
The key to Biihrle's collection lies in his group of Manets and Cezannes. Manet's early works are realistic in a tradition deriving ultimately from Caravaggio; his mature works, though Impressionist, still retain that ideal of monu- mental design to which most of his younger Impressionist colleagues were eventually to revert. BUhrle never succeeded in buying a great early Manet, but his Woman in Oriental Dress (La Sultane) is only distinguished by its looser handling from the heroic single figures of Manet's youth. This is not a superficially appealing picture, but it is a haunting one. The frank carnality with which Manet has defined every contour of a body ostensibly concealed by a loose-flowing dress is miraculous. The illu- sionism is of Manet's period, the grandeur is timeless. La Sultane both recalls the most sensuous female figures of Titian and anticipates, as Cooper notes, the odalisques of Matisse. Another masterpiece, Bordeaux: the Harbour, while appearing thoroughly modern in the cine- matic objectiveness with which it records an expression of contemporary life, descends never- theless from the shipping pieces of Claude and Cuyp, of Canaletto and Guardi.
Biihrle's Cezannes range from the early melo- dramatic Temptation of Saint Anthony to a Montagne Sainte Victoire painted in the last year of Cezanne's life. In spite of that early work, the general effect of these Cdzannes is calm, classical, static. The portrait of Madame Cdzanne in an armchair must be the most impersonal portrait that an artist has ever painted of his wife. As Cooper comments, 'it is no very great step pic- torially from this impassive face, with its eyes on two different levels and formalised hair-do, to early Cubist paintings by Picasso.' The same preference for clarity and order, as well as for evolutionary design, distinguishes Biihrle's choice of other masters. Even the latest of his splendid Van Goghs, The Park of the Hospital at St. Remy, painted during the artist's sojourn in the asylum, is less shrill and anguished than the late Van Goghs in major collections elsl where. And the solitary Redon, The Ship of Li/I contains little of the bizarre fantasy associate with the artist.
Taken all in all, this collection is enormous] impressive, particularly when one remembers th great works of art were already far from plenti by the time it was begun. All the same, if o compares it with the other great collectio formed, when the market was well stocked, collectors with the same preferences, a especially with the almost identically constitut Reinhart collection at Baden near Ztirich, 0 must admit that there is a certain heaviness abot its consistency. With all his qualities as a collect° Biihrle is the prisoner of his formalistic theorld of art-history. If only he had possessed a lilt! more imagination and a little less plain comma' sense! He might then have perceived that Ill heroes descend not only from ,the artists who they most obviously resemble but from earl Italians, from Bellini, Piero, Raphael, even from mannerists like Bronzino and RosSo, and baron!' realists like Ribera. After all, such artists, ho" ever unfashionable today, meant much to th' artists of nineteenth-century France, so the) presence in the Btihrle collection would ha' been not only enlivening but apt.
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