Swiss painter Miriam Cahn is famous in the art world for her acid-colored canvases depicting ghostly silhouettes. Exhibited in the largest institutions in the world, and in particular at the moment at the Bourse de Commerce, in Paris, inaugurated in May 2021 by billionaire François Pinault, the 72-year-old plastic artist has, at the start of her career, seen her works purchased. by Switzerland’s largest public museum, the Kunsthaus Zurich.
But today, between the artist and the institution, nothing is going well. In December 2021, in an open letter published by Tachles, the weekly newspaper of the Swiss Jewish community, it targeted the Zurich museum, demanding to buy back all of its 31 works in the collection.
Bührle, merchant for the IIIe Reich
In the eyes of Miriam Cahn, the “Museum reputation [serait] tarnished “ by the installation, in October 2021, of a collection of paintings by Manet, Degas and Van Gogh eminently controversial because having belonged to Emil Georg Bührle, who died in 1956. Little character
frequentable as this naturalized Swiss German gun merchant who first armed, in all neutrality, both the Allies and the Wehrmacht, before choosing his camp, in 1940, that of the IIIe Reich.
“A step has been taken. Whether this set is shown in a private setting is not my problem. But, in a public museum, it is not moral. »Miriam Cahn
His business allowed him to build, during and after the war, an important collection. This set includes canvases purchased in part from the Swiss Fischer Gallery, known for orchestrating the sale of works considered to be art “Degenerate” by the Nazis and marketed property looted from Jews. Others were sold in a hurry by their owners before leaving Germany. So many canvases that have long been kept at the Bührle Foundation, on the outskirts of Zurich, but which, since October and the opening of a new wing at the Kunsthaus, have been visible to a wide public.
For Miriam Cahn, herself of Jewish faith, these origins are so many indelible marks. “A step has been taken, she confides on the phone, from the village of Stampa, where she lives, in the canton of Graubünden. That this set be shown in a private setting [comme au Musée Maillol, à Paris, en 2019], it’s not my problem. But, in a public museum, it is not moral. ” Invoking her own moral rights and supported by her galleries, she asks to recover her works by repurchasing them “At the original price”.
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