Zurich Spotlight: Can the Art be Separated from … the Owner? How the Kunsthaus Museum is Addressing its Controversial Affiliations with National Socialism

By Vivika Gerogianni

On July 11, 2023, visitors to the Kunsthaus in Zurich encountered an unexpected cyber hacking incident. The act was orchestrated by a group calling itself the Komitee Kunstraub Konfiskation Kommunikation (KKKK).^[1] Usually, artworks in the museum’s Bührle Collection are accompanied by a QR code which directs the visitor to the provenance information of each specific painting. The KKKK replaced the QR code, so that, when scanned, it redirected to the KKKK’s website, which read “Emil Georg Bührle was a Nazi sympathiser, an authoritarian militarist, at best a war profiteer - but probably a war criminal.”^[2] In a time when transparency and accountability are both expected and essential, an association between a museum’s collection and a war criminal is still jarring and can be catastrophic.

Currently, the Kunsthaus houses over 203 Impressionist paintings (the “Bührle Collection”) on permanent loan from the Emil G. Bührle Foundation, as decided in 2021.^[3] The relationship between the Museum and Bührle dates back to the 1940s, when Bührle had become part of the Kunsthaus’ board of trustees.^[4] Bührle’s contributions to the Zurich Museum have always been regarded with honour, and the relationship persists to this day. The Museum had in the past received waves of criticism about exhibiting works of contested ownership due to Nazi affiliation, to which it responded by rejecting the approach that artworks are to be stigmatised due to their owners’ history.^[5] In an effort to avoid stigmatising the art pieces, while also acknowledging that they may be tainted cultural property, the Kunsthaus Museum is actively strengthening provenance research and inviting open and public discussion about the controversy surrounding its own exhibits.