Master’s Thesis for the Attainment of the Degree Master of Art at the Department of Architecture Technical University Munich Winterterm 2020/2021 Title: The Virtuous Alliance of Private Art Collections in Public Museums, the Controversial Case of the Flick Collection in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Dietrich Erben Chair of Theory and History of Architecture, Art and Design Prof. Dr. Andres Lepik Chair of History of Architecture and Curatorical Practice Submitted by: Pia Nürnberger Oskar von Miller Ring 25 80333 München Submitted on: Munich, March 31st, 2021 0 TABLE OF CONTENT INTRODUCTION 2 1.1 PUBLIC MUSEUMS AS OBSERVERS 2 1.1.1 PRESENTATION OF THE EXAMINATION AREA 4 1.1.2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 6 2. PART I: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL RELEVANCE OF THE RESEARCH TOPIC 11 2.1 DISAMBIGUATION 11 2.1.1 MUSEUM 11 2.1.2 COLLECTION 12 2.1.3 PUBLIC SPHERE 13 2.1.4 PRIVATE 14 2.1.5 PRIVATIZATION 14 2.1.6 PUBLIC PRIVATE COLLECTION 14 2.1.7 PRIVATE COLLECTION IN PUBLIC INSTITUTION 15 2.2 THE BOOM OF PRIVATE MUSEUMS SINCE THE 1990S 16 2.2.1 GERMAN PRIVATE COLLECTIONS OF ART IN THE 20TH CENTURY 16 2.2.2 EVENT MACHINE MUSEUM 23 3. PART II: CASE STUDY FLICK COLLECTION AT HAMBURGER BAHNHOF 30 3.1.1 STIFTUNG PREUßISCHER KULTURBESITZ 30 3.1.2 HAMBURGER BAHNHOF 33 3.1.3 COLLECTION 42 3.1.4 ARRIVAL 59 3.1.5 FIRST EXHIBITION 73 3.1.6 DEPARTURE 77 4. RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION 83 5. LIST OF REFERENCES 92 1 Introduction 1.1 Public Museums as Observers Both private and public musuems own to the public their commitmend to the communication of knowledge, their task is to present an obejctive past and present and to establish connections between them that are relevant for a broad public. It is thereby curious to get to the bottom of the question whether exhibiting private collections, in both private and public museums, change the traditional purpose and ethics of a museum today? When observing the numerous new museums founded between the 1990s until today, one might think that museums are in a continuous boom. In 2018, 8800 exhibitions opened in Germany alone and the trend seems to be rising.1 However, many public museums are struggling for survival, as operation costs as well as the acquisition of contemporary artworks is hardly possible for public institutions anymore. This paper will explain why public museums a suitable place for private collections and why more and more public museums are creating exhibitions from private collections.2 This thesis argues for the importance of public museums as exhibition venues for private collections. The research is conducted through a case study of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the thesis evaluates the benefitis and disadvantages of private collections in public musuems and to understand the context and particularities of why several private collectors prefer to open their own museum instead of presenting their collection in public ones. The following questions constitute the core of this master’s thesis: What are the reasons for this phenomenon that began in the 1990s and led to more and more collectors establishing private museums for their art collections instead of exhibiting them in public museums? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these respective exhibition models, both for the public museum and the private collector? What problems, but also potentials, do both variants have? What are the conditions under which private collections can be successfully displayed in public musuems and when can those relationships break down? What are the terms that public museums can accept for the display of privately-owned artworks? How does the public museum favour the experience of art for the viewer? Is the exhibition process of public museums more democratic than of private museums? 1 See: Statista, “Entwicklung der Anzahl von Ausstellungen in Deutschland.“ 2 The definition for a private collection describes very briefly the collecting of objects by private individuals. See: Chapter 2.1 DisamBigurations – Collection. 2 Since 2003, the Hamburger Bahnhof has entered into an agreement with the private collector Friedrich Christian Flick to display his collection at Rieckhallen, located near the Hamburger Bahnhof facilities. The agreement was productive for both collector and musuem, but unfortunately broke down for the following reasons: The Senate's sale of the Rieckhallen, the city's lack of interest in the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) lack of diplomatic handling of the situation. The collection now will be relocated back to the depots in Switzerland in September 2021. A study of this case can thus reveal meanings, problems and potentials about the difficulties and the benefits of the display of private art in public museums. Since the 1990s, more and more private collections with their privately purchased works have been appearing in public; on the other hand, public museums have only limited possibilities to acquire works, since the state is increasingly cutting funding and the costs of artworks is rising more and more. Two phenomena are therefore happening in parallel, neither of which improving the situation of public museums. It seems like the audience today is no longer looking for a public art space to appreciate art and learn about contemporary artists. Instead, art enthusiasts and the art community are gradually concentrating their attention on private collectors who have preferred to create their own private space in order to share with the world what has encouraged them in their own encounters with contemporary art and collecting.3 In many cases, public museums have to make themselves dependent on the loans and support of a growing number of private patrons with privat collections and donors who support state institutions through loans and thus keep the museum running. For the private collectors, this kind of cooperation means an enormous increase in the value of their collection. On the one hand, for the public museum it is an enrichment of their exhibitions, but also a restriction of freedom regarding the conception of the exhibitions and a certainly an economic dependence, because the collector wants to be entertained. There are collectors who claim that their collection should only be presented in its entirety.4 In the most problematic cases, this results in a few wealthy privileged individuals who determine which contemporary works of art are exhibited in the major public museums and are ultimately received within the public interested in art and which are not. 3 See: Doroshenko, Private Space for Contemporary Art, 4. 4 Like the Brandhorst Collection in Munich. 3 Evidently, it is of great importance for the general public that these private collections are made publicly accessible. There are two forms of accessibility by which a private collection can be made public: presenting the private collection publicly in its own museum or making the private collection available via exhibition in a public museum. The founding of privately-run museums has aroused great enthusiasm among private collectors and can be seen to be a new phenomenon in the museum landscape. These private museums are primarily dedicated to current and contemporary art and, with their remarkable exhibition and programme offerings, contribute to the revitalisation and profiling of the cultural landscape of their cities, while at the same time creating diversity and new qualities in the museum landscape. The second variant, exhibition of private collections in public museums, was common in the late 19th century but is now increasingly rare. Scholarly engagement with the subject has increased in recent years, and there is an overall increase in interest in museums, which is evident based on the growing number of visitors each year.5 The museum cannot be clearly assigned to one discipline, it is a phenomenon with interest from various academic disciplines, such as the social sciences, cultural studies, cultural management and art studies. The public museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, has been a topic of polemic in newspaper and media articles for a while now, since it is one of the largest contemporary private collections in Europe and it is leaving Berlin due to a foreign investor demolishing the so-called Rieckhallen, a side building of Hamburger Bahnhof, in order to develop office and residential space. This case presented a unique situation for examining the issue of whether private collections should be increasingly returned to public institutions instead of being presented in self-funded private museums. Therefore, this master's thesis examines the situation of the Hamburger Bahnhof (Nationalgalerie), a state-owned public museum that houses private collections by way of permanent loans in a former railway station that provides an ideal architectural setting for exhibiting contemporary art. 1.1.1 Presentation of the Examination Area In order to conduct an empirical and qualitative study, a representative selection is made from the public musuems of the research field, a so-called sample is selected. In this master’s thesis the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin has been selected. The interest of the current press reports in the Hamburger Bahnhof demonstrates how important it is to deal with the presentation of private collections in public museums. This thesis will firstly point out to some relevant theoretical literature 5 111 million visits in 2019 in German museums. See: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/besucherzahlen-in- museen-111-millionen-besuche-im-jahr-2019/26827984.html (15 March 2021) 4 and then, in a second step, examine its implementation using the example of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection and the Hamburger Bahnhof. The Friedrich Christian Flick collection of contemporary art is named after collector himself Friedrich Christian Flick. It consists of approximately 2,500 works by 150 artists, and it has been on display in Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof since 2004.