History's Long, Dark Shadow at Berlin Show

BERLIN - When a deranged protester did some handsprings and trampled on two works by Gordon Matta-Clark in an exhibition here of Friedrich Christian Flick's collection, she proved again that art, even the art of a dead American sculptor far removed from German history, does not exist in a vacuum.

Can art cleanse a name tainted by a sordid past? In a stroke, the Flick collection, a vast, high-priced trove of hip brand-name contemporary art on view at the expensively renovated Hamburger Bahnhof, has, for the moment, put Berlin on the map with cities like London and New York. But it has also come at a steep cost. There is no promise of a gift to Germany from Mr. Flick, who can take back the art when his loan expires in seven years, and is free to sell work while the exhibition naturally inflates the value of his collection.

This is a risk Germany never should have undertaken.

Here, history is unavoidable. In Dresden, the Green Vault, the city's historic treasury of Renaissance and Baroque jewelry, recently reopened in opulent new galleries in a palace that was firebombed during the war and is still being renovated. The collection had partly been on view some blocks away at the Albertinum, where a group of Gerhard Richters have since been installed: Mr. Richter, an adolescent during the war, donated them to the city, where he once cleared rubble from the bombings and from which he eventually escaped to West Germany.

In Berlin two exhibitions that are also freighted with history have dominated the headlines. A traveling show of highlights from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, just closed, became such a blockbuster at the Neue Nationalgalerie that local radio broadcast updates on the number of hours people had to wait in line to get into the show each day (up to 11 hours by the end).

That the exhibition featured art the Nazis called degenerate and banned, and that was thereby lost for German museums, is a fact implicitly understood here. Berlin is a cultural capital lacking cultural capital when it comes to modern and contemporary art, so the city has become anxious, even desperate, as the Flick loan illustrates, to gets its hands on some now.

Through his agreement with the government, Mr. Flick is lending his collection of some 2,500 works to the Hamburger Bahnhof, the railway station turned museum for new art, where it will be shown in exhibitions that are supposed to change every nine months or so. The first show includes about 400 works.

It has caused a spectacular ruckus. Mr. Flick, 60, is a grandson and heir of Friedrich Flick, a notorious Nazi industrialist who employed thousands of slave laborers in his arms factories and who profited from Hitler's Aryanization program, which seized businesses from Jewish owners. His conviction at the Nuremberg trials (he was sentenced to seven years but released after three) did not stop him from rebuilding his empire in West Germany to become the world's fifth-richest man before he died in 1972.

Since the 1970's, the younger Mr. Flick, investing his inheritance and creating a fortune on his own, has amassed one of the most glittery collections of contemporary art in Europe. It is valued to be worth $300 million. A plan to construct a Rem Koolhaas-designed museum in Zurich to house the collection ran aground a few years ago in the face of protests there. Then Berlin stepped in.

Opponents here claim the collection is tainted by association with Flick family history, that Mr. Flick is trying to whitewash his name via art, which he adamantly denies, adding that he is not his grandfather. He did not enhance his reputation by declining, unlike his brother and sister, to contribute a few years ago to a government fund for slave laborers and their families. He has since paid $5 million to set up a foundation in Potsdam to fight xenophobia and racism.

"It's fine by me that my family history and my responsibility are being discussed," he said in an interview. "I'm not a believer in letting the past be the past. There was a dark past. But why shouldn't another generation stand for another side? I want to disconnect the art I collect from my family history. These are two completely different issues."

They aren't to the protesters who picketed the show's opening. A pair of billboards plastered by artists outside the museum mocked Mr. Flick. "Tax Evaders Disclose Your Fortunes," said one. (Mr. Flick lives in Switzerland.) "Free Entrance for Slave Laborers," said another. The woman who vandalized Matta-Clark's sculptures (she punched and pushed over "Office Baroque" and "Graffiti Truck") shouted, "Flick, now I forgive you!" as the police carted her away.

When Die Zeit, the German newspaper, asked various artists in Mr. Flick's collection for their views of the situation, Mr. Richter responded by noting disdainfully how quickly and easily a "so-called top-class" collection of contemporary art can be bought today by anybody with enough money. He added that a loan is not a gift -- and moreover, that "the moral side of the whole story, insofar as it can be separated from the aesthetic side, is also only disgusting to me."

Mr. Flick gave a private tour of the collection before the opening, with his public relations adviser and a curator from the museum in tow. A blustery man, anxious to appear open, he moved excitedly through the show, occasionally talking over the curator to venture an opinion about a work here or there.

.His taste is for the kinds of artists "who ask irritating questions." He stopped to admire Duane Hanson's bloody, hyperrealist "Motorcycle Accident" and Jeff Koons's gilded ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson. Two photographs by Jeff Wall, he volunteered, to him represent flip sides of American culture, despair and aspiration. He said he enjoyed Paul McCarthy's "Saloon Theater" because it mocked American icons like cowboys.

Duchamp and Bruce Nauman are among his heroes, Mr. Flick added. The exhibition includes a virtual Nauman retrospective, with both a drawing and a neon sculpture of men goose-stepping and another work in neon, reminiscent of a swastika, called "American Violence."

"At the center of my collection is the human being," he said, "not idealized but with mistakes and faults that humans have. In a way this is a reaction to my family history, but that was not my game plan. It just came from my gut."

The art is exhaustingly laid out along fuzzy curatorial themes in sprawling white-box quarters that spill from the museum into a newly converted two-story annex three football fields long. There are rooms for Duchamp, Dieter Roth, Nam June Paik, Jason Rhoades, Wolfgang Tillmans, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pipilloti Rist and Thomas Struth (one of the few other artists in the collection besides Mr. Richter to criticize Mr. Flick in Die Zeit, in this case for not paying into the slave fund).

The impression is of a collection busily acquired and buzz-driven. It is astonishingly long on cruel, cold, black-humored art. It includes much of what has made news in New York and at mega-shows around the world during recent years.

Will it stay here after seven years? Mr. Flick professes to enjoy his relationship with the Hamburger Bahnhof, so far, and insists he has no intention to sell anything. He paid for the renovation of the annex to the Hamburger Bahnhof (nearly $10 million) but not for the rest of the museum renovation (including a bridge between the museum and the annex), nor will he pay to maintain the exhibition now. The German taxpayers (Mr. Flick not being one) will cover the costs.

Meanwhile, the museum's curators, who might otherwise be able to put public money to use for exhibitions of their own, will no doubt consult with him about how to rearrange the collection every several months. They want to keep him happy. Asked whether independent curators would be permitted to tinker, Mr. Flick said, "We'll see."

.Germany's culture minister, Christina Weiss, defended the arrangement as pragmatic. She said the collection was an asset for a heavily indebted city trying to re-establish itself as a cultural center. Visitors receive a handout with an interview between Mr. Flick and Eugen Blume, a curator at the museum, and a dossier of press clippings about the debate over the show.

Mr. Flick and German officials clearly hope this will appease critics by acknowledging the legacy of Friedrich Flick but also inoculate the art on view from that history, as if the two could somehow be separated.

But as the vandal proved, art is not divorced from its context. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, defending Mr. Flick and the show, said at the opening that it would be wrong to punish the public by depriving them of this "wonderful collection." The outcry, he said, has only ensured that the past will be remembered, because now everyone, including a young generation, knows who Mr. Flick's grandfather was.

True. Memory is served when it stubbornly resists resolution. But surely it could have served Germany better to have secured a few more promises at the start from Mr. Flick.

For his part, while he might have been a hero and avoided the whole brouhaha by declaring his collection a gift to the nation, he is now trying to seem sensitive.

Still, during his tour of the show, he couldn't resist pointing mischievously to a work by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, a painting of vaguely crisscrossing lines. Mr. Flick read the title, "I Really Can't See a Swastika," and laughed.