The Bührle Foundation

From the beginnings to the current exhibitions

1960-1980: The first years

On 24 February 1960 Emil Bührle’s widow Charlotte Bührle-Schalk, his son Dr. Dieter Bührle and his daughter Hortense Anda-Bührle established the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection in Zurich. They transferred one third of the original holdings to the Foundation based on an arrangement proposed by the London-based art dealer Arthur Kauffmann, who had been a particularly close associate of Emil Bührle. According to the estimates at the time, the division brought around three-fifth of the existing values into the Foundation and ensured that the structure and integrity which the collector had striven to achieve remained visible in the Foundation. A few additional paintings and sculptures were handed over to the Foundation for sale.

The Foundation’s collection was installed in a former residential property at Zollikerstrasse 172 in Zurich. It was adjacent to Emil Bührle’s house, and Bührle had used the first floor of the building to store his pictures and sculptures. The villa, dating from 1886, was now entirely converted into a museum and opened to the public in April 1960. The costs of operation and maintenance were borne by the founders.

The year 1961 saw an exhibition of 78 masterpieces from the collection of Emil Bührle at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and the National Gallery in London. This was followed in 1963 by a smaller presentation at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, which once again showed pictures from the Foundation’s holdings as well as the works from the collection that had stayed with the family. A complete scholarly catalogue of the Foundation’s collection was published in 1973 (2nd edition 1986) by Artemis-Verlag, a publishing house owned by the collector’s family. The Foundation’s museum was comprehensively renovated in 1976.

1990-2015: World tour and presence at home

In 1980 Hortense Anda-Bührle succeeded her mother as President of the Foundation. She organised a collection tour featuring important works from the Foundation and the private holdings to commemorate the centennial of her father’s birth; it travelled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts in London during 1990-91. During that time, the Foundation’s museum in Zurich exhibited the Swiss paintings from the Bührle Collection.

Between 1999 and 2002 the collector’s grandson Dr. Christian Bührle acted as the curator of the collection and was responsible for a series of cabinet exhibitions on the Foundation’s premises that centred around pictures from the collection: Sisley and the Bridge at Hampton Court; Messaline and Toulouse-Lautrec from Swiss Collections; Der Blaue Reiter.

In 2002 Dr. Lukas Gloor was entrusted with the management of the Foundation as its director and curator. He edited a three-volume complete catalogue of the collection published in 2004-05. Small exhibitions (Van Gogh echt falsch; Mme Cézanne from the Gertrude Stein Collection) highlighted specific aspects of the history of individual pictures in the collection. In 2010, a comprehensive exhibition of all works from the collection at the Kunsthaus Zurich attracted 130’000 visitors. On this occasion, the first results of the Foundation’s provenance research were shown to the public.

On 10 February 2008, the Foundation’s museum fell victim to an armed robbery. Four key works from the collection by Cézanne, Degas, Van Gogh and Monet were stolen from the large gallery on the ground floor. Two were retrieved a week later; the other two remained lost until they were recovered during a major police operation in Belgrade in April 2012.

2015-2019: A travelling collection

In 2014 Dr. Christian Bührle took over as the President of the Foundation. By the end of May 2015 the Foundation closed the museum at Zollikerstrasse 172, as it had proved impossible to equip it with the security measures necessary for regular opening. In 2016, the Foundation could announce the bequest of Dr. Dieter Bührle, the collector’s son, who left 10 important paintings from his father’s collection to the Foundation. Today, the Foundation owns 203 works of art.

2016-17, paintings and Gothic sculptures from the Foundation were exhibited together with corresponding works from the collection of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. In 2017, a representative group of works were shown in the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne, followed, in 2018, by a tour of an important selection of works to three different venues in Japan (National Art Center, Tokyo; Kyushu National Museum, Fukuoka: Nagoya City Art Museum) that attracted almost 800’000 visitors.

In 2019, an exhibition at the Musée Maillol in Paris brought works of the collection for the first time to the French capital. Smaller groups of works from the Foundation’s collection were exhibited in Arles, Schaffhausen, and Zurich. Two exhibitions in Lugano and in Vienna had to be cancelled due to the outbreak of the Covid-pandemic.

In summer 2021, shortly before the move of the collection to the Chipperfield-Building of the Kunsthaus Zurich, an extensive and carefully designed history of the collection was published. The Emil Bührle Collection, History, Full Catalogue and 70 Masterpieces was edited by the Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich, and produced by Hirmer Verlag, Munich. A text by the long-time curator, based upon numerous sources and lavishly illustrated, assesses the collection within the history of modern art collecting in the middle of the 20th century in general, charcteristic for the Swiss art world of its time as well as typical for its close links to art collections particularly in the USA.