Is the opening of the Flick art collection in Berlin a ruse to dispel the Nazi shadow hanging over a notorious German family? Derek Scally reports
The visit of New York's Museum of Modern Art to Berlin came to an end last Sunday night, after six months and 1.2 million visitors, in a burst of pink fireworks. But even more colourful fireworks came two days later with the opening of the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection in Berlin's Museum of Contemporary Art.
The collection has been hailed as a treasure trove of modern art, with more than 2,000 works by artists such as Gerhard Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Naumann and Cindy Sherman. For Berlin's cultural elite, it's the art coup of the century, but critics see it as a morally questionable quid pro quo with one of Germany's most notorious families.
Friedrich Christian Flick's grandfather was a confidant of top Nazi brass and built up a fortune during the second World War supplying the Nazis with armaments manufactured using 50,000 slave labourers. Sentenced at Nuremburg but later pardoned, Friedrich Flick rejected any notion of personal guilt, rebuilt his empire and reached a new level of notoriety as the money man in post-war Germany's biggest political corruption scandal.
Friedrich Christian Flick inherited the family fortune along with his brother and sister and went on to achieve notoriety all on his own in the 1970s as Europe's leading playboy, "Mick" Flick.
He made the leap from playboy to art collector, but initial plans to put his collection on display in Zürich and Munich were abandoned after public protest. With that in mind, Berlin officials made a secret approach to Flick two years ago, hammered out a deal and only announced plans for the exhibition after the contracts had been signed.
Curiously, it took more than a year for the public protest to gather any momentum, with a shrill open letter from the vice-president of the German Central Jewish Council, Salomon Korn. He called the deal "a kind of moral whitewash of blood money into the socially acceptable form of the possession of art".
From then on it was open season on Flick. He was accused of trying to launder his family name with the willing assistance of the German government, but on his terms and at a knock-down price. Flick has loaned the works he owns for seven years and paid €10 million for the renovation of the building housing the exhibition. The museum will cover the costs of running the exhibition.
Flick's most common refrain throughout the controversy has been that he has never denied his family's past and that although one can inherit responsibility, one cannot inherit guilt.
His critics counter that Flick, like his grandfather, continues to shirk the responsibility associated with his wealth by declining to pay into the compensation fund for former slave labourers, as his siblings have done. Flick responded by donating €5 million to create a foundation to tackle racism and xenophobia.
The claims and counter-claims continued to fly right up until the opening press conference on Tuesday, a ghoulish affair where ministers and cultural types lavished praise on Flick. The curator of the exhibition remarked that Flick was "incredibly easy to handle".
"Like his grandfather's slave labourers," murmured one journalist.
A visibly nervous Flick said that, as far as he is concerned, this exhibition is all about the art.
"It would be a shame if the art on display was overshadowed by the burden of my family history," he said, a statement of breathtaking audacity, according to his detractors.
The compliments continued to flow later that evening when the exhibition was opened by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
"The people would be punished if one didn't want to show these glorious works of art," he said, pointing out that Flick could have spared himself the criticism and kept the works in his depot. The greatest thing Flick could now do for himself and for Germany, Schröder said, would be to leave the works in Berlin "forever".
The collection is now open to the public, but the whole business leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
The collection may succeed in "lightening the shadow" that hangs over the Flick name, as one Berlin official said at the press conference. But the way the deal was done casts a far greater shadow over Berlin's reputation as a centre of contemporary art.
Berlin's politicians and cultural mafia harbour grand notions of returning to the top table of the art world. Despite, or perhaps even because of, the city's €37 billion mountain of debt, they are determined to pursue this project of cultural grandeur whatever the cost.
Germany is a country that prides itself on its lively intellectual tradition and the open debate between all sections of society. But the Flick agreement is a new and worrying departure, presented as a done deal and leaving no room for public debate on the historical or artistic issues or the influence of private collectors on public galleries.
The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection is a bid for prestige at any price - and for Berlin's reputation abroad, it could ultimately be a high one.
Flick was fêted this week as a patron of the arts in the grand old style. But at the end of the day, Flick is a German millionaire with a bad back who lives in tax exile in Switzerland. His art collection, bought at great cost on the open market, is owned by a PO box company in Guernsey.
"It just shows how easily and how quickly you can throw together a high-quality collection these days. Anyone can do it with a little money," said Gerhard Richter, one of the artists in the collection, to Die Zeit newspaper. "The moral side of the whole story, in so far as you can at all separate it from the aesthetic side, is just disgusting for me."
Flick has a certain resemblance to another self-professed lover of art, or kunst: Lorelei Lee, dizzy heroine of Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. To loosely quote Lee in one of her more lucid moments: Friedrich Christian Flick "will really never be full of anything else but unrefinement".