The Art of Collecting

A well-chosen art collection is a work of art itself; it has integrity and takes the pulse of an era. Such a collection is that of Dr. Arthur Hahnloser, who lived in Winterthur, near Zurich, until his death in 1936. In his Villa Flora, a large and angular house behind an iron fence on a faceless street, he gathered one of the choicest private hoards of post-impressionist art in the world (see following pages).

The Hahnlosers, Herr Doktor Arthur and Frau Hedy, were 33 and 30 when they bought their first work, Ferdinand Hodler's Little Cherry Tree. Thereafter, although the Hahnlosers were not rich, they bought contemporary art steadily until the walls barely showed through the paintings. By 1924, buying most of the time directly from artists, they owned Renoirs, Bonnards, Vuillards, Vallottons, Cezannes, Manguins, Hod-lers, Rodins, Maillols, Redons, Matisses, Rouaults, Utrillos, and just about every other French or Swiss artist that mattered at the time.

Prophets & Beasts. The focus of the collection was the postimpressionists, those who rejected the spontaneous, open-air naturalism of the early Monet, Pissarro and Degas. Two groups attracted the Hahnlosers' attention: the Nabis (or prophets, from Hebrew), and the later, more violently color-clashing

Fauves (or wild beasts, from a critic's derisive quip). The philosophy of painting that both groups followed was best summed up by an 1890 dictum of Theoretician and Painter Maurice Denis: "A picture, before being a horse, a nude, or some kind of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain order." Although neither the Nabis nor the Fauves entirely abandoned the impressionist lessons of analyzing the fleeting scans of colored light rebounding from landscape, they flattened their tableaux and added vigorous, if vague and personal, symbolism to their work. In effect, they were the first expressionists.

Frequently the Hahnlosers took the overnight sleeper to Paris and nearly always returned with crates of paintings and graphics. On one early trip Dr. Arthur bought a nude that he praised as having "cool, exact, beautifully executed lines, and whose intensely clear colors appeared like such a relief from the general air of muggy sensuality." It turned out to be by a fellow Swiss named Felix Vallotton, a member of the Nabis and soon a lifelong friend of the collectors.

The collectors became passionate supporters of the artists to whom their taste led them. Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse, Rouault and others were frequent guests at the Hahnlosers' winter home in Cannes. Swiss artists, professors and writers gathered weekly in the living room of the Villa Flora, where, surrounded by Van Goghs and Cezannes, they debated art with such fervor that the meetings were called "Revolution

Cafe." Indeed, the little magazine of anarchism called Revue Blanche was a polemical ally of the kind of art that the Hahnlosers loved.

What's Up Front. Thus the Hahnlosers shared the intimate lives of the painters that they collected. The good doctor liked to take the pulse of his painter friends while they worked. Invariably, he found that it quickened. When he brought Vallotton a bunch of yellow tulips to paint, the doctor's stingy countryman refused, because cadmium yellow was the most expensive color. Manguin, they observed, loved color so passionately that at times he dunked his head in cold water to prevent falling into uncontrollable ecstasy.

Bonnard, the most frequent visitor, was the shyest. He kept emphasizing the surface flatness of his oils: "One must notice what's up front in a painting." The Hahnlosers eagerly pressed him to paint their portrait, but he did not see what he wanted until one sum mer's day in 1923 when, while sailing with them in the Mediterranean, Bonnard shouted, "This is it!" "What is it?" asked Hedy Hahnloser. "Your portrait, in the blue sweater against the sail!" replied the artist. For a fee of $950 Bonnard began sketches for a canvas only 34 by 28 in. in size. "How can you paint so important a subject as the Hahnlosers on a canvas that small?" asked Bonnard's wife. Bonnard an swered by increasing the format to 41 by 39. Asked Dr. Hahnloser: "Isn't that going to increase your price?" "No," said Bonnard. "The additional expense is my gift to you."

Checks on the Walls. Though the Herr Doktor paid for it, Hedy Hahnloser was the umpire of the collection. With her high-minded Swiss upbringing, she disapproved of the fast life of girls and powerful cars that Matisse enjoyed. She lived to the age of 79 but could not stand Derain or Van Dongen, virtually ignored Dufy, and only came upon Braque when his selling price was, in her opinion, too high. Since every great collection has to end, just as a great painting must reach completion at some point, the Hahnlosers finally ran out of zealous vision. One day in the 1920s, the young Picasso rang at their gate in Cannes. Hedy sent down her last word with her maid: "I'm not at home for him. Never!"

The heirs of the Hahnloser collection are their son, Dr. Hans Hahnloser, professor of art history at the University of Bern, and daughter, Frau Lisa Jaggli-Hahnloser, wife of a retired banker. Frau Lisa still lives in the old Winterthur house, but the collection is divided between there and Dr. Hahnloser's Bern apartment. Only a few dozen friends and qualified art critics from abroad see the paintings each year. The value of the works is in the millions, but the heirs, taught to love the art, despise the idea that their parents' collection should ever be viewed as "so many large checks hanging on the walls."

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