A Tobacco Factory Closes, Sheds its Collection

Source from:  spiegel.de By Dirk Limburg 10/06/2008

Cigarette-maker BAT has built up an impressive collection of modern art at its factory in the Dutch town of Zevenaar over the last 50 years. The art was used to keep workers from getting bored. But now the factory is closing, the art is up for auction and many are unhappy. Cigarette brands Peter Stuyvesant and Lucky Strike will no longer be made in the Dutch town of Zevenaar. The closure of the British American Tobacco (BAT) factory marks not only the end of a major source of employment in the area but also the final curtain for an unusual piece of Dutch art history. At the end of the 1950s, factory director Alexander Orlow started hanging works of art among the cigarette-making machines. The workers needed something interesting to look at to stave off boredom and increase their productivity, he felt. Orlow went for modern, avant-garde art -- large, colorful and mainly abstract paintings. It turned out to be the start of a major collection. In collaboration with the directors of Rotterdam's Boijmans van Beuningen museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, it has acquired over 1,500 pieces, 150 of which are often loaned to major exhibitions. But on August 15, BAT announced that it would auction off the total collection. The cigarette manufacturer had tried to find a buyer who would keep the collection together and accessible to the public, but had been unable to do so. "We are a commercial company and have to weigh up commercial interests against the cultural ones. Our shareholders and owners have expectations," says Cees Foet, an executive at BAT Artventure, the foundation responsible for the art collection. Sotheby's Sale Sotheby's will stage the sale. Four Chinese paintings are to kick off the auction on Oct. 4 in Hong Kong, but the largest part will probably come under the hammer in Amsterdam at the end of this year. These will be followed next year by auctions in New York, London and Paris. Behind the desk of Zevenaar mayor Jan de Ruiter hangs Ger van Elk's "The Long Island Expressway or Midtown Tunnel" (1984), lent to him by the BAT Artventure Collection. Earlier it was known as the Peter Stuyvesant Collection, but a European Union-wide ban on tobacco advertising forced a name change earlier this decade. De Ruiter has been trying to save the collection since 2006. "I forced them to look for a buyer for the whole collection," says De Ruiter. He spoke to the BAT executive in London and mobilized the Dutch state, the provincial government and the Mondriaan Foundation. He spoke to Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum about the possibility of an annex in Zevenaar. He had calculations made on how much a Stuyvesant Museum would cost. Everyone was helpful but all his efforts failed. What annoys De Ruiter the most is that an offer for the collection was "just under" the asking price. If BAT or the buyer had come to him, he would have been able to make up the shortfall through his own connections, he says. "BAT didn't really want to make a deal," De Ruiter concludes. "And I'm annoyed with them about that,". He knows that the Van Elk will be taken away for sale any day now. Neither Sotheby's nor BAT want to comment on the total value of the art (which includes paintings by Karel Appel, Corneille and Anton Henning), but it is believed to be between €15 and €25 million. "Cultural Barbarism" The eye-catcher is the 1994 painting "Bloodline: Family Portrait I" by Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang, who is hugely in demand. The painting is expected to fetch between €1.7 and €2.5 million in Hong Kong this week. Meanwhile, back in the Netherlands, BAT's former adviser and an important collector of modern art, Martijn Sanders, who has been responsible for the collection since 1998, says: "I think it's awful. Not only because more or less the oldest corporate art collection in the country is disappearing, but a museum is closing too." "I would never have worked on this project if I had known how it would end. The budgets (to buy art) were very low, certainly in my time, but galleries and artists were happy to give their work to this collection. They made big sacrifices for this. ... Now everything is being sold off while galleries and artists are getting nothing back. ... I see as a form of cultural barbarism," says Sanders. Enditem