The German culture minister has questioned how Berlin’s state museums allowed three valuable paintings by Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly to be taken out of the country, allegedly against the will of the late art collector who bequeathed them to the public.
The three American works from the Sixties, collectively valued at up to €170 million, had been left to the state on a permanent loan by Erich Marx, a property developer and prolific patron of postwar art who died in 2020.
Now, however, they have been transferred to the Gagosian gallery in New York for sale, according to the German art historian Hubertus Butin, who accused the museums of allowing their collection to be “bled out”.
Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, Butin also suggested that one of Warhol’s 1973 silkscreen prints of Mao Zedong, which may be worth more than €155 million, might be at risk.
The Marx collection consists of more than 200 artworks from the 1950s to the 1980s, including Twombly’s 1961 painting Empire of Flora and Warhol’s Do it Yourself (Seascape), from 1962, and Ten-Foot Flowers, from 1967. Among the other artists represented are Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Roy Lichtenstein.
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When the collection became too large for Marx’s home, he lent it to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), which runs Berlin’s state museums and is Germany’s largest single cultural institution. The works were exhibited in one of the city’s main art museums, a former railway terminal called the Hamburger Bahnhof, from 1996.
Shortly before Christmas, the SPK announced that the Marx collection would be moved into a museum that is being built to house the collection of the New National Gallery.
It also said that Marx’s heirs had agreed to donate all of the Beuys artworks in the collection but the three Twombly and Warhol paintings had been “placed in the care of the lenders” in 2022. Warhol’s Do it Yourself (Seascape) was “no longer part of the collection”, it added.
At the time Berlin’s museum authorities described the deal as a “splendid gesture and a sign of a special connection”. They hailed Beuys as an “artist of the century” and singled out the cultural importance of his Tram Stop: A Monument to the Future and The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, which consists of 456 drawings.
However, Butin said the Beuys works donated to the city state were collectively valued at less than a sixth of what the Warhol and Twombly canvases are worth.
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In response Claudia Roth, the national culture minister, said her office would investigate what had happened. In particular it will examine whether the Beuys were truly “donated” or simply handed over as a quid pro quo for the release of the Twombly and Warhol paintings.
Parzinger, an archaeologist by training, will step down next year and be replaced by Marion Ackermann, an art historian and the director of the Dresden state art collections.
Parzinger’s critics in the German press argue that the release of the paintings is symptomatic of an era of “leaden” leadership in which the number of visitors to Berlin’s state museums had declined.
