Curator's Voice: David Zwirner on the Collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs

NEW YORK—Among this month’s New York gallery highlights, key works from the outstanding postwar art collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs are on show for the first time in this country, in a two-part exhibition at David Zwirner on 19th Street and Zwirner & Wirth on 69th Street. Next month, the exhibition, on view here through May 21, will travel to Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.

The late Walther Lauffs, a successful industrialist based in Bad Honnef, Germany, began collecting art with his wife Helga in the late 1960s. For advice they turned to Paul Wember, who had been director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld since 1947, and it turned out to be a match made in heaven: In exchange for Wember’s guidance, the Lauffs offered their works on long-term loan to the museum, where they remained for 40 years.

In an unexpected move, Helga Lauffs recently decided to remove the collection from the museum and sell it off (Walther died in 1981). According to her lawyer, Michael Loschelder, "We didn't get any kind of guarantee that the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum would be renovated to our satisfaction.... So we decided to remove the collection." In addition to other repairs, the museum needs a new roof and climate-control update. Some 150 of the more than 500 works are being sold by Hauser & Wirth and Zwirner & Wirth; the remainder went to Sotheby's, which has already sold some and will offer several more in London later this year.

The collection itself focuses on contemporary art, specializing in Pop Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism, Postminimalism, and conceptual art, and reveals a fascinating back-and-forth of influence between Europe and the U.S: the translation of Yves Klein’s Dada-tinged Anthropometries into the process-based work of Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra, for example, and the subsequent reassimilation of Nauman and Serra’s interest in art environments by installationists like Jannis Kounellis. The artist list amounts to a who’s who of high and late modernism: Joseph Beuys, Christo, Joseph Cornell, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Michelangelo Pistoletto, George Segal, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, and Tom Wesselmann, all of whom appear in the current two-venue show.

ARTINFO sat down with David Zwirner at his 19th Street gallery to discuss the collection’s history and significance.

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