Art: 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.