April 28, 2005
Noted
Buried inside today's "Arts, Briefly" round-up in the Times:
Paying for the Past
Giving in after years of pressure from Jewish groups, Friedrich Christian Flick, the billionaire contemporary art collector whose grandfather was a Nazi arms industrialist, has finally paid $6.5 million into a fund for former slave laborers, the German news agency ddp reported. Mr. Flick, whose collection was installed in September at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, had been accused by critics of using his art to try to whitewash his family's past. Although his Nazi grandfather employed as many as 50,000 slave laborers in his factories, Mr. Flick refused to contribute part of his family inheritance to a major compensation fund, choosing instead to set up his own fund intended to fight racism and neo-Nazism in Eastern Germany. KIRSTEN GRIESHABER
I wonder how that will effect critics of his collection's presentation at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Considering that $6.5 million is probably far less than he paid for the works in the front hall of the museum, I suspect the gesture will not mollify many.