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 . 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 , and
the later, more violently color-clashing Fauves . 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.
