Schaulager: the first public depo is finally fully operational

Visitors of the first extensive overview in 30 years of the Emanuel Hoffmann family collection are not allowed to take pictures of the artworks, nor of the interiors of the Schaulager, the museum founded in 2003 to host this 80-year-old extraordinary collection. And apparently this is the only disputable aspect of the policy chosen by what ought to be considered the perfect museum, especially now that the upper floors are finally accessible to the public thus providing a full experience of the building designed by Basel-based architecture firm Herzog & De Meuron between 1998 and 1999. Until last 13 June, in fact, only the ground floor and the basement were opened to the public, and the two identities of this massive bunker-like architecture – exhibition space (schau) and storage (lager) – were indeed separated despite the original idea of merging these two generally-distinct functions.

 

Probably inspired by the need of showing the kind of bold and multimedia installations collected by the notorious philanthropist Maja Hoffmann – granddaughter of sculptress Maja Stehlin, who started the collection with her husband Emanuel Hoffmann in the Thirties and then created the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation after he died prematurely in a car accident (1933) – the idea of public storage has been recently followed by the Boijmans museum too. But while the Dutch project is still waiting to be approved by Rotterdam’s city council, the Schaulager is now fully operational, and is the first of this kind, since also the Louvre Lens’ deposit can indeed be seen only from outside.

 

Before everything else, it must be said that the quality of the Hoffmann collection is terrifically high. From Robert Delaunay to Julian Schnabel, as from Max Ernst to Bruce Naumann, not to mention Maja Oeri’s acquisitions such as Matthew Barney, Ilya Kabakov or Robert Gober. The pieces are always beautiful, perfectly preserved, necessary, never obvious, and in the right scale – as the small delicate Joan Mirò from 1949 proves. At the moment, private not-aristocratic art collections so well conceived, curated and displayed can be counted on one hand.

 

By being in touch with all these masterpieces you perceive the time spent to gather them together as a visual and monumental entity that the building itself is hardly able to contain. This latter turns out to be a sort of powerful shell, with just one thin window to look outside, and an amount of void space that could recall the parliament in Star Wars Episode III, when the Sith takes the power and declares the birth of the Empire.

 

But even the most perfect glass has what Roland Barthes would call its “point of corruption” (Fragments d’un discours amoureax, 1977). In this case this point could be spotted in the lightening, which tends to yellow and could have a slight but disturbing hypnotic effect, or in the format of the rooms at the first, second and third floor. According to the architects, the building was conceived part as an exhibition space, and part as a storage. But when accessing the storage area this clean perfection and virtuosic minimalism (pay attention to details such as the intersection of the surfaces) may make you feel like being in a hospital, with corridors and patients, instead of artists, inside the wide, sometimes too wide rooms. Some of them are accessible, while others are not. You can enter Paul Chan’s installation, for example, or the impressive Gary Simmons’ film. But other rooms in the same corridor are closed by high and monumental (again) doors with no handles. In this frame this could seem like a mysterious and a bit disquieting dark side.

June 23, 2015