The artist Hans Haacke, photographed in Abingdon Square in Manhattan’s West Village on June 26, 2024. Haacke has rejected what he sees as the art world’s cult of personality and so doesn’t show his face in photographs. Photo Credit: Daniel Terna (Clicke to enlarge image)

Sept 16, 2024
New York Times Style Magazine
Arts and Letters
by M.H. Miller

As cultural institutions face an existential crisis over who funds them and how, the 88-year-old artist Hans Haacke is still making curators and collectors clutch their pearls.

…Before Haacke, museums were considered, in the words of the New York Times critic Holland Cotter, “genteel and politically marginal.” Robber barons might have donated to them to enhance their social clout, but such cultural largess was seldom questioned. Today, though, when phrases like “artwashing” and “toxic philanthropy” have entered the lexicon to describe the role that museums and other cultural organizations play in boosting the images of corporations and billionaires, Haacke’s work is more than just relevant — it’s prophetic. With persistent clarity, he seemed to understand, half a century before anyone else, the stakes of the uncomfortable relationship between art and politics.

Haacke had been preparing for a major exhibition in Frankfurt that will open at the Schirn Kunsthalle in November and travel to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. He also currently has work on view in New York, in a group show dedicated to the American flag at Paula Cooper Gallery. The Frankfurt show, a career retrospective, includes many artworks about his native Germany, among them another influential, often suppressed piece, 1981’s “Der Pralinenmeister,” about Peter Ludwig, a chocolate manufacturer and one of Germany’s most famous art collectors. Across 14 framed panels that include photographs of Ludwig and his factory workers, Haacke wrote a text detailing the overlap between patronage and commerce: Ludwig received tax advantages from donating artworks and displaying his collection publicly and would loan artworks to cities where he produced or distributed his chocolate. “Der Pralinenmeister” also notes that Ludwig’s factories housed female foreign workers in on-site hostels that didn’t offer day care, so women who gave birth were forced to leave or find foster homes for their children — or give them up for adoption. According to Haacke’s text, the company’s personnel department stated that it was “a chocolate factory and not a kindergarten.” Ludwig, who died in 1996, was reportedly interested in buying the work, perhaps to remove it from circulation, but Haacke wouldn’t sell it to him.

– excerpts from the article by M.H. Miller
Read the entire article in NY Times Style Magazine
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