From 8 November 2024 to 9 February 2025, the Albertina reveals the artwork assortment of Swiss ophthalmologist Othmar Huber (1892, Aargau – 1979, Glarus, Switzerland)
Supply: Albertina, Vienna · Picture: August Macke, “The Port of Duisburg”, 1914 · Museum of Fantastic Arts Berne, Othmar Huber Basis.
The artwork assortment of Swiss ophthalmologist Othmar Huber (1892, Aargau – 1979, Glarus, Switzerland) displays the collector’s life and passions. In opposition to the backdrop of his medical coaching and experiences in a wartime discipline hospital, Huber was impressed by Paul Klee’s assertion that “art … makes visible.”
As an experimental collector, Othmar Huber was fast to acknowledge the qualities of artists whose works had not but grow to be costly model identify objects. He thus acquired footage by Klee and Kandinsky, Jawlensky, and Werefkin as early because the Thirties.
1939 noticed the “Verwertungsstelle” of Germany’s Nationwide Socialist regime provide “degenerate art” on the market in an public sale entitled “Modern Masters from German Museums” at Galerie Fischer in Lucerne. Huber feared that the Nazis would destroy these works that would not be offered, which did certainly come to move afterward. To fund his purchases of “degenerate art” by Marc, Macke, and Picasso, Huber needed to promote the lion’s share of his present assortment: “What I continually gave away in exchange would hardly have made a worse collection than the present one.” His choices have been all the time spontaneous: “Whenever I hesitated in front of a picture and asked myself how I’d be able to pay for it or where I’d want to hang it, I knew it wasn’t a strong artwork.”
Shortly previous to his dying in 1979, Huber established a basis to which he transferred the works he had collected—and the work now exhibited right here, usually stored on the Museum of Fantastic Arts Berne and Kunsthaus Glarus, are on mortgage from this Othmar Huber Basis.
Since 2020, the Othmar Huber Assortment has enriched the everlasting exhibition Monet to Picasso. The Batliner Assortment by 15 chosen works, rounding out the present presentation by high-caliber key works of modernism. The exhibition The Huber Assortment now supplies a chance to view the whole vary of works acquired by this experimental collector. Curators: Constanze Malissa, Matthias Frehner.
