Project 74
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“For Haacke, institutional critique is an attempt to re-contextualize the sphere of the aesthetic, with its socioeconomic and ideological underpinnings, in a somewhat mechanistic manner. ”(Foster,2004)
In 1974 in his home town Cologne in Germany on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Haacke participated in the ‘Project 74’ exhibition. He provided a series of 10 panels revealing the origin of Manet’s ‘Bunch of Asparagus’ (1880). This painting was donated to the Museum in 1968 by the Friends of the Wallaraf-Richartz Museum, under the leadership of its chairman, Hermann Josef Abs, in memory of Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor.
The last panel was an analysis of Abs’s background – he had been a prominent banker and financial adviser of Hitler’s Reich during the second world war. After the war he had been put into a position of particular power again and reminded there through the 60’s up to the moment of his gift to the Museum.
The other panels were tracing the provenance of the still life from its first owner, “Charles Ephrussi (a French Jewish art historian and collector who was reputed to be one of the models for Proust’s character Charles Swann), to figures such as the German publisher and art dealer Paul Cassirer and the German - Jewish painter Max Liebermann (whose work was outlawed by the Nazis), finally to be bought from Libermann’s American granddaughter [...] by the Friends of the Museum led by Abs.” (Foster, 2004) The last panel announced Abs as an ex-Nazi and it showed how easily the posture of cultural benefactor allows an individual to ‘clean’ their ambiguous criminal past. That was a scandal. Haacke’s proposal for the exhibition was once again rejected.