Entrepreneur Korbinian Kohler explains the changing meaning of holidays over time in an interview with Rolf Westermann.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Good afternoon, Dr Haller, and thank you very much for your time. Let us go straight in medias res and speak about your latest book, “ART PERFORMANCE”, which is based on a very interesting, but also astonishing thesis.

DR PETER HALLER:
The philosophy is actually simple. The difference between a famous painting and a good painting is the better story. A famous artwork therefore does not necessarily have to be better than other good works. Ultimately, I collect artworks with surprising stories of origin.

If you take famous examples, such as Michelangelo’s David, probably the most famous sculpture in existence today, it is by far not his best. For the Tomb of Julius II, he created much better sculptures, for example his Moses or the sculptures for the Medici tombs. David has a slightly too large head, hands that are too large; the anatomy is not optimal. Michelangelo was still at the beginning of his career. But it is his most famous sculpture. Why? It has the best story.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
And what is the story?

DR PETER HALLER:
Before Michelangelo, Florence had already commissioned two famous sculptors to shape a David from a huge block of marble as a symbol for the small but particularly clever and creative Republic of Florence. Both failed. And then came the young, ambitious Michelangelo and swiftly made his David from this XXL block. This David was then placed in a prominent position in Florence, in front of the town hall, and repeatedly became the target of political protests and disputes. Once, for example, one of his arms was knocked off. And so on. David therefore has an eventful history, whereas the later sculptures Michelangelo created, whether the Pietà or the Tomb of Julius II, are much better works.

A completely different example is the Mona Lisa – the one hanging in the Louvre in Paris. It is a copy. Not the original.

The Mona Lisa in the Louvre is not painted significantly better than Leonardo’s two other female portraits. But those two commissioned works have a very ordinary origin story. The Mona Lisa, by contrast, hung in Napoleon’s bedroom, was displayed in Louis XIV’s cabinet, was stolen in 1925 by an Italian patriot, was sprayed from top to bottom with water by a sprinkler system at the Metropolitan Museum, was exposed to an acid attack, and today can only be viewed from a distance of ten metres. And so on.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
But why do you say the Mona Lisa is a copy?

DR PETER HALLER:
As is known, Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual. As was Michelangelo. Leonardo bequeathed the original to his long-time companion named Salai when he moved from Florence to Milan to join Ludovico Sforza. This is also recorded in Salai’s will. But then the trail is lost. He probably sold it. A painting by Leonardo was already very valuable at the time; in any case, it never resurfaced.

And then, a few years later, in 1503, one of the Medici, Giuliano, commissioned Leonardo to paint Mona Lisa. She was one of the most beautiful women in Florence at the time. Ten years later, he came back to Leonardo and told him that he had an illegitimate son named Hippolyt, whose mother had died in childbirth. The boy was constantly mourning his mother. To comfort the child, Leonardo was to paint a picture of his mother, whom Leonardo, however, had not known. So he painted Mona Lisa once again – with this benevolent smile about which so much has been speculated. She was to look out of the picture at the little boy with a comforting, maternal expression.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Who then painted the one that now hangs in the Louvre?

DR PETER HALLER:
The Mona Lisa as it hangs in the Louvre today is precisely the one Leonardo da Vinci painted for Giuliano de’ Medici’s son. It was never delivered because the client, Giuliano, died. Leonardo then sold it to Francis I, King of France, two or three years before his death, and from there it took its course.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
But Leonardo painted it.

DR PETER HALLER:
Clearly, yes. Leonardo painted the picture through in one go, which was completely contrary to his usual working method. Recently, it was also discovered through X-rays that beneath the painting as it hangs in the Louvre, there is a second Mona Lisa painting. That is presumably the version from 1503.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
That means there is an original Mona Lisa, possibly still somewhere, which has not yet been found. That would of course be the greatest sensation in art history.

DR PETER HALLER:
It would be worth 500 million or one billion euros.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Incredible.

DR PETER HALLER:
When a painting has a story like that, it does not have to be qualitatively better than others.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
But would you say this also applies to modern and contemporary artworks, which cannot have such a history?

DR PETER HALLER:
Contemporary paintings can also have a good origin story. Take Anselm Kiefer, for example. His paintings have very ambitious, substantial content.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
At this point in your life, what plays a greater role for you: art and your art collection, or Serviceplan?

DR PETER HALLER:
Both are very important to me. I founded the company more than 52 years ago, but the art collection is now also 45 years old. I began collecting in the mid-1970s, and it has always been a kind of cultural counterbalance for me. I was able to concern myself with things that lay outside my demanding operational responsibilities. And all the stories I tell during my art tours are researched with great effort; you will not find them elsewhere in this form. That has always motivated me greatly, and I will continue doing it for as long as I can.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
How did you begin collecting?

DR PETER HALLER:
At the end of the 1970s, we moved to Prinzregentenstraße in Munich, into the so-called Wedekind House, the last old façade on the right-hand side when driving towards the Friedensengel. The Wedekind House has rooms four metres high. When we moved into the house, I said to my partner: we cannot hang advertising on the walls here, as is customary in agencies; that would be blasphemous. We should present art here. After all, Wedekind was the most important dramatist of his time and lived in this house with his wife for 20 years.

And so we bought the first two paintings. I went to Raimund Thomas, at that time the largest gallery in Munich, and incidentally still one of the largest today. The young Raimund Thomas sold me two paintings by a painter named Victor Mira from Spain. I thought to myself, well, the name sounds similar to Miró, and he is Spanish too. So it cannot be all that wrong. And besides, I liked the paintings. Afterwards, I thought we should actually continue this. And with every pitch we won, we bought a painting.

But by whom? Which art movement? From which period? And so on. That is when I had the idea of looking at the auction catalogues of the major auction houses, with their sometimes very good descriptions of works. I learned a great deal from that and then decided which artists I wanted to collect in future. Today, there are around 80 artists in our collection, approximately 250 to 300 paintings and sculptures. But we never bought inflationarily, only five or six works a year. That is how it came about.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Did you know anything about art at the beginning?

DR PETER HALLER:
No. Very little. I only learned slowly. I am an economist, not an art historian. And so I developed my own way of judging artworks based on their origin stories.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Would you say that collecting itself is already an art form?

DR PETER HALLER:
That depends on the type of collector. There are very different types. There is the obsessive collector who collects everything from beer mats to porcelain and carpets. That is certainly not an artistic form. There is also the investor who puts capital into, for example, two Picassos and sells them on after five years. Then there are collectors for whom art is a form of self-presentation. Not necessarily artistic either.

Finally, there is the collector who collects out of passion. That is where it begins to become somewhat artful. But I must also say that I have met several collectors who have little idea of what they are collecting. There are enough people in the market who offer themselves to such people as experts. Many experts also introduced themselves to me in order to buy on my behalf and shape the collection, and I always told them: “What you are proposing here is exactly what gives me pleasure.” I am not so interested in possession, but in acquiring the artwork. The search and discovery are the exciting part for me. Because once I have walked past a painting 500 times, it gradually becomes a natural part of a room and loses its drama.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Is it important to you to know the artist personally?

DR PETER HALLER:
That depends very much on the artist. I have met one or two, but it is not essential. It is more important to look at which influences shaped him, what he actually wanted to express with the artwork. Although very few artists can really say that clearly. Anselm Kiefer is an exception. A true exception. And then there is the epoch, the spirit of the time in which an artist worked. That is crucial. If you look at Caspar David Friedrich, the prototypical German Romantic, he would have painted completely differently 50 years earlier or later. He was decisively influenced by the zeitgeist of the period in which his art was created.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Is that the reason why you collect contemporary or modern art?

DR PETER HALLER:
Yes, I collect contemporary art after 1945, because one should concentrate on something. And at the time, abstracting and abstract art was what I preferred. So you will mainly find abstract or abstracting paintings in our collection. I am also very interested in older art. That can also be seen in the stories I tell during my art tours. But contemporary art is more interesting because it is current.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
One needs certain personal qualities in order to collect art well.

DR PETER HALLER:
Yes, I think so. If one is the type of collector who collects oneself and does not merely rely on advice, then I do believe one needs knowledge first of all, secondly a concept, and a reasonably sure sense of taste. And finally, some capital. There are certainly a few prerequisites for building a sensible collection.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Why do you publish books?

DR PETER HALLER:
I believe that a larger company such as ours not only has the task of maximising profits and paying wages, but also has a socio-political, cultural task. And one should decide on something that gives expression to that – in our case, it is art. That is why we also publish it, because I believe it does us a great deal of good as a company. At my art tours, we do not primarily invite clients, but people who are interested in art.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Have you developed some kind of system for your art and your collection?

DR PETER HALLER:
You can read about that in my book “Bilder erzählen”. There is a system we developed ourselves for structuring abstract art: eight to ten different forms, from geometric abstraction to lyrical and expressive abstraction, through to colour field painting and symbolism. And I also bought according to that system. That means I wanted, as far as possible, to have the best artists from each relevant art movement since 1945 and the best paintings by those artists.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
What is decisive for you when buying a painting? Is there perhaps a moment in which you decide to buy a painting?

DR PETER HALLER:
A decisive point for me is that a painting must have an aesthetic that leaps out at you. That is by no means a given in contemporary art today. Georg Baselitz, for example, says that aesthetics play no role at all. Anselm Kiefer says the same. For me, however, it very much does. And that is why, to stay with those two, we only ever have attractive paintings by Baselitz or Kiefer. I find those dark works that Kiefer has also produced impressive, but I would not hang them on my wall.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
So it has to be beautiful.

DR PETER HALLER:
Yes, it has to be aesthetic and attractive.
And structurally, it must fit into my collection, must come from the right period, and should be a masterpiece.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
How do you currently assess the art market? We are coming from an incredibly high, perhaps very overheated market and are now entering, or at least approaching, a severe economic crisis and probably a recession. How do you judge the art market? Is it still liquid? Or is everything currently in a state of shock?

DR PETER HALLER:
At the moment, it is still running very well. This applies above all to the top lots. Incidentally, the top lots are not really affected by such cyclical fluctuations. A Picasso simply costs a double-digit million amount, or even a triple-digit one. But apart from that, the art market is very volatile, without question. If we slide into a recession, one will see a sharp decline again in the price range of artists who are more or less known. The art market is around 60 to 70 billion dollars worldwide, and depending on the economy, it can easily fluctuate by 30 percent within a year. One can also see that in the revenues of the major international auction houses.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Are there artworks you could have bought and did not buy, and that you now regret not buying?

DR PETER HALLER:
Yes, certainly, there are. There are, for example, large-format abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter that I would have liked to acquire, but quite simply could not afford.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
And have you ever made a mistake, where you said: my God, that was nonsense?

DR PETER HALLER:
I do not really regret anything I have bought. Of course, there are some paintings that I no longer find exciting. That is true. But to say I made a mistake? Not really.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
You are focused on top art by top artists. But there is probably also good art or very good art by beginners, or young artists who may not yet be known. Isn’t there? What is the hallmark of good art?

DR PETER HALLER:
One can speak of art when an artwork has something truly innovative. That is the decisive point. But otherwise? It is often difficult to define what truly makes art. It must not be a painting or sculpture of which one says: I have seen that countless times before. Then it is trivial. Then it is mainstream and has nothing to do with art.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
What is still missing from your collection?

DR PETER HALLER:
Not all that much. To be honest, I have become somewhat more restrained with new acquisitions in recent years.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
So is there also a point for you at which the collection is complete?

DR PETER HALLER:
In fact, a contemporary collection is never complete, because many of the artists I collect – Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Julian Opie and Alex Katz, for example – are all still alive and still producing. In that respect, a collection actually requires a certain renewal again and again. That is true. But by and large, I am satisfied with what I have.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
That is the highest state one can reach.

DR PETER HALLER:
Perhaps.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
A few years ago, you handed over the company to your son Florian in splendid condition. He, in turn, turned it into a global corporation. Incidentally, he says you are his most important advisor. And you have a fantastic daughter, whom I only know as a television presenter from ZDF’s heute journal, and who is also very successful. What are you more proud of: your art collection or your children?

DR PETER HALLER:
Oh. Very clearly: my children.

KORBINIAN KOHLER:
Thank you very much for this wonderful conversation. I very much enjoyed it.

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Dr Peter Haller

In addition to founding Serviceplan in 1970, Europe’s largest owner-managed agency group, the father of two and grandfather several times over has built up an important collection of modern and contemporary art over the past 45 years and written various books on art.